Proper 20, Year B, Track 1
Proverbs 31:10-31
Psalm 1
James 3:13-4:3
Mark 9:30-37
"This morning, I would like us all to take a moment to look at our noses. For those of us who wear glasses every day, take a moment to look at your glasses while they’re on your face. I can promise you, there is no chance of doing this in a dignified way; I just need you to humor me for a moment. Now look back at me. I’m glad we could share this silly moment together. More importantly, I’m glad we could quickly illustrate one of the stranger quirks of the human brain: how something that is quite literally always in front of our faces can vanish unless we concentrate on it. In fact, the brain is constantly filtering all our sensory stimuli all the time. If it didn’t, we would be absolutely overwhelmed. Not only that, but the brain also constructs information to fill in gaps. Again using our previous example, the location of the nose actually blocks part of the visual field of both eyes, but rather than simply showing us a dark blur where our nose is, the brain uses the input from both eyes to construct what it thinks should be there. This anomaly, this filter, is something that every one of us has in common, regardless of who we are. This is a fundamental quirk of a normally functioning brain.
As I was reflecting on some of the previous events of Mark, I couldn’t help but chuckle a bit at the relatability of Jesus’ disciples. After nearly a thousand years of sainthood, it’s sometimes easy to forget these twelve men were pretty ordinary guys plucked from their ordinary lives who became part of something extraordinary. They had all the same failings as we do today. And sometimes, they were just absolute boneheads. Imagine, if you will, having to constantly remind your best friend that their nose is attached to their face.
In verse 31, Jesus says “The Son of Man is going to be betrayed into the hands of His enemies. He will be killed, but three days later will rise from the dead.” And how do the disciples respond? “They didn’t understand what He was saying, however, and they were afraid to ask Him what He meant.” Think about that. Christ’s death and resurrection are the most foundational, important elements of the Christian faith. Without them, there is no perfect sacrifice, there is no new covenant, there is no hope of redemption. Without them, Jesus is simply an eccentric rabbi with some interesting teachings. The disciples are Jesus’ students throughout His entire ministry, constantly seeking to understand the significance of His teachings and actions, except at this very pivotal moment.
Littered throughout Mark are moments of Jesus’ utter exasperation at the disciples just not getting what this whole ministry is all about. In Mark 7, after Jesus’ parable about inner purity, the disciples ask him what it meant. Jesus replies “Don’t you understand either?” In Mark 8, in the aftermath of the miracle of the loaves and fishes, the disciples were arguing because they hadn’t brought any bread with them. Jesus says “Why are you arguing about having no bread? Don’t you know or understand even yet? Are your hearts too hard to take it in? You have eyes—can’t you see? You have ears—can’t you hear? Don’t you remember anything at all?” And of course, Jesus reserved his most poignant rebuke for Peter, who had reprimanded him for teaching that he would suffer, die, and rise from the dead. “Get behind me, Satan!” Jesus proclaims toward the end of Mark 8. “You are seeing things merely from a human point of view, not from God’s.” With that last statement fresh in mind, we are reminded of today’s reading from Mark 9, in which the disciples are once again arguing, this time about which of them would be the greatest. After all they had already seen, and after all Jesus had told them about who he was and what was to come, they get hung up debating who would be in charge once Jesus was gone. Honestly, this is such a relatable moment. How often do we, unable to mentally process or understand something, adjust our focus to the mundane questions that are in our power to understand? Alternatively, how often do we simply shut our minds off altogether when faced with ideas that are hard for us to understand?
Unable to comprehend what Jesus has told them about the impending fate of their Messiah, the disciples turn their attention to what they could understand: their own future roles. It’s important to understand why they did this, however. Mark 9 and Luke 22 both recount this story, but one detail is different between them. In Mark, the disciples do not answer Jesus when He asks them what they were talking about, which leaves the reader feeling that perhaps the disciples were ashamed of themselves, even though that is not explicitly stated. In Luke, Jesus “knew their thoughts,” and directly responds to their arguing. Perhaps there is a message to be found here about the spiritual dangers of selfish ambition, but perhaps there is also something else we can learn in what the disciples left unsaid. These men were not mere empty vessels when Jesus chose them to follow Him. They were observant Jews who had at least some familiarity with the teachings of the Old Testament, and there was a big, difficult question that they left unasked: why does the Son of God have to suffer and die? Indeed, this is a question the early church would struggle to answer for the first century after Christ’s death. And surely, after centuries of expectation that the Messiah would come as a glorious king to reign over His people, it had to have been jarring to hear that their Messiah would be humiliated, tortured, and killed instead. But they don’t ask. The disciples put their blinders on and consider a more comprehensible question: who would lead them once Jesus was gone?
The core doctrines of Christianity are not especially complicated on their face, and for many of us Christians, we never seek to look deeper than what is on the face, because the questions become exponentially more difficult as we do, both mentally and spiritually. Sometimes we even see our spiritual leaders doing this, airbrushing the Gospel to make it simple and clean. The harder concepts and questions go out of focus and eventually disappear like the nose on our face until something makes us concentrate on it. Our minds take our basic understanding of the faith and fill in that dark spot where the conflict would be with what makes the most sense to us, rather than what is really there. But we cannot live our lives with the hard spiritual questions unanswered. We have to have the courage to ask ourselves and each other, why does God allow suffering in the world? Why does God allow me to suffer when I have been faithful to Him? Why do wicked people seem to get away with their wickedness? It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the magnitude of such questions, but we should confront them on our terms rather than be confronted by them when they suddenly appear to us in times of crisis. So once again, I ask that we take a moment today to look at our noses, our metaphorical noses this time. Let us take a moment to look at that dark spot of ignorance in our spiritual lives that we have covered over. What is that hard question that we are looking away from? And most importantly, what can we as disciples of Jesus, do to find the answer? Amen."