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(Read this series from the beginning at Part 1 and Part 2.)
Jesus challenges political patriarchy and familial patriarchy (these forms are connected) from the beginning of Mark to the end. From the male disciples’ repeated blinkered leadership failures to the ways women disciples practice the vocation of service, Mark shows yet another illustration of those who are last being honored as first while those first made to be last. Some scholars now question whether the gospel of Mark could have been written by women within the early male-dominated Jesus community.
While I find that idea intriguing, today we must be clear that any effort to merely reform a system that includes slaves and lords rather than eliminating these kinds of relationships is not good enough. These types of systems are to be eliminated, not reformed. We must not merely seek the lowest positions within hierarchical systems of domination and oppression, we are to reject those systems in their entirety.
We need neither lords nor slaves. It’s time to leave both categories behind.
What would our world look like with neither slaves or servants nor lords? What would it look like if we instead made commitments of mutual care for one another rather than to more effectively or efficiently dominate each other? At the heart of that kind of world would be respect for the dignity of every human being and understanding that we are a connected part of one another. As Valarie Kaur states, “You are a part of me I do not yet know” (in See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love, p. 4). It would be a world where we chose social, political, and economic systems rooted in the ethic of loving our neighbors as a part of or as connected to ourselves (Mark 12:31).
Mark puts these words in the mouth of Jesus: “ For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Here the early Jesus movement is wrestling with efforts to redeem some meaning from Jesus’ execution. As I’ve stated before, this is one explanation in the gospels. I find a more compelling and life-giving narrative than the language of redemptive suffering and sacrifice in the parts of the gospel narratives and the book of Acts that focus on God overcoming, reversing, undoing, and triumphing over Jesus’ unjust execution through the resurrection event (see Reinterpreting the Easter Story and Imagery of a Good Shepherd). Death is not overcome in these narratives through more death. Death and death-dealing is overcome through the greater power of life—resurrection life. Everything the state accomplished by executing Jesus was undone through the resurrection.
Our goal today is not to passively give ourselves as ransoms for death, but to become channels of death-overcoming life as we relate to one another as individuals and shape social, political, and economic structures as we share space with each other here in our world. For if we take seriously Jesus’ call for no more lords, and we work for a world where there are no more, we will by that same effort create a world with no more slaves as well.
This week’s narrative is call to both imagine and work toward a different world.
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