Thomas Kleinert
“Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked,” it says in Psalm 1, “or take the path that sinners tread, but their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law they meditate day and night. They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither.” Happiness, according to the psalm, is for those who know who to listen to, what path to follow, and what to delight in. It’s not getting what you want that makes you happy, but knowing what to want.
I don’t remember when I began to know what I wanted. Perhaps none of us do. We all start out little. We all start out needing to be welcomed, held and loved — all of us, no exceptions. In the earliest weeks and months of our life, we don’t know what to want, we just want what we need, and we want it with every cell of our little bodies. And from day one, we begin to learn and know; our world, growing daily in wider and wider circles, shapes our bodies and relationships, our tastes and wills and minds and spirits, our whole and broken selves.
So here we are, disciples on the way with Jesus, wanting to be formed by his life and teachings, wanting to be part of the fullness of life he calls the kingdom of God. We’re back in Capernaum, the hub of his Galilean ministry. We’re headed to Jerusalem now, where, he’s been telling us, repeatedly, he is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.
You noticed I said “we’re back in Capernaum” and “we’re headed to Jerusalem now.” I say this because we’re not merely readers of the story, but participants in it. I say “we” because we could listen to the words from the Gospel and, shaking our heads in disbelief, declare,
Oh, do his disciples need teaching! The obtuseness of the disciples in Mark’s Gospel is downright comical at the same time that it is deadly serious. In spite of all that they have witnessed and heard from Jesus, they still do not seem to have a clue what his mission is about.
“Perhaps they do not want to understand this confusing message about a Messiah who suffers and dies,” writes Elizabeth Johnson. “Or perhaps they are afraid to reveal their ignorance.” I say “we” to help me and you not point the finger at “them,” but wonder, Why am I afraid to ask him? Is it because I don’t want to appear slow? Is it because I’m thoroughly confused, but I still want to project confidence and make everybody else believe that I have it all together?
Jesus, of course, is not afraid to ask us, “What were you arguing about on the way?” Well, we’ve been with him on the way for a good while, and we know exactly what we’ve been arguing about over the weeks, and years, and generations, and he knows it, too. He asks, not because he doesn’t know, but because he does, and because he wants to give us an opportunity to think about it. We’ve been arguing about who is the greatest.
Three times in the gospel of Mark, Jesus talks about being rejected and betrayed, being handed over and condemned to death, being killed and rising again after three days. Three times, and not just because this is disturbing news that is hard to take in, but because being a disciple of Jesus is so tied up with his particular path of compassionate, self-giving service. We do want to believe that his way is indeed the way of life, fullness of life, but long before we said yes to his call, the world has been shaping us, our bodies and relationships, our whole and broken selves. We’ve been shaped by a world of ambition, competition, and status anxiety, and that’s what we’ve been arguing about, and he knows it.
“Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all,” he tells us. In the world that has shaped us since before we were born, those at the top of the ladder lord it over those at the bottom. But in the world Jesus was sent to inaugurate, heaven and earth touch at the bottom of the ladder where Jesus stoops to wash our feet. The way of Jesus doesn’t lead up the steps of our social rankings to some throne at the top, surrounded by the clouds of heaven. The way of Jesus remains at ground level, and it leads to us, always to us.
We all start out little. We all start out needing to be welcomed and fed, held and loved, all of us, no exceptions. We all need loving folks who see us and call us by name. How much of our drive for what we take to be greatness, do you think, has to do with that deep need to be seen and loved?
Jesus took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”
We argue about who is the greatest and Jesus puts a little child among us. Who knew there was a child? Who noticed? We were engaged in important matters, we were making sure our voice would be heard, our opinion registered, and our contribution recognized in its significance. And Jesus puts a little child among us.
Politicians love being seen interacting with little children; their PR people tell them it makes them more likable among voters. But Jesus doesn’t take a child in his arms to draw attention to himself. He does it to draw our attention to the child. Feel free to paint a picture in your mind, whether it’s a snot-nosed toddler or a wiggly four-year-old who still thinks clothes are optional.
The point is that it could be any child, and that in Mark’s day, children were socially invisible, unimportant. They were closer to servants than to persons endowed with certain rights, and on the status ladder, they were grouped around the bottom. Jesus, of course, does all his work at ground level, and he directs our attention away from our ambitious status pursuits. You want to be great and so you make yourself as big as possible just to be seen and recognized. But in the world of God’s reign you’re not welcomed because you’re great. You are welcomed because you belong; you are loved for who you are. So don’t be afraid to shift your attention. If you want to be great, recognize the ones that are habitually overlooked. Welcome those who are not great by any common measure, and bring them in.
“Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”
Welcome, welcome, welcome is woven into this teaching like the holy, holy, holy sung in heaven.
On Thursday I picked up a long-awaited copy of Charlie Strobel’s beautiful memoir, The Kingdom of the Poor, and reading it, I could hear his gentle voice, saying,
I grew up among poor people who were good to one another, good to my family, and good to me. We all helped each other through hard times and celebrated together the good times. I cherished the memory of my father, a man of modest means who nonetheless considered himself rich in all the ways that truly mattered. I watched my mother stretch her small salary to the limit to make sure we had food, clothes and shelter, yet she was so happy and grateful for the life we had and the neighborhood we called home. I was drawn from a very early age to poor people and to those, like Father Dan, who exalted poor people.
Working on his master’s degree in theology, Charlie “came to understand in the classroom that the poor of the world not only should be but must be at the top of the list of our concerns as a society.” And in the classroom he fell in love with “a beautiful word in Hebrew, little known and rarely used — a word that gave fullness and depth to everything I intuitively believed and understood about the so-called “least of these.” The word is anawim. Anawim is the Hebrew word for “[the] poor.”
To Charlie, the word doesn’t merely describe an economic condition, but “refers to all of us, as we are seen [and blessed] by God.”
Our blessing is that we know we are incapable of being happy all by ourselves. This is our poverty, and all the riches in the world cannot rid us of it. … [M]ost of us resist thinking of ourselves as poor, much less blessed in our poverty. We lose sight of the fact that this is how we are created. At our birth, long before we achieve power, prestige, possessions, or even pigmentation, we are naked, vulnerable, and poor. When we forget this basic truth about ourselves — whether we are people of faith or not — we end up fighting for our own survival rather than helping each other survive. As we gather possessions, power, and prestige, we begin to separate, creating all kinds of differences of class and status. Although almost everyone believes in the necessity of possessions, the differences they create inspire extreme competition, rivalry, and war.
Charlie, with a lifetime of joyful service, invites us not only to see the little ones and serve them, but to understand ourselves as belonging with them to God’s community of the blessed poor, the anawim.
Jesus turns our attention away from ourselves and our anxious obsession with status. Following him on the way, we learn to see the neighbors who are rendered invisible by our arrangements of power, until we all welcome in each other the presence of the invisible God.