35 James and John, Zebedee’s sons, came to Jesus and said, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask.”
36 “What do you want me to do for you?” he asked.
37 They said, “Allow one of us to sit on your right and the other on your left when you enter your glory.”
38 Jesus replied, “You don’t know what you’re asking! Can you drink the cup I drink or receive the baptism I receive?”
39 “We can,” they answered.
Jesus said, “You will drink the cup I drink and receive the baptism I receive, 40 but to sit at my right or left hand isn’t mine to give. It belongs to those for whom it has been prepared.”
41 Now when the other ten disciples heard about this, they became angry with James and John. 42 Jesus called them over and said, “You know that the ones who are considered the rulers by the Gentiles show off their authority over them and their high-ranking officials order them around.43 But that’s not the way it will be with you. Whoever wants to be great among you will be your servant. 44 Whoever wants to be first among you will be the slave of all, 45 for the Human One[e] didn’t come to be served but rather to serve and to give his life to liberate many people." (Common English Bible)
Mark: The First Gospel Sermon Series, Winter/Spring 2019
The photograph’s contents were stunning: an entire tree, split and felled across a road that ran between a church and a school, that could have and would have caused real damage to anything and anyone unfortunate enough to be beneath it at the time. Fortunately, nothing, and nobody, was.
That photo is my one foray, my solitary contribution, to the world of photojournalism rather than to the world of writing in which I ordinarily ply my trade. The photo got picked up by the Associated Press, so you can still find it if you Google me, yet surprisingly, I have yet to be asked to photograph anyone’s wedding or baby shower, despite my extremely reasonable rates!
Even though I was born and raised in Kansas, where the tornadoes are so common that across the intersection from where I grew up there was a loudly blaring tornado siren that scared the dickens out of me as a small child, it took becoming an adult and living here in Washington state for years for me to actually be in a tornado. I had gotten of my car outside the office of the church I served for nearly seven years in Longview when I saw the funnel cloud touch down in the park across the street from the church building; it spun through our lawn and over our building before moving over me and literally blowing the hat right off my head before plowing into the nearby neighborhood.
We had a preschool like Noah’s Ark in our church building as well, and I rushed into the building to see if everyone was. Thankfully, they were, and the damage to our building was negligible. The same would not be able to be said for a number of buildings across Longview. I then called Carrie and said, “Just so you know, you might see on the news that there was a tornado in Longview, and I wanted to let you know that I am, and everyone here, is safe.” What I may have neglected to tell her was that I had been, you know, *in* the tornado.
The tornado was an anomaly, an aberration, a destructive freak occurrence that fell right on top of me by sheer dumb chance after decades of managing to avoid them where they are so frequent. It was akin to a near-miss with a bolt of lightning, or narrowly avoiding an accident on the road. It brought to mind Qoheleth’s saying in Ecclesiastes, that the race is not for the swift nor battle for the strong, but time and chance happens to them all.
Except that isn’t entirely so either. Yes, the tornado avoided harming me or anyone else at the church that day. But I know from being born and raised in Kansas that, for instance, living in a mobile home, or a less sound house without a basement or centrally located bathroom, drastically increases the chances that you will be hurt or killed in a tornado. As is the case with so much in our broken world, your poverty—or lack thereof—influences your chances of survival.
Which brings us to James and John, the boanerges, the Sons of Thunder, as Jesus calls them, here in Mark 10. And that Messiah-bestowed moniker is hardly accidental.
We have, by now, spent nearly three months with the Gospel of Mark, working our way methodically through chapter-by-chapter. We are almost at Mark 11, which tells the story of Jesus’s Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem. But before we enter the Old City, waving our palms, laying down our cloaks, and shouting our Hosannas, we read this request from the brothers James and John.
They wish to sit at the places of honor in the kingdom of God—at the right and left of Jesus. Jesus gives them what is basically a caveat emptor spiel—do you know really know what you’re signing up for with that request?—when the other ten disciples hear of this request that comes seemingly out of nowhere, and they start grumbling and grousing about these presumptuous Sons of Thunder.
Imagine their entitled demand wending through the group of disciples like a tornado, maybe not coming entirely out of nowhere—after all, the disciples were already caught discussing among themselves who was the greatest among them in Mark 9—and sowing discord and chaos, and doing some very real damage to the fabric of the group. Such can be the damaging ways of thunder.
So Jesus calls a team meeting, and He lays out the reality for all of them: whoever wants to be great must be a servant. Whoever wants to be first of all must be a slave. And the Son of Man—Jesus—did not come into this world to be served, but to serve, and to give His life to liberate others.
