Mark 3:7-19a

08/31/11 Mark 3:7-19a GUMC Youth

This passage in Mark's gospel is interesting because we start to see the difference between what it means to be part of the crowd that is following Jesus around and what it means to be one that Jesus has specifically called to join him in a deeper way. We are going to see this interplay between the crowd of followers and the twelve disciples over and over again, but this is where Jesus first separates the twelve out from everyone else.

We need to understand just how popular Jesus was. He really had a crowd of people following him wherever he went. Remember, he is ministering primarily in Galilee at this time, which isn't much to write home about. Galilee is the kind of place where you only really go to because you need to go through it to get where you actually want to go. It is kind of the backwater place that has nothing about it that really draws people to it other than the fact that Jesus is there. We get people from all over the place coming to see Jesus; we read about people coming from Judea, Jerusalem, and Idumea in the South and Tyre and Sidon in the North. It seems that everyone in the world wants to come to see Jesus. Somehow, the mere presence of Christ makes Galilee the most important place in the universe, the center of the world.

However, it is at this moment, where Jesus is more popular than he has ever been before, that he calls out twelve people to be his close disciples. So, at every point after now, we have this idea that there are some people who are in the inside and some who are on the outside. In general, we will see that the disciples are on the "inside" and the crowd is on the "outside." But before we get too rooted in that way of thinking, I want to give you a head's up, that the question of who is on the inside and who is on the outside is going to get taken up over and over again. Even though Jesus makes this distinction between the crowd and the disciples, we are going to continually be asking the question, "Who really is on the inside or outside?" and the answer to that question might surprise you as we explore it.

However, be that as it may, I want to take tonight and look at the people that Jesus called. The fact of the matter is that history has tended to venerate the disciples and put them up on a pedestal, but it was a bizarre bunch of people. I want to talk about several of them. You might find that one of them reminds you of yourself in one way or another. You might even find that some of them resemble people you know, which should encourage you to remember that God is calling them, too.

Let's start with people we talked about a few weeks ago, Levi the tax-collector and Simon the Cananean, also called the zealot. The Cananeans were a group of radically nationalistic Jews, who hated the Romans more than anyone else. There had been armed uprisings over the years, for which they were at least partially responsible. They were not the folks who were just mad at the fact that they were ruled by a foreign power, they were prepared to put their money where their mouth is and to even attack the Romans, even though they were far more powerful.

On the other hand, Levi is a tax-collector, a person who is employed by the Roman government in order to collect the high taxes from their neighbors, who even were known to take more than they were supposed to and just pocket the rest. If there were two kinds of people in the world that would have hated each other, it would be the tax-collectors and the Cananeans. And yet Jesus calls them both. The call of Christ commands them, and us, to set aside our differences, even our deep differences, because few of us can have deeper differences than Levi and Simon did, and join together in following Jesus. We could name all kinds of opinions that divide us Americans today, but when Jesus calls us, and he does call us, we must lay them down, not because they are unimportant, and not because we do not have strong feelings about them, but because, compared to Christ, everything else is unimportant by comparison. To use modern language, Jesus calls both the most conservative Republican and the most liberal democrat and, even though they will probably continue to disagree, they must not allow their serious differences to tear the body of Christ. In fact, Jesus is the only one who can actually make that work. Certainly, nothing else seems to.

The next disciples I want to mention are James and John, the ones that Jesus calls the "Sons of Thunder." These are people who are extremely fiery and dominating. There is a moment, when Jesus and his disciples go and preach in a town, and nobody seems to listen. When faced with this frustration, James and John ask Jesus if they can pray that God would send down fire from heaven and consume the people. Jesus just rebukes them and moves on to the next town. There is another moment, that we will see later, when James and John go up to Jesus and ask if, when he comes into his kingdom (which, by the way, they thought was an earthly kingdom, not a heavenly one), they can sit at his right and left hand, that is, they wanted to be the most powerful people in the kingdom, after Jesus. As you can imagine, that kind of annoyed the other disciples. We will talk about what Jesus said to them when we get there, but these are the kinds of people that James and John were.

