Mark 10:35-45 Commentary

Comments, Questions, and Observations

Saying, “Before I ask you something, I want you to promise me that you’ll do whatever I ask,” is almost always a sign that something is amiss. On the positive, the person making the request could have more confidence in the person they are speaking to than that person has in themself. On the negative, the person making the request could know that what they are about to ask is wrong but want to pursue it anyway. So where do James and John fall on the sliding scale of motivation?

Well, given that we know who is the greatest has already been a hot topic among the disciples, I’m guessing that James and John weren’t trying to give Jesus a pep talk. Jesus has just described his suffering and death again, listing the awful things that will be done to him (verses 32-34) and here come James and John thinking about themselves and where they might end up when things shake out. Even if they do not understand the way Jesus is describing his method to glory, they clearly still trust that Jesus has amazing power and is the Messiah.

Jesus confirms it. They do not know what they’re asking. But then again, who of us truly do know what it means when we join the Jesus way? We may know some things, but if we stay on the Jesus way we find that the continuous journey of transformation goes beyond what we could have imagined. James and John, for instance, do stay on the Jesus way after Christ ascends and James becomes an early martyr of the faith. But did they ever truly come to understand the meaning of greatness?

The other disciples also continue to struggle with letting go as they become angry when they hear that James and John have approached Jesus with this request. Here Jesus uses the verb “to know” again, it’s a brilliant play on knowing and not knowing. Jesus picks at the wound of oppression, telling them they know what it’s like to be “great” in this age, where the Empire power lords it over the occupied people.

“But it is not so among you.” Or it shouldn’t be anyway. Jesus’s solution to being frustrated and stymied and hurt by one’s position in a group is not to reverse it so that you go from the bottom to the top, but to resist the way of the world by following the way of the Kingdom—servanthood, servanthood, servanthood.

I think that the way to understand it is to care less about where we end up in the power hierarchy and to care more about how we’re treating and viewing others as we go about our lives. The Jesus way shapes a different understanding of power and how to wield it. Look at Jesus’s final words here, “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” Ransom (lytron) is the payment made to redeem or free something or someone. As William Placher points out in his Belief Series commentary on Mark, it’s like the pawn shop system. Something is given up because of a great need, and there is a price set on getting it back.

In so many different ways, human beings across cultures and times have fallen into a way of thinking about greatness that runs counter to the design God has. Jesus literally gives his whole life (not just his death) to living in the way God intended. His life should be our measure of greatness. If we were to try to live according to that standard, we would discover what it means to be redeemed and a blessing to many.

Textual Point

Some biblical scholars believe that James and John, the sons of Zebedee, were also Jesus’s first cousins. Perhaps they felt that their shared bloodline gave them a slight upper hand or obligated Jesus’s favouritism over the other disciples. In Matthew’s version of this story, it is their mother that asks Jesus to give her sons the position of power—with her sons in tow (Matt 20.20-28). If Salome was Mary’s sister then the same expectation might have been a motivating factor.

Illustration Ideas

When Jesus calls the disciples together as they start to express their anger towards James and John, I can’t help but picture a parent breaking up a little squabble between siblings. Having to remind your children of what’s more important than their current point of bickering seems on point for Jesus—in fact in last week’s text he even refers to the disciples as children!

James and John’s question has the same sort of tone of our own uninformed opinions about what someone else should or shouldn’t do. There’s a great scene from a now pretty old show, Arrested Development, where the Lucille Bluth asks one of her sons, “I mean, it’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost? Ten dollars?” And her son replies, “You’ve never actually set foot in a supermarket, have you?” It’s a comedic version of, “What’s the big deal? Just _____.” Like James and John’s question, when people go down this road, they usually don’t understand (or care to understand) what’s happening in the life and circumstances of the person they are talking to.