Clawing Our Way up to Middle Management (Mark 10:35-45)
Popular Christianity promises a Jesus who wants to be your pal, a Jesus who doesn’t want you to be inconvenienced, a Jesus whose real concern is that all your biases are continually reconfirmed for you. A Jesus who knows what true glory looks like. And, let me tell you, that would be a whole lot easier on me.
But unfortunately, I’m not good enough at this to give you that Jesus. Instead, I’m so incompetent at my job that all I can manage to figure out how to give you is a Jesus who seeks out the small, the irrelevant, and the marginal. I’m only skilled enough to show up on Sunday mornings with a Jesus who thinks glory looks like losing, sacrificing, and dying on behalf of those everybody else walked away from a long time ago. I hope once again that you’ll forgive me my vocational inadequacies.