What in
God’s name is going on around here? Sounds kind of like a parental voice
doesn’t it? Do you imagine that was the tone of voice Jesus used with the
disciples in this morning’s Gospel? “Just what were you wrangling about?” he
asks to the disciples. It definitely sounds like a parental voice. “What in
God’s name are you guys arguing about? What in God’s name are you and your
brothers fighting about now?”
Most of us
have heard that voice at one time or another from either a parent or an
authority figure of some sort. So here’s Jesus this morning asking, “What in
God’s name are you arguing about?” I imagine the disciples ducking their heads
and mumbling. Probably something like this: “Well, umm…ah…we were arguing about
which one of us would be the greatest.”
Now many
people interpret Jesus’ actions as his way of telling the disciples not to
strive after greatness. First he scolds them and then he tells them to be satisfied
with their place and role is what most people think.
I’m here to tell you that if we
look at Jesus carefully we’ll see something else. Jesus never told the disciples not to want to be great. Instead, he told
that how to be great. And best of
all, he showed them how to be great. That’s the real challenge.
”Whoever welcomes a child in my
name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent
me.”[1] We’ve
used that as a way to trivialize what Jesus had in mind. It goes something like
this. “Oh isn’t that sweet. Jesus was telling the disciples they had to be
innocent and free and willing to go to anyone.”
Yet that is
precisely not what Jesus had in mind
in this living parable he enacted in front of his disciples. Children in Jesus’
time – even more than they are today – were non-entities. Certainly parents
loved their children. But children weren’t considered people, they were chattels;
they were owned. Children had no rights, no legal protection; they couldn’t do
anything of importance. Instead, things were done to them. In
Greco-Roman society a father could, and did, sell his child and in some places
that still goes on. But, rather than owning property, as even slaves could,
children couldn’t own, they were owned. Children couldn’t inherit
property when a parent died, even if there was adult to be conservator of the
property.
Into this
attitude, this way of being where children are not only unseen and unheard, but
barely exist, Jesus tromps all over the societal norm with his living parable about
how to be great.
In telling
the disciples how to be great, Jesus welcomed and embraced those whom no one
else was willing to truly embrace. He embraced those who had no voice, no
rights, no property, and no value. This is how we too are called to be great:
to truly embrace, to welcome others that society considers less than nothing by
treating them as people who have
something and are something.
By his actions Jesus tells us the
greatness of God. He demonstrates for us, by his embrace of a child, that we
too should welcome those to whom no one else will offer welcome. We are called
to embrace those who are nothing
according to the world, yet everything
to Christ.
Jesus, in
his actions and his words, tells us how to be great. Do you want to be great?
Do you want to follow Jesus? “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and
servant of all.” ”Whoever welcomes a child in my name welcomes me, and whoever
welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me,”[2] These
are the lessons in how to be great.
And that question we started
with? What in God’s name is going on around here? How about we change the emphasis
of the question? Suppose we join together to find out just what God is up to in
this place. Suppose we do that so we can have more of what God is already doing.
Suppose we do what is great and wonderful and surprising and inviting. Suppose
we ask, during this interim time, “What in God’s
name is going on around here?”
Because, discovering what God is
already doing and creating more of those things in God’s name will make
Resurrection the great place God
wants us to be. What in God’s name is going on around here? AMEN.[3]
The Rev Nicolette Papanek
©2015
