James 3.13 – 4.3,7-8a, Mark 9.30-37
The Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity, 22 September 2024
Austwick, Clapham
Who is wise and understanding among you? In an ephemeral world full of newscaster soundbites and social media snapshots we yearn for wisdom – the slow, considered truth of those who have nurtured inner depth and open understanding of themselves and others. [1]
Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom. In a harsh world dominated by the brutal politics of ambition, where our lives are governed by institutions so large they are incapable of care for the individual, we yearn to be touched by gentleness. [2]
But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be boastful and false to the truth. In our yearning to belong, our desire to be recognised, our need to be loved, we bend ourselves out of shape, mould ourselves into other people’s image of who we should be; we lament the damage that this causes our soul, and long to be at peace with ourselves by being true to ourselves. [3]
We are hungry to be rid of envy and selfish ambition, we ache for an end to disorder and wickedness of every kind. By coming here, week by week, year by year, we show ourselves keen to embrace the wisdom from above, that pure, peaceable, gentle wisdom, of God.
We desire to be at peace with ourselves, to be able to bring peace to the world around us. For a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace, writes James.
The beginning of the wisdom we seek, is our willingness to take a good long look at ourselves, recognising the reality of which James writes: that conflict in our world isn’t caused by things outside us; it comes from within.
That desire to have what others have, to be what others are, is deeply ingrained in us. It’s at the heart of all our disputes, be they little village spats or international conflicts, be they family feuds or civil wars, and they’re hard to overcome. But they can be; if we ask. James says,
You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.
This seems to be about prayer. Its about the difference between praying for the things we desire because other people have them, prayers which feel more like letters to Santa Claus than conversations with God – and praying for our desires to be aligned with God’s desires for us.
As St. Augustine puts on it in the opening prayer of his Confessions: “our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” We begin to move away from envy and selfish ambition when we begin to set our desires on what God desires for us, not what others desire, when we start to fix our heart on imitating God rather than following other people. As James continues,
Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.
Our longing to be at peace with ourselves and the world, begins to take shape when we prayerfully acknowledge the desires which are driving us, and relinquish them, in our hearts, to God.
Now James has got to the heart of the deep conflict in human nature – and identified a way to work towards healing. But James leaves out Jesus – and we need to ask, is it really possible for us to discover what God desires for us and to begin to turn our desires towards God, without the help of Christ as the go-between who helps us to understand and set that desire?
For us, Jesus is the Son of Man who knows all about human desires. Some novelists and filmmakers who have dabbled in this area have been dubbed heretical by some, but being fully human Jesus must have known what it felt like to be in relationships, entangled in human desires.
And Jesus is also the Son of God, whose relationship with the Father is our model for divine desire. How The Son looked towards the Father is how we might look, what he prayed to the Father illuminates how we should pray, and so on. As we find in today’s gospel story, where Jesus finds his disciples arguing about who was the greatest.
Now, the disciples had heard Jesus many times teaching, ‘Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.’ But it may have been a shock to them, seeing what he did next.
Then he 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.’
The shock here is that Jesus turned the eyes of the disciples away from each other – away from those competitive relationships with each other which were their obsession, those competitive relationships of desiring what the others had in terms of status and position. And he turned their eyes towards a little child who he put among them – placed at the centre of their attention.
Now from what we know and can imagine, children in that society were largely invisible, powerless, the lowest in status of anyone. To make them the centre of attention was a radical gesture of Jesus, designed to reshape the disciples view of who and what was important in life, to reform their desires from being among the greatest, to paying attention to the least.
Children are often caught up in our competitiveness: witness the lengths that parents go to to ensure their child succeeds in school. Children are always victims of our conflicts: I say just one word, divorce, to illustrate that point. And children are problematic: with their physical, emotional needs, with the financial burden they bring, with their new-fangled behaviour which we adults cannot fathom. Children are so often on the receiving end of adults’ violence, their misshapen, misdirected desires – it was the same in Jesus’ time as now. [7]
But Jesus took the child in his arms – directing his attention away from the squabbling disciples and focussing his attention on this little one, just as a loving father would his son, and telling them, ’Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.’
Here is Jesus inviting us to welcome those who have nothing to offer us but their vulnerability; encouraging us to divert our attention away from the endless struggle for our own status to reach out in compassion to the little ones of the earth. Here is Jesus showing us that when we turn our hearts outwards, away from our own selfish instincts, when we re-set our desires to embrace others, when we cease from our competitiveness and instead place ourselves in a position of self-giving love, like a parent towards a newborn child, then our restless hearts will learn to rest in him.
Notes
[1] An Adbusters-influenced paragraph. Adbusters is ‘the journal of the mental environment’ which is currently publishing its Manifesto for World Revolution series – ‘a tactical manual for fighting back against the capitalist algorithm that threatens the very essence of the human spirit’.
[2] A paragraph influenced by my reading of Theodore Roszak, Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society, in particular Chapter 5, ‘Too Big.’, p.131ff.
[3] Here the influence is the mimetic theory of Rene Girard and the treatment of James (and Jesus) here owes a good deal to Paul Nuechterlein, girardianlectionary.net, Year B, Proper 20b.
[4] Matthew 14.22-23.
[5] John the apostle is traditionally held to be the author of the Gospel of John, see eg Wikipedia.
[6] John 12.6: ‘[Judas] kept the common purse…’
[7] See Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus, p.266-271 for a fuller discussion of ‘The Child, the Family System, and the Roots of Violence’.
