Proper
20 :: Jeremiah 11: 18–20; Psalm 1; James 3: 13 – 4: 3, 7–8a; 9: 30–37
This
is the homily given at St. John’s, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania by Fr. Gene Tucker
on Sunday, September 23, 2018.
“HOW TO BECOME A NOBODY”
(Homily text: Mark 9: 30-37)
This
morning’s Gospel reading sets before us a stark truth. It is a lesson in “How
to become a nobody”. For that is the lesson Jesus is trying to get His
disciples to understand as they made their way back to Capernaum.
Our
Lord is pointing toward the mysterious process by which a person enters the
kingdom of God. The process can be expressed in a number of different ways,
but, in its most basic form, it is this:
Each one of us must empty ourselves in
order to enter the kingdom.
The
Lord expresses this truth in a number of different ways. For example, He said:
“If
anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and
follow me.” (Mark 8:34b) [1]
“Whoever
finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find
it.” (Matthew 10: 39b)
“Truly,
truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it
remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. (John 12: 24: Jesus is
speaking of His own death.)
But
the Lord isn’t asking us to do anything that He, Himself, hasn’t already done. The
Lord set aside every right and position He possessed from before the foundation
of the world in order to become fully human. Compared to the glory He possessed
in heaven before being born of the Virgin Mary, He became a “nobody” when He
took up our human condition. This truth is expressed in St. Paul’s words, found
in his letter to the Philippians:
“Have this mind among
yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of
God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking up the form of
a servant.” (Philippians 2: 5–7a) (Italics mine)
With
this background in mind, let’s return to our text from Mark.
A
wonderful scene unfolds before the disciples as Jesus takes a child into His arms,
saying, “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, and whoever
receives me, receives not me but the one who sent me.” (Verse 37)
This
incident has been captured in a familiar painting.
Beyond
the tenderness of the action, a deeper truth is to be found, and the lesson
Jesus is conveying has to do with the culture of the society in that day and
time: Children were nobodies back then.
Such
a regard for children might seem odd to us today. In that culture, children
were a person’s future. In that sense, their attitudes match ours pretty much.
But a child was a nobody until that child reached the age in which they could
become a full inheritor of God’s covenant. That happened at about the age of
thirteen or so, in a rite known as Bar
Mitzvah.
Jesus
sets before His disciples an object lesson:
If you want to become my disciple, if you want to be a part of God’s
kingdom, then you will have to become a nobody. You’ll have to empty yourself
completely.
The
stark disconnect between the disciples’ conversation along the road, in which
they argued among themselves as to who was destined to be the greatest, and
Jesus teaching about the nature of discipleship, couldn’t be greater.
In
Baptism, we undergo the process of becoming a “nobody”.
We enter the waters of Baptism, dying to our selves in the process by imitating
the Lord’s death. (See Romans 6: 3 – 9 for St. Paul’s wonderful explanation of
this process.)
But
then, we are raised to a new life, and we are counted as God’s children. We
become a “somebody”, a somebody special and unique in God’s sight, as we emerge
from the waters of Baptism.
The
process of self-emptying, of becoming a “nobody”, is repeated all throughout
our walk with the Lord. It is a necessary part of the reason for confessing our
sins, acknowledging that we are unworthy, though the things we have done that
fall short of God’s holiness, and through the things that we have failed to do,
that we are completely helpless to help ourselves out of our spiritual
predicament. The process of self-emptying comes whenever we say the words, “Not
my will, but yours, be done”, as the Lord said in the Garden of Gethsemane
before He suffered and died for us. The process of self-emptying happens
whenever we follow God’s call to do something, something that is for His
benefit and for the benefit of others, even though God’s call may entail
sacrifice and hardship for us.
Becoming
a “nobody” is, strangely and oddly enough, the way – the only way – to become a
“somebody” in God’s sight.
AMEN.
