Sitting beside Jesus

A sermon on Mark 10:35-45, Hebrews 5-1-10

I summed up today’s gospel reading to my children as follows: Two of Jesus’ disciples demand that they both get to sit beside him in Heaven,” to which my kids replied: “That’s just like us fighting over who gets to sit next to you!”

It’s true. Since they were old enough to make verbal demands – which was very early on, as they take after me and are strident verbal communicators (lucky me!) – part of our nightly routine has been a heated debate (well, ok then, a fight) over who gets the coveted seat beside mum on the sofa. They have a hyper-sensitive barometer of fairness and are always on the look out for potential injustice, which usually means that the phrase “it’s not fair!” is much overused and abused in our house.

I’m hoping that when they grow up they will unleash this quest for justice upon the world and become excellent adults, but right now, it’s mainly directed towards their siblings and is tedious beyond belief. So I do have some sympathy with Jesus when he’s faced with a similar demand, not from squabbling children, but from two grown men.

Let’s take a closer look at the passage and see if we can figure out what’s going on:
Firstly, we need to note that this demand from James and John – to sit on the left and right hand of Jesus, comes just after Jesus has predicted for the third time what will happen to him in Jerusalem. So the disciples have just heard, in the most explicit terms yet, that Jesus will be betrayed, condemned to death, flogged, killed, and three days later will rise from the dead.

And this is how James and John respond:
“Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask…let one of us sit on your left side and on your right in your glory.”
Now, Matthew puts these words in the mouth of Salome, who was the mother of James and John, which would make them first cousins to Jesus. So perhaps this was their way of trying to get ahead of Peter, by claiming familial loyalty. Perhaps they thought that being cousins gave them extra brownie points that meant they deserved to be closer to Jesus than the other disciples. Perhaps they thought that Jesus’ glory meant he was going to be establishing a new government. A new order. And this was their demand for top jobs in the cabinet. Perhaps.

And can we really blame them for wanting to be near Jesus? Don’t we all just want to be closer to Jesus? Sadly, they’re hugely mistaken. Not only are they demanding the wrong answer, they’re asking the wrong question. They’re having petty thoughts of self at a time when Jesus is telling them of big things that will be happening in the spiritual realm. But they’re so focussed on earthly power structures that they can’t see what Jesus is really getting at. Yes, change is coming, but it’s nothing like they’ve ever seen before. The fight isn’t for a new government, it’s for a whole new world.

So how did Jesus respond? Let’s consider for a moment our first reading today from Hebrews. In verse 8 we’re told that “Jesus learned obedience from suffering.” Which is an intriguing sentence that we need to unpack a little. In the Greek that this is translated from the word for SUFFERING and the word for LEARNED are almost exactly the same but for one letter. Which is interesting isn’t it? Anyone who has suffered, which sadly is probably all of us, knows all too well that we’re not the same afterwards. Particularly if you’ve visited very dark places in your suffering,  you can’t help but have learned from that experience. It’s a lesson you never wished to partake of, but learn you did.


So when Jesus responds to the petty power politics of James and John he uses two key phrases that would have been very familiar to the people he was talking to. These were a people who knew their scripture. He says to them: “Can you share this cup?” Which was a well-known saying meaning to share in another’s suffering. Later, Jesus uses this imagery again when he prays in the Garden of Gethsemane.

“Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will but what you will.”
We pray this prayer ourselves, don’t we? We pray, “your will be done,” but do we always mean it? Are we fully ready for God to take us up on that challenge? To do what God wants, instead of what we want?

Then Jesus talks of Baptism. He says: “Can you be baptised with the baptism I will be baptised with?” Jesus refers to a Jewish understanding of baptism, not the one that we’re familiar with. This is a baptism that speaks more of death than of life. A baptism of fire, rather than water. I wonder how many people would rush to be baptised if they had to walk through fire instead of be immersed in water.

So Jesus is clear: to sit beside me means to suffer as I will suffer. The place beside Jesus is an uncomfortable place to be. James and John make a dangerous request of Jesus, and he tells them: “You don’t know what you’re asking.” And they don’t.
A few days after this conversation, James and John would truly witness what it meant to be on the right side and the left side of Jesus, at Golgotha when the two criminals were nailed to crosses either side of him.

And we know that it didn’t end well for James and John. Within weeks John would be imprisoned for his faith and James went on to die a violent death, beheaded by Herod.
It seems that being close to Jesus, comes with a certain element of risk.

This passage is the key moment in the whole of Mark’s gospel and it’s one of the earliest statements of why Christ came – to SERVE and to GIVE. We don’t get to be near Jesus just because we demand it, or because we feel we ought to be there. The Kingdom of God isn’t a meritocracy and God doesn’t have favourites. In the Kingdom, true greatness flows upwards, and it never comes without some personal cost to ourselves.

What does it really mean to sit beside Jesus? It’s not a comfy place to be. To sit beside Jesus means to sit with the homeless man who begs outside the supermarket and smells powerfully of beer.
To sit beside Jesus means to sit beside the person who claims benefits and who has to regularly use the Foodbank.
To sit beside Jesus is to sit beside someone who wears a Hijab and whose ideas of God are very different to our own.
To sit beside Jesus means to sit beside the person whose sexuality is different from our own.
To sit beside Jesus is to sit with the different, with the strange, with the foreign, with the lost, the mentally unstable, the angry, the defensive and the dying.
It is to sit beside them, to serve them, and to love them. This is our calling. To serve and to give, whatever the cost, whatever the discomfort, to share Jesus’ cup. To sit beside him no matter how uncomfortable that may be. Amen.