Impossible Salvation: 17 October, 2021

Mark 10:35–45

“Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant.” . . . He can be interpreted in at least two very distinct ways.

The first is that he encourages aspirations for greatness, in that he wants future leaders and persons who think they have something to contribute to God’s kingdom. He does not turn on James and John to rebuke them for their ambitions. He does not say such desires come from Satan, and that Christians should cherish no hopes for themselves. They should use and refine their natural ambitions, so that these do not take the form of lording it over others, but there is nothing wrong with ambition in itself.

The second view is that he comes close to saying exactly this. The “baptism” with which he will be baptized, and which he promises to James and John, is a death for the sake of the kingdom. He offers them nothing but this, and refuses to grant them in advance a specific and special reward for their dedication. To be servant or slave is hardly a glorious aim, and that is what leadership will mean in the kingdom Jesus will rule . . .

Does Jesus support Christian ambition or condemn it? I’ve not come down on one side or the other here. I am inclined to say that the two interpretations can both be defended, are useful for different occasions and audiences, and have definite limits. But which is better, in the sense of more accurately reading the mind of Christ, I cannot say. –– Lucy Bregman

Hebrews 5:1–10

“Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant . . .” (Mark 10:43, 45). The text from Hebrews underscores this point. Through his suffering, the writer tells us, Jesus was made perfect and became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him. In offering up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears, Jesus, on the cross, lifts up to God our human condition: all our frailty and folly and phoniness; our love of self; our disordered desires; our longing for power and status; our propensity toward violence. And in his suffering and death, Jesus absorbs all of it—including all past, present, and future violence, taking on himself the sin and suffering of the world. Now the suffering Christ who is present in every sufferer of every time and place—the Jew at Auschwitz, the AIDS-afflicted African, the battered suburban housewife—the suffering Christ calls us to stand with these victims in their time of suffering. –– Debra Dean Murphy

Isaiah 53:4–12

Today’s reading from one of the suffering servant songs of Isaiah that we heard in its entirety back on Good Friday reminds us of how certain strains of Hebrew scripture provided both Jesus and the early church with clues as to how to understand the peculiar kind of messiahship that Jesus’ life and death came to represent. For an effort to see beyond both classical doctrines of “substitutionary” atonement and contemporary feminist and other critiques see Daniel M. Bell, Jr., “God Does Not Require Blood,” in The Christian Century 126, no. 3 (Feb 10, 2009): 22–26. –– John Rollefson

Lucy Bregman, professor of religion at Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, is the author of several books including Beyond Silence and Denial: Death and Dying Reconsidered (WJK, 1999) and Preaching Death (Baylor Univ., 2011).

Debra Dean Murphy is associate professor of Religious Studies at West Virginia Wesleyan College.

John Rollefson, a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, has served congregations in Los Angeles, Ann Arbor, Milwaukee, and San Francisco.

Homily Service 42, no. 4 (2009): 76–88.