A Reflection for Tuesday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time
Find today’s readings here.
This week marks a return to the liturgical season of Ordinary Time. Today is the first day since February 13 that the priest can wear green vestments at mass. Today also marks a return to daily mass readings from the Gospel of Mark, which is what the church was reading just before Ash Wednesday.
The readings for daily mass during Ordinary Time emphasize everyday discipleship, and today’s readings are especially appropriate. The drama of Jesus predicting his own death might obscure the lesson on discipleship in the second part of today’s Gospel reading, but that lesson is, in fact, what Mark wants to bring to our attention.
Mark includes three episodes in which Jesus predicts his passion, death, and resurrection (Mk 8:31-33; 9:31-32; 10:32-34). Many biblical scholars believe these memories of Jesus were influenced by later reflection on the resurrection, but they could have easily been rooted in real events. As Jesus and his disciples went on their journeys they no doubt would have passed places where criminals had been executed. It is not unreasonable that Jesus saw the corpses of these unfortunate people and realized that a similar fate awaited him. Yet at the same time, his faith was so strong that he felt confident in God’s ability to rescue him even from death.
In each case, Mark uses these passion predictions to introduce a teaching on discipleship. By doing so, Mark emphasizes how central these particular instructions are to Jesus’ message. After the passion prediction in Mark 8:31-33, Jesus teaches that those who wish to be his disciples must take up their cross and follow him. Similarly, the passion prediction in Mark 10:32-34 leads to Jesus’s teaching that the one who wishes to be great must be the servant of all, and whoever wishes to be first must be the slave of all. In today’s Gospel reading (Mk 9:30-37), Jesus teaches the Twelve that, “Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me; and whoever receives me, receives not me but the One who sent me.”
Jesus brings together representatives of two very different classes of people to shock his disciples into awareness. In Jesus’ day, children were treasured but had no control over their lives. They were completely at the mercy of their fathers or their guardians. It would have been easy to dismiss kindness shown to a child as a wasted effort since the child would have had no means to reciprocate. The fact that, in Greek, the word “child” could also mean “slave” only emphasizes the powerlessness of the person Jesus used in this illustration.
By contrast, the emissaries of powerful people were received with great ceremony. Whether these were ambassadors from foreign rulers or agents of powerful trading interests (the Holy Land in Jesus’ day accounted for about twenty-five percent of the Roman Empire’s economic activity) representatives of great individuals were treated as extensions of those who sent them, and would receive protocol of comparable rank—rich gifts, places of honor at meals and other public events, and tokens of courtesy and respect. Ambassadors and other high-ranking representatives were free to speak their minds and their words always carried weight.
Jesus proposes to his disciples that they treat children and slaves as his own emissaries, indeed as ambassadors of God. This is his response to the disciples arguing about who was the greatest among them. If you want to heap honors on someone, find a child; if you want to hear words that carry weight, listen to a slave. If you want to encounter the divine, seek out a person of no account and recognize that you’re standing in the presence of Christ himself.
This is a good lesson for Ordinary Time. If our daily acts of discipleship can make us sensitive to Christ’s voice in people we have previously ignored, then the Gospel is taking root in us. When we treat powerless people as ambassadors of God, we will begin to live a discipleship worthy of Christ’s sacrifice. Transforming our lives according to this teaching is the task of these “ordinary” days.