And yet, both of them become people who laid down their lives for others. James is ultimately killed for his faith, as an early Christian leader. John is not killed, and he is either the only one who wasn't killed or one of only two who weren't. The point is that, when we look at the writings of John, we find him to have become one of the most deeply loving leaders in Christian history. The story goes that, when John was too old to be able to actually deliver sermons, and had to be helped around by others, he just came into the church and said, "Children, love each other," and left it at that. This man who had been so completely obsessed with power had been transformed into one of the most humble people in history.

Next, I want to talk about someone who does not appear in the lists of Jesus' disciples. His name was Nathanael, and he was a bigot. When his friends, Simon Peter and Andrew, told him they had found the Messiah who had been promised, Nathanael's response was, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" He didn't think that those people could do anything good. He certainly didn't think that God would save humanity through someone who grew up in Nazareth, of all places. When he actually met with Christ, Nathanael was so overwhelmed by him, that he cried out, saying, "Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!" Christ, being who he is, challenged and overcame, even some deep prejudices.

Jesus had a disciple named Thomas, called "The Twin," who, it seems to me, is something of the disciple of our modern age. Church history has called him "Doubting Thomas," because of a famous scene in the gospel of John. After Jesus had been resurrected from the dead, he met with the disciples, but Thomas wasn't with them at that time. Everyone was making a big deal about the fact that they had met with Jesus, but Thomas wouldn't believe it. He said, "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe." Thomas said, in so many words, "Seeing is believing." Even though Jesus did indeed show up and allow him to satisfy his curiosity, people can't do that in the same way today. He shows us that the disciples were not only a bunch of people who would simply believe everything they heard, regardless of how far-fetched it might be. Instead, we have an example of someone who refused to believe until God proved it to him.

But, though Thomas was a skeptic, he did not remain one forever. There are people who say they need proof, when in fact, they have already made up their minds that nothing can ever really be proof. They say, basically, "You will not convince me, even if you convince me," and they can always find a way out of believing if they find themselves in a corner. That was not the case with Thomas. The Eastern Orthodox Church actually calls him, not "Doubting Thomas," but "Believing Thomas," because he finally believed Christ, crying out, "My Lord and my God!"

There are just two more disciples that I want to lift up for your consideration, and these last two are the most interesting for us today. The first one is Peter, who I like to call "The Bold Bumbler." Peter very quickly became something of a spokesman for the disciples, so we hear him speak up as the one who tells us what the disciples were thinking. He was probably the oldest of the disciples, since he was married and most of the others, as far as we can tell, were not. He has something of a strong personality and is really excited about being involved with following Jesus. It is Peter who, when Jesus asks his disciples who they think he is, responds with, "You are the Christ." It is Peter who actually gets out of the boat and walks on the water when Jesus calls to him. It was Peter who made it clear that he was going to follow Jesus to the very end; even if everyone else abandoned him, Peter would not, he would stay and he would fight for his master.

But Peter isn't exactly always, in fact, the great and mighty leader that he wanted to be. We read about Jesus asking his disciples who they say he is and Peter gives what certainly seems to be the right answer; but right after that, when Jesus is explaining that he was going to be handed over and killed, Peter takes him aside and begins to rebuke him. Jesus' response is to turn around and return the rebuke, saying, "Get behind me, Satan." In one moment, Peter went from seeming like he understood Jesus better than anyone else did to being called Satan. Later on, he promises that he would die rather than abandon Jesus. Unfortunately, before that night is over, within just a few hours, he not only abandons Jesus, but denies him three times. Peter might be one of the most famous Christian leaders in history, but he wasn't always that great. He messed up an awful lot.

