When disciples John and James asked Jesus to let them sit by his side once he occupies his heavenly throne, they received a pointed lesson in the real purpose of their lives and their calling as followers of the anointed one. The lesson, it turned out, had almost nothing to do with heaven.
As Mark’s gospel — in its typically brief, to-the-point style — moves through its account of Jesus’ ministry, we find three different predictions of what the church calls the Passion of Christ, meaning his arrest, trial and crucifixion.
All of which, of course, culminates in the joyous resurrection on Easter morning, a radically unexpected event that seemed to change the very genome of the world.
The passage from Mark that we read today comes right after the third prediction of the Passion. In it, Jesus makes himself quite clear, choosing, for the moment, to set aside parables and other indirect methods of teaching. He simply says what he means directly. Here’s what Mark reports:
He (Jesus) took the twelve aside again and began to tell them what was to happen to him, saying, “Look, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the gentiles; they will mock him and spit upon him and flog him and kill him, and after three days he will rise again.”
Just as an aside, before we talk in more detail about the whole passage we read today from Mark, please notice that Jesus here destroys the 2,000-year-old condemnation of the Jewish people as so-called “Christ killers.” What does Jesus say? He says that the gentiles, meaning non-Jews, will kill him. The J.B. Phillips translation of Mark doesn’t use “gentiles” but, rather, “pagans.”1 But either way, the people being pointed to as Christ killers are not Jews. So isn’t it way, way past time for the world to be done with that anti-Jewish calumny, out of which so much of modern antisemitism has come? (That’s a rhetorical question.)
The disciples miss the point again
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