That word, “liberate” that the Common English Bible translates from Mark’s Greek is derived from the Greek word “lutron,” which means “ransom.” It is a word that Matthew’s Gospel also uses in its version of this teaching, in 20:28, in the same way: to refer to Jesus’s life as a ransom “for many.”
Now, when we talk about Jesus paying a price for us, it is usually done not in terms of paying a ransom—which suggests that we are held captive and must be liberated—but in terms of buying or being bought. Except those are not exactly the same thing. I may buy things with my MasterCard, but when my credit card statement arrives, the payment I make to MasterCard is not a ransom. I am simply paying for the items I have already bought. Nor have the items that I have bought been freed or liberated from anything for my having bought them.
Yet over the past thousand years of Western Christian history, that is how the giving of Jesus’s life has gotten framed—us being bought and paid for, not ransomed and liberated. I think the notion that we needed to be ransomed and liberated was troublesome to us for a plethora of reasons.
James and John, then, by presenting their audacious request to Jesus, are making a cry to be freed from the mindset and worldview that got them to the point where they thought they deserved to rule alongside Jesus at His right and left. As Jesus says to them, they do not know what they are asking. Their ways of thunder may have brought them to a point where they feel comfortable making such an arrogant ask of the Messiah, but Jesus makes it clear that they will come no further.
Such are the capricious ways of thunder—of storm and tornado, of destructiveness without constructiveness. James and John’s request may be on some level understandable, but it is in no way redeemable. I can understand and explain how tornadoes exist, and that one touched down over my former church and swept over me, but that doesn’t make the experience itself good or beneficial.
That is what I mean by the ways of thunder, the ways of these Sons of Thunder. We may be able to explain how they get to this point to think so highly of themselves that they want to place themselves at the seats of honor next to their Lord, but that does not make it right for us to make their ways into our ways. We are not meant to emulate the destructive ways of thunder. Nor are we meant to be silent before them. Rather, like Jesus, we are meant to rise up and respond to them.
Two weeks after the Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand that have claimed the lives of over fifty children of God, the question of how we—how I—respond matters an awful lot.
I reference myself specifically because, as some of you know, I’m ethnically Armenian, and one of the culprits had covered his weapons in writings that included references to Armenians, and his manifesto included hateful references to the anti-Armenian president of Turkey. This comes from a profoundly unfortunate trend of far-right racists fetishizing us Armenians as a historically persecuted Christian population, and as a result of this, anti-Armenian foreign leaders have tried to explicitly link us as terrorists to the mosque shootings.
And I wanted so badly, so desperately, to respond to all of that, all of that hate and all of that exploitation with the fury and wrath of God’s own thunder.
But that thunder is God’s. Not mine. How I clap back loudly to the thunder that clapped in the form of gunshots in Christchurch must come from righteous anger, not anger for anger’s sake.
How we respond to the ways of thunder can vary for each of us. But as the thunder is so very often loud in how it claps to us, loudly clapping back in righteousness seems as important as ever, especially if we are clapping back from a place in diametric reversal of bigotry and prejudice.
To find liberation from thunder, we must be willing to clap back at its noisiness, to say to it what we may be afraid to say, but what we must say if we are to remain true to the Gospel message of Jesus Christ. Jesus tells James and John that the reversal of circumstance must be total—that in order to be great, you must serve. In order to be first, you must be a slave. Our own response, our own clapping back to thunder’s peals, must offer the reverse of that which thunder claps at you with:
When thunder claps at you in hate, you clap back in love.
When thunder claps at you in oppression, you clap back in liberation.
When thunder claps at you in sin, you clap back in salvation.
And when thunder claps at you in the ways that might hurt you the most, that are meant to cut you to the quick so that you might not ever get back up, you clap back in faith in the one God who created you and redeemed you, who ransomed you from death and handed you back over to life, because it is that God who calls you to serve not the way of thunder, but the way of Jesus Christ.
For the God who ultimately liberates James and John from their ways of thunder also liberates you from thunder. The next time you find yourself surprised by that thunder, or in the spiritual tornado, or in the eye of the emotional storm, remind yourself that yes, you too are ransomed and set free.
Blessed are you who comes in the name of that God. Blessed are you who chooses to serve in the name of that God, that you too might be littlest, last, and least, and in so doing, find the liberation that so many of us seek, yet far too few of us ever find in full.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson, D.Min.
Vancouver, Washington
March 31, 2019