NOTES for Mar 10:32

How much Christ's disciples understood His words about the Cross will forever remain a mystery for us. It is quite possible that some hope still glimmered in them that the Teacher was speaking in parables and that His prediction would not be fulfilled literally. Perhaps this explains the striking contrast between Christ's words about death and resurrection and the request of the sons of Zebedee. After all, only if one expected Christ to reign in glory could one ask Him for high places beside Him. "You do not know what you are asking" - these words of Christ emphasize the depth of human misunderstanding of God's plan. All the more inappropriate and presumptuous are the words of the sons of Zebedee that they can drink Christ's cup and be baptized with His baptism.

Two most important things stand out in Christ's answer. First, He says: "You will drink the cup that I drink." For a human being it would be natural to rebuke the brothers for exalting themselves: who among people can do this? But the Lord says: you will. His following words, that whoever wants to be first among His disciples must be slave of all, put everything in its place. The chief gift of Christ to His disciples is not nearness to the throne, but precisely His cup, the possibility of following Him along His way of the Cross. Therefore He tells the sons of Zebedee that "high position" must not be their goal. He opens to them the possibility of gaining nearness to God without acquiring any outward greatness. This is an exceptionally important revelation, one that applies to any of His disciples.

The apostles still had a poor idea of what the Kingdom that their Teacher brought into the world was, if they asked Him questions about who would occupy the places of honor beside Him in that Kingdom. For them, it was apparently a reality of our world, though an unusual one. Perhaps they thought the matter concerned an earthly state that, however, would be full of God's signs and wonders performed by their Teacher, who at last, with God's help, would take the place that belonged to Him. And the question about the cup and the washing, or "baptism," they most likely understood to mean that before the triumph all of them would face a long struggle, and each would receive no small share of suffering, which in general fit the messianic ideas accepted at the time.

Jesus, however, accepts their readiness, telling them that they will have to drink one cup with Him and be washed with one washing with Him, without going into details and without trying to explain anything to them. As can be seen, He understood that at that moment any explanations were useless: the disciples would not have understood Him anyway, just as they had not understood Him up to that point.

But Jesus tells His disciples right away that in His Kingdom everything is not as it is in earthly kingdoms, evidently so that they would have no illusions about this from the very beginning. As can be seen, He regards the inner readiness not to rule but to serve as the spiritual foundation without which there can be no question of life in the Kingdom. The details of the Kingdom's structure, however, He evidently considers less important: if the disciples do not understand them now, they will understand later, having acquired the corresponding spiritual experience. Thus the Savior Himself sets the priorities where spiritual life is concerned: first comes what is necessary in order to enter the Kingdom, and only afterward, as spiritual experience is accumulated, everything else.

The question of primacy periodically came up in the disciples' conversations among themselves, coming up again and again. They undoubtedly still imagined the Kingdom as entirely earthly, and in every earthly state, even one established by God, there is a king and there are those close to him. They naturally saw their Teacher as the King, since they had no doubt about His messiahship, but who would be among those close to Him? All twelve, that is clear, but someone would turn out to be among the closest; someone would sit at the King's right hand, and someone at His left.

That is how it had been in every age and in every state, and the apostles simply could not yet imagine the Kingdom in any other way. These conversations are especially remarkable against the background of Jesus' account of the sufferings and death awaiting Him. The disciples seem not to notice the Teacher's words, although in reality they simply do not hear Him, as a person often does not hear what does not fit into his consciousness. Jesus again and again tries to explain to them that in the Kingdom, which entered the world together with Him, everything is not as it is in the earthly kingdoms of the fallen world.

He says directly to the disciples: in the fallen world rulers strive for power above all, and for power not so much over bodies as over the souls of those whom they want to rule. Power in the fallen world is a way to take other people for oneself, their lives, their souls, so that afterward they belong to the ruler, and he can dispose of them at his own discretion, just as anyone is free to dispose of himself, his own soul, and his own life. The Kingdom is arranged differently; there the question of power, or rather of what there corresponds to the concept of power in the earthly sense, is the question of service.

To the extent that a person is ready to be the slave of all, to that extent he has power, in the special sense of the word, the sense in which it is applicable to the relations of the Kingdom. This is about slavery in the patriarchal form in which it existed among the Jews, when a slave was effectively a member of the household, but without rights. A slave claimed nothing in the house, but he lived in it and used everything in the house that the other members of the household used. In some cases he could even inherit from the master of the house.

A household slave worked as slaves always worked, without counting the cost and without demanding payment. In return he received as much as he needed, since he had no fixed wages. This is the position toward others that is adequate from the standpoint of the relations that bind the inhabitants of the Kingdom to one another. In the fallen world, of course, nothing like this can exist, but Jesus orients the disciples precisely toward the relations of the Kingdom, at least when it comes to their relations with Him and with one another.

"Going up to Jerusalem," Jesus again speaks of His sufferings and His resurrection; until now the disciples had not understood His words, and Peter had even argued with Him. Now He describes everything that must happen to Him. The disciples are horrified; but have they now understood the Teacher's words?

James and John ask Jesus to give them the most honorable places in His Kingdom. According to the customs of that time, the king's chief adviser sat at his right hand; the place at the left hand was considered second in importance. Christ answers the brothers, "You do not know what you are asking," and invites them to share with Him the cup of suffering. This is what happened to the brothers: John endured persecution (see Rev. 1:9), and his brother James was killed (Acts 12:2).

Wanting to restore peace among the disciples, Christ reveals to them that requests like this make no sense: in the Kingdom of God there is no pyramid of power such as exists in every earthly kingdom, no domination in the familiar sense. Who is greatest in the Kingdom of God? The one who serves most. And the One who serves most of all is the King Himself (cf. Phil. 2:7).

Perhaps for contrast, the Evangelist Mark tells about the request of blind Bartimaeus, to which the Lord responded with the miracle of healing. How was Bartimaeus's faith shown? He calls Jesus by the messianic title "Son of David" (not everyone liked this address; many order the blind man to be silent). As he goes to Jesus, he throws off his cloak - if he had remained blind, he would never have found it again. Finally, when he receives his sight, he follows Jesus.

The Lord responded to the plea of blind Bartimaeus, but rejected the