25th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (B)

If anyone wishes to be first, he shall be the last of all and the servant of all. 

Mk 9:30-37

v. 31. He was teaching his disciples and telling them, “The Son of Man is to be handed over to men and they will kill him, and three days after his death he will rise.”

Handed over to men:

The Greek word handed over (paradidonai) can be used of handing a person over to the authorities for arrest or imprisonment, so there may be a reference here to Judas' act of betrayal. 

But the word was a favorite one with Paul, and in view of such passages as Rom. 8:32 or 4:25 (literally 'was delivered for our transgressions'), we should probably find here the: furthe: idea that the whole Passion of Jesus had its ultimate ground in God’s initiative and his concern for the salvation of men. If so, the play on words “Son of man ... men” is no doubt deliberate. In a fallen world men had become so hostile to God that when, as the culmination of his plans for their salvation, he sent to them the Man, their Savior and ultimate model, they regarded and treated him as their worst enemy. Men and the Son of man stood on opposite sides in God's eschatological battle against the powers of evil.

SECOND PREDICTION OF THE PASSION

 The second of Jesus' three solemn predictions of the sufferings in store for him (cf. 8:31 and 10:32-34). 

St Mark sets it in the context of a secret journey through Galilee, which he appears to have regarded as the beginning of Jesus' final journey to Jerusalem (cf. 9:33, 10:1, and 10:46), but here, as in the case of the other two predictions, there is no really essential connection between the prediction and the surrounding events.

What St Mark has in fact done - with great skill - is to distribute the three predictions through the narrative in a way that has been aptly compared to the solemn tolling of a minute bell [a bell tolled at intervals of a minute, as to give notice of a death or a funeral] as the party makes its way from Mount Hermon in the far north towards Jerusalem in the south.

The predictions thus serve as a commentary revealing the significance of the accompanying events and also serve to assure us that, as was to be expected of the Son of God, Jesus had no illusions about the destiny in store for him, and was not surprised by it when it overtook him.

v. 33. They came to Capernaum and, once inside the house, he began to ask them, “What were you arguing about on the way?”

The question presupposes that Jesus knows by supernatural insight what had been going on in the disciples' minds; so explicitly Luke 9:47, but contrast Matt. 18:1.

v. 34. But they remained silent. They had been discussing among themselves on the way who was the greatest.

There is some evidence that the rabbis were in the habit of discussing who would be the greatest in the new age. If the disciples' discussion is historical it must be seen in that context, but the verse reads much more like a free composition of the Evangelist designed to set the scene for what follows.

v. 37. “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.

In my name:

Either simply 'for my sake' or 'on the ground of my name', i.e. because of his connection with me. Some commentators take the meaning to be 'because my name has been invoked over him (in baptism)' - cf. James 2:7.

THE CONTROVERSY ABOUT GREATNESS

 Literally translated, the words mean: 'if anyone wants to be great he will be last' The words should not be interpreted as a threat of what will happen at the Judgment to those who have displayed the temper of ambition, but as an indication of how really to become great, and of the essence of true greatness—that it consists in service. 

'That is probably substantially true, though we must beware of unduly modernizing the Gospels, and the possibility cannot be ruled out that the saying contained an element of threat, cf. Matt. 23:12 and such rabbinic sayings as: 'God will exalt him who humbles himself, God will humble him who exalts himself.'

The introduction of the child (v. 36) would be more natural if he were used, as he is in Matthew's parallel version (Matt. 18:3-4), as an example for the disciples to copy. (Except you adopt the same attitudes as this child…') But in the Marcan version the point lies not in the child's attitude, but in the attitude of the others towards him—the connection presumably being that the true disciple achieves greatness not by holding great offices but by doing services to insignificant people such as the child.

What exactly is meant by 'receiving' a child - an expression as obscure in the Greek as it is in the English? St Mark presumably understood it as meaning ‘show kindness to' or even possibly as referring to the reception of children in baptism; but the fact seems to be that Jesus was in the habit of describing certain of his followers as 'little ones' or 'children' and that as a consequence a certain amount of confusion arose in the tradition between sayings of his about children and sayings about disciples.

If our present saying referred originally to Jesus’ disciples, 'receiving' them would be a perfectly natural expression, especially as the Aramaic verb ‘gabbel’ meant both 'to receive' and ‘to hear’ in the sense of ‘to obey’. Cf. Mat. 10:11ff and Lk 10:5ff.

It is noteworthy that both Matthew and Luke have versions of this saying in Jesus' charge to his disciples as he sent them out on missionary work (Matt. 10:40, Luke 10:16) - a setting which seems more likely to be original. The sense would then be fully in line with the well-attested principle of Jewish life that ‘One who is sent (by a king) is as the one who sends him', and it is probably a mistake to read a ‘mystical’ meaning into the idea of 'receiving' Jesus and the Father. If such language were used in the fourth Gospel it would no doubt refer to receiving the indwelling of God's spirit through love and self-sacrifice, but such ideas are hardly present in Mark.