The Sermons at Calvary
By Father Richard Humke
EMPTYING THE CUP OF PRIDE
September 21, 2003, 20-B, Calvary
Church
Wisdom 1:16-2:1,12-22
Psalm 54
James 3:16-4:6
Mark 9:30-37
Friday
morning, as I was eating my cereal, I was glancing through the comics and
stopped at "Hagar the Horrible."
On the surface it appears to be a particularly silly comic strip, but
under the obvious there is often something worth pondering. On Friday Hagar says, "After being away
for six months, I'll bet my pals at the tavern really missed me!" And in the next box he enters the tavern,
and they say, "Hagar! Haven't seen
you for a couple of days! Have you been
sick?"
Oh, how important we think we are!
And
in our Gospel today Jesus asks his disciples, "'What were you arguing
about on the way?' But they were
silent, for on the way they had argued with one another who was the
greatest."
Some
of you may recall that I said our Gospel last week, which came just a chapter
before the one today, was a transition in Mark's telling of the story of
Jesus. Until then the emphasis had been
upon Jesus' teachings and healings and miracles. But now his face was turned toward Jerusalem and what that
meant. Our Gospel today says,
"...he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, 'The Son of Man is to
be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after
being killed, he will rise again.'"
But
they were arguing about who was the greatest among them.
A
Zen Buddhist story goes like this:
A man
went searching for the meaning of life.
After several years and many miles he came to the hut of a particularly
holy hermit, and he asked this hermit how he might be enlightened. The holy man invited his visitor into his
humble dwelling and began to serve him tea.
He filled the pilgrim's cup and then kept on pouring so that the tea was
soon spilling off the table and dripping on the floor. The pilgrim watched with amazement until he
couldn't restrain himself any longer, and he said, "Stop! It's full.
No more will go in." Then
the holy man said, "Like this cup, you are full of your own opinions,
preconceptions, and ideas. How can I teach you anything unless you first empty
your cup?"
This
story came to mind as I thought about our Gospel for today, a Gospel that deals
with pride, with self-importance, that very dangerous human emotion. It is
pride that gets people and nations into so much trouble, this belief that what
we want must be more important than what anyone else wants because we
are more important.
Jesus
then "sat down," and that alerts us to the fact that some important,
formal teaching is to follow, for the teacher with authority in that day sat
down to teach while the listeners often stood.
(We have it differently today: I
get to stand and you get to sit. We
have, however, some remnant of this practice still, of course, when the Bishop
visits, for sometimes he sits in his chair and speaks to us, and we stand. We also have a remnant of this idea of the
teacher sitting when we speak of "chairs" in university
departments.)
Jesus
teaches them by showing them what he means.
It is an enacted parable. He
takes a little child in his arms and says to those prideful men, "Whoever
welcomes one such child in my name welcomes not me but the one who sent
me." (This is a particularly
appropriate Gospel for a day on which we have a Baptism, don't you think?)
The
full force of the enacted parable is not readily apparent to us, however,
unless we know, as commentators tell us, that children were held in a low
esteem in the Graeco-Roman world in which Jesus lived. So original readers of Mark's Gospel would
have seen that in Jesus' embrace of the child he was identifying himself with
the lowliest and the least, and as the servant of all.
Who
is the greatest? is the question answered in today's Gospel by Jesus, and the
answer is radically different from that that the disciples thought or that we
would give. Greatness is measured in
terms of service, not status. Jesus
identifies with the child who is vulnerable, as every child, then and now, is
vulnerable. Jesus identifies with the
lowly status of the child, which is the same status as a servant.
Perhaps
that suggests to us that we might need to view things in a different way. Is true importance in our society measured
only by what compensation a person receives?
If so, then the teachers and social workers of our country count for
nothing but the head of the New York Stock Exchange (a position now vacant, alas) is unbelievably more important. But really?
Really? Those teachers we read
about this past week at Lincoln Elementary School here in Louisville, who
helped to pull their students' scores up so dramatically, aren't going to be
rewarded with stock options and obscene salaries, but they will have the
satisfaction of knowing that they have made a difference in many children's
lives -- and what's more, they know they won't be sitting in some white collar
prison either.
A
good part of the whole of Jesus' teaching is found here today: true greatness is to be had in serving those
in need, in serving those who cannot pay you back; and the truly great person
is the one who serves others. The
person who is so full of himself, of his own importance, cannot hear this, of
course. His cup is already too full, as
our Zen story told us. It must be
emptied of the pride that resists hearing such a teaching of Jesus so that room
is made for new truth, namely that if you want to talk about greatness, if you
want to talk about importance, look at the person who serves others, because in
Jesus' scheme of things that is where importance lies.
The
disciples were so far from realizing the true meaning of Jesus. And in a perverse way, that gives me some
hope. If those men who walked along the
roads with him, who ate with him, and spent every day and night with him, and
listened to his teachings -- if those men missed the point of Jesus'
teachings, then perhaps you and I can be forgiven for missing the point as
well. But that doesn't mean that we
don't need to hear it over and over and over again. To hear that the true meaning of discipleship is service to
others. To hear that greatness and
importance in the Body of Christ are different from what they are in the world
at large.
Check
the level of your cup. How full
is it? Has your pride and your sense of
self-importance taken up so much room in that cup that no room is left for
anything else?
Those
are the questions each one of us might ask himself or herself. And then, when we get the answer (and we all
know what the answer will be), we need to know that it is not too late to make
room in our cup because it is never too late in the eyes of God to begin to
change.
Richard
H. Humke