The last disciple I want to mention by name is Judas. He is different from the others because he is not a name that shows up again at all after the Gospels. He completely drops out of the narrative because he does not live until the church really began at Pentecost. In fact, he even died before Jesus did, and did not even get to see the resurrection. You see, Judas was the one who betrayed Jesus, who handed him over to be killed by those who hated him. His death was either, depending on who you are talking to, the result of suicide or divine judgment. There are many people who use Judas as the greatest example of someone who has been rejected by God. Dante, the famous poet, in his Inferno, speaks of a special place in hell for people like Judas.

And yet, Judas was one of the twelve, one of those who was hand-picked by Jesus to follow him, to be part of the community set up by God himself to spread the good news to everyone. Jesus called Judas, walked along side of him, entrusted him with the money bag, included him in his last supper; Jesus even washed Judas' feet. Can you imagine that? Jesus, God in flesh, God with us, bent down and washed the feet of the one who was going to leave any moment to hand him over to death. Even though Judas would be responsible for his death, Jesus was not ashamed to be associated with him. He had called him and made him one of his own.

The reason why I bring this up is that Jesus calls all kinds of people. When we first heard about Levi and Simon being called a few weeks ago, I mentioned that Jesus not only calls us, but he calls our enemies. We are called, and so are the people that we hate, regardless of who those people might be. The thing that we need to deal with is that we are not the ones who get to choose who Jesus calls and who he does not call. We have to be able to live with the fact that, just as Jesus calls us when we didn't deserve it, he calls other people when they do not deserve it. That doesn't seem so bad until we realize that, because Jesus calls us and because Jesus calls them, we have to deal with them, too! In fact, if we let them, it is actually the other Christians who drive us crazy who are able to help us the most, because it is when we realize how deeply we disagree with other people who love Jesus that we realize just how strong the blood of Christ really is and how far mercy and grace really extend.

The fact of the matter is that it shouldn't take too much effort to see yourself in the disciples. In many ways, we are just like they are. I can see my own impulsiveness in Peter, my own skepticism in Thomas, my own fear of the unknown in Nathanael, my own pride in James and John, my own zeal for my own tradition in Simon and my own desire to just blend in with the culture in Levi. Perhaps you see yourself in more than one of the disciples. I want to encourage you to identify as deeply as possible with the disciples and I want you to do this for two reasons. First, the more we identify ourselves with the disciples, the more we will be humble. Even these people who we hold up as great examples of faithful Christians were real human beings, just like we are. When we make mistakes, we can be reminded that Jesus didn't call perfect people, in fact, not that it is a contest, we might even say that Jesus called people who were even more imperfect than we are, regardless of how imperfect we might seem to be. The second reason we should identify with the disciples is because they did not always remain weak and broken, but did become mighty heroes of the faith.

The Jesus that we worship and cling to is a Jesus who invites everyone to come to him, who extends his arms to the weak, to the broken, to the sinner, to the fallen, to the awkward, to the people who have problems. It wasn't the people who had it all together who followed Jesus. In fact, those people didn't like him, because he told them that, unless they followed him and came to know the Father through him, they didn't actually have it all together. Jesus consistently calls the people the world doesn't think all that much about. For goodness sake, he even called Judas and washed his feet. He put up with Peter's bull-headedness and was patient when he stuck his foot in his mouth over and over again; he dealt with the sharp conflict between Levi's connection with the Roman government and Simon's hatred of the Romans; he overcome bigotry, he knew how to put arrogant people back into their place while still loving them.

Wherever you are tonight, whoever you think you are, know that Jesus loves you and calls you, even as you are, and we know this because of the people he called when he was physically present on earth. However, we also need to remember that, though he called all kinds of people, regardless of how messed up they were, he did not leave them that way, but sent his Holy Spirit into them, and transformed them from the inside out. They were joined to Christ's own ministry and empowered by the Spirit to do it. Just as we are broken like those first disciples, the only thing we need to be great heroes of the faith like they became is the same Spirit they received, and that Spirit is promised to us in abundance. Let us pray.

AMEN