Calculating Leadership

Mark 9:30-37

They left that place and passed through Galilee. Jesus did not want anyone to know where they were, because he was teaching his disciples. He said to them, “The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men. They will kill him, and after three days he will rise.” But they did not understand what he meant and were afraid to ask him about it.
They came to Capernaum. When he was in the house, he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the road?” But they kept quiet because on the way they had argued about who was the greatest.
Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, “Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all.”
He took a little child whom he placed among them. Taking the child in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me.”

(Mark 9:30-37 NIV)

This is a passage where I think we could be missing the point a little, simply because we tend to deal in caricatures. Or maybe that is just me!

I say that because I have always read this as “disciples don’t understand, so fall to putting themselves forward as the most important and Jesus shames them with a small child.” But there is a little bit more going on here than just that.

Firstly, and whatever it looked like, why were the disciples talking about who was the greatest?

Jesus has – on this occasion – successfully kept the crowds at bay so He can teach His disciples, which He does by telling them that He is going to be handed over to men, and they will kill Him, and having been killed after three days He will arise (ἀναστήσεται is simply the middle future of the verb meaning “make to stand up”, hence I will make myself stand up or “arise”; it does of course cover rising from the dead, but that may not have been clear to the disciples.)

The disciples didn’t understand but were too frightened to ask.

So why were they talking about who was the greatest? If Jesus is saying – is He saying? – that He is going to die, what is going to happen then? That is the problem they are trying to solve: who is going to lead us?

Now of course, we know they are missing the very biggest part of the whole story – i.e. that Jesus really does mean He will rise from the dead – but it explains what is happening. They aren’t all saying “me, me, me, I am better than you” (which, I regret, is how I have tended to hear it); the Greek makes it clear that they are calculating to try to understand who will need to become their next leader. Jesus asks them “what were you trying to work out on the road?”; they were silent because amongst themselves they were trying to calculate who was greatest. διαλογίζομαι is literally to balance accounts, and therefore to calculate and, yes, to argue (for a certain value of argue, namely arguing about relative values).

So I don’t think this is “me, me, me” at all; I read this as a conversation like this: “clearly it is Peter because he walked on water…” and “well, hold on, John did …”; “yes, but …” and so on. Whether or not Peter or John was secretly hoping they would be chosen, or, conversely, wise enough to hope they wouldn’t be, we don’t and can’t know. We know that the mother of James and John was very ambitious for them, but that is a different story,

But when Jesus asks them what they were working out (also διαλογίζομαι) on the road, they are silent because they were embarrassed: it is like the President or PM walking into a room of his colleagues and finding them discussing his successor. Or at least that is how they felt – caught out.

So if it wasn’t “me, me, me”, why does Jesus instruct them on the characteristics of a leader? Simply because their calculations were based on very flawed premises; and that is where this suddenly starts feeling uncomfortably contemporary. They had been discussing who was greatest, on the assumption that “greatest” was the criteria for leadership. Jesus is saying “you want to be first or foremost? Be least, lowest and the one who serves everyone else.”

And why does He take the child in His arms? He is modelling what a leader looks like: they have time for the apparently unimportant. (Only apparently, though; it is actually about sharing God’s priorities, and God puts a lot of store on receiving and protecting those who haven’t yet taken on board the lies of the enemy, as we shall see in the next episode.)

In passing, if you want to understand why it matters so much that we respect and support those who lead us, it is because they won’t be those who claim respect and demand position for themselves. (See 1 Thesslonians 5:12 and especially 1 Timothy 5:17-21; the latter also makes it clear that being a leader isn’t a free pass from being accountable.) When we fail to honour that, we don’t really hurt the leader, we simply disqualify ourselves from being led.

So although the main point here is that the disciples have missed what Jesus was telling them about rising again, He has used the opportunity to teach them the right way to calculate the fitness of a leader. And as I say, that is a very relevant and contemporary thought.