September 19, 2003

Leadership

The disciples apparently weren’t satisfied that they may be on an inside track with Jesus, they wanted to know who was going to be the greatest when they got wherever it was leading. So Jesus pulled a child out of the crowd and said the greatest in the kingdom of Heaven were people like this (Mk 9.30-37; Mt 18.1-4).

Children aren’t necessarily better than other people. But like the child in the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes, they are not only cut out of the same cloth, but just apt to be better at telling the difference between a put-up job and the real thing.

The disciples wanted to talk about leadership, so Jesus talked about leadership. He says in effect to each of them and to each of us and to this church and its leaders, that anybody who wants to be first must be last and not only last, but last of all, and furthermore, servant of all. And while we’re at it, he says, lets start with the children, for whoever receives a child like this, receives me and not only me, but the one who sent me, and thus has already arrived at the top. Because the top is the bottom.

It’s about priorities. In Jesus’ time, children had no legal rights and no privileges guaranteed by law. They were totally defenseless and totally dependent with absolutely no social standing.

This fact of New Testament life plugged in to Jesus’ analogy draws a sharp contrast for us to show that Christianity is not some pious admonition to cultivate humility or neighborliness (as it is so often taken to mean and as important as these are), but that it is a disturbingly revolutionary rebuke in the face of anything that even looks like the pretentious puffery that the church and the nation has so often made of it.

Jesus publicly scorns the legalism that separates people from one another and that perpetuates the lines of social and religious distance between the clean and the unclean, the rich and the poor. He has absolutely no use for a moralism that is in service to the exaltation of a spirituality of self-importance. All the compassion, courage, and risk of suffering which are the real measurements of personal and institutional worth are implicit in Jesus’ bold invention in this episode with the power-seeking disciples.

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