Thursday of the Sixth Week in Ordinary Time
In a culture high on celebrities, that chases after that which is trending, and demands that you have your “elevator speech” ready at all times, it’s all too easy to focus our eyes on what is above. I don’t mean heaven. I mean those people who seem above. That is, those who have more money than we do or a higher status or whose affirmation of us would mean so much.
Ours is a culture that thrives on competition. It’s supposed to be good for us, after all. It’s what makes corporations work hard to develop new, better, cooler products and forces prices down. It’s what motivates us. Without competition, so the wisdom goes, we’d probably all just become lazy, or something like that.
My husband, Bill, has a great test for an administrator. Bill was a dean and academic vice president at one time, so he has thought about this stuff. His test: does the administrator look up? Or down? Of course, administrators (or anyone in a middle-management position) has to look up. That’s where the new initiatives come from, or the new budget constraints, or the benchmarks, or whatever. And it’s those folks whose responsibility it is to decide whether or for how long you’ll continue in your present position.
But it’s the administrators (or middle-management) who spend more time looking down that are beloved. They’re the ones who care a lot less about their next step up and a lot more about who they lift up.
In Mark’s Gospel for today Jesus asks the disciples—who do you say that I am? What a question! Can you imagine being asked that question by Jesus—flesh and blood right in front of you? Peter applies with confidence: “You are the Christ.” And he is right.
And then when Jesus starts telling the disciples about what is to come—that he will suffer, he will be rejected by the priests and the scribes (those who like to think they are above him), he will be killed—Peter loses it. Next thing you know, Peter is rebuking Jesus. In Peter’s estimation, Jesus is not playing the part of the Christ—the one at the very top! Instead, he’s talking about being brought down. All the way down. Peter will have none of it.
Peter’s problem is that he has a certain idea about who the Christ is. And the Christ is the one on top. In short, Peter is looking up. And he desperately wants the Jesus he follows to end up on top.
Jesus, of course, has no time of day for this. He even calls Peter “Satan” and that’s because what Peter wants Jesus to be as the Christ fundamentally undermine who Jesus is as the Christ.
Instead of looking up to the one who is above him, who is better than him, who can confer affirmation on him, Jesus wants Peter to look (as he does) down.
Likewise, in the reading from the Book of James, we are admonished to stop chasing after the rich and powerful and attend to the poor—those most easily ignored. If we value the rich more than the poor then we have misunderstood who God is and what God is about. And we have missed our calling as followers of the crucified Christ.
It’s really hard to follow Jesus in a culture that values competition and climbing much more than care and compassion. And it’s easy in a culture like ours to want, as Peter did, a Christ who wins.
But that is not our savior. The guy who saved us was the one who was looking down on the people who had him crucified and pleading: “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”
May we, who want to follow Jesus, cultivate the habit of looking down. May we wake up each day wondering who we might lift up today.
Amen.
-Susan Trollinger