Palm Sunday 2009

I want to share with you something we uncovered during our Bible study over the last six weeks, as a group of us met to read through and appreciate the whole gospel of Mark. In a lot of ways, as we’ve discovered, the gospel could be subtitled “the story of Jesus and his disciples”. The whole thing revolves around the relationship between Jesus at the centre of the story, and the figures next to him: the ones who are following him, learning from him, and learning to do the things that he does.

We’re used to seeing certain characters in the foreground of that arrangement. We hear a lot from Peter - in fact some people even think that the gospel of Mark is really Peter’s memoirs, passed on verbally to someone else after the fact and eventually written down. And along with Peter we see James and John as key figures, sometimes with Andrew as well - along with the rest of the 12 who were the core band of disciples, the leadership-in-training of the Jesus movement.

And that’s what makes it really striking when we come to the closing chapters of Mark, the ones we’ve just read, and realize that there’s been a rapid and complete change of cast. The faces we’ve been used to imagining around Jesus have all melted into the scenery. Peter and James and John, the rest of the 12, the ones who said “We won’t desert - even if we have to die with you, we won’t deny you” …. Where are they? Even the familiar voice of the narrator has left us - many people think he’s written himself into the story as that young man who was almost captured but left his linen cloth behind and “ran off naked.” The rest of the story has an air of reconstruction about it, as though he is trying to piece together what must have happened, rather than telling it to us straight.

Instead of these familiar faces and voices, there’s a whole new set of characters who have suddenly appeared. The process began slowly back at the beginning of the gospel reading, with the woman who took her family heirloom and broke it open to anoint Jesus’ head and honour his determination to go to his death for the sake of God’s kingdom. In our story she has no name. She was one of that faceless crowd around the core group of characters - people who we aren’t really supposed to notice. But Jesus brings her out of the background and links her action to the heart of the good news, wherever it is proclaimed in the whole world.

The next character in this new cast is Simon of Cyrene, who is in the wrong place at the wrong time and gets dragooned by the Roman soldiers to carry Jesus’ cross. There are a few interesting things about Simon. One is that he wasn’t even in the background of the earlier part of the story - he was probably back home in northern Africa going about his business. Another is that he is described as the father of Alexander and Rufus - names that Mark’s original audience must have known, or why else include them? So this accidental connection with Jesus in the hour before his execution ends up producing a lasting link between him and a family from another part of the world. Finally, Simon’s part is to carry the cross - an incidental bit of stage business you might think. Except that way back in the story, when Jesus was first beginning to explain to his core team what their job definition was, he said this: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross, and follow me.”

The pace picks up at the end of chapter 15. As Jesus dies, none of the old crew are to be seen everywhere. Instead we have a Roman centurion, unwittingly voicing a truth that none of Jesus’ own students were ever able to grasp: Truly this man was son of God. We have Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the Jewish religious council - whom we actually should have heard from before, because this was the council that conducted Jesus’ sham trial with its predetermined conviction of blasphemy. Where was Joseph then? Yet it turns out he was one of that invisible outer circle of people whom Jesus had touched and now, when it’s too late, he stirs himself to action, to recover Jesus’ body from the cross instead of letting it be thrown to the elements.

And finally we have this group of women, half of whom seem to have been named Mary. It turns out they were in the story before too, and not just as tag-alongs - they were actually the people who looked after Jesus (and probably the core team as well) in Galilee. For some reason that didn’t count enough to get a mention. Until now. Now, it’s a different story - literally. Not the story of Jesus and his entourage of 12 would-be leaders. You could say that the story of Jesus and his disciples only just got started here, at the very end, with this new set of names and faces.

This, the narrator is saying to us - this is what discipleship actually looks like. Sticking with Jesus when there is no upside. Taking a risk for him, for the very first time, knowing that you missed your real chance last night. Carrying the cross, even when that only happened by accident and you’d rather be anywhere else in the world. And you can hear our narrator saying all this rather soberly, because what he’s really saying is “I know! I got taken in too. I thought it was those guys who were going to sit at Jesus right and left hands in his kingdom - I thought they were the real disciples. I stuck to them like glue hoping some of it would rub off. Now I know better.”

But there’s a point to this - it’s not just true confessions time, Mark wrote all this down for a reason. In his own time, 30-40 years after Jesus was crucified, the church was full of people who weren’t Peters and Andrews and Jameses and Johns. The second-generation Christians were, in their own eyes, unimportant people with none of the advantages of the heroes of the faith who had worked side by side with the Lord. And they were facing unprecedented challenges, as the church was beginning to make its mark on a Roman Empire that needed to hear the good news but was resisting the message, sometimes persecuting the messengers. These were exactly the people who needed to know what real discipleship was all about.

And we’re no different. OK, no one is threatening our lives because we stand up for Jesus - though that does happen in some parts of our world even today. Where we live, the work of discipleship is less clear, harder to pin down. But we have an uneasy sense that we’re not doing it as well as we could. We might think, like those first century Christians, “If only we were heroes. If only we had walked side by side with Jesus like his first followers. Then we could do it.” And the gospel of Mark is still there to tell us, there are no heroes. The last among us is as the first. Because real discipleship can happen to anyone, any time, by accident just as much as on purpose. And it’s not about us or how good we are at it - it’s just about the Cross, and whether we’re willing to put a hand out to take our tiny share of its weight.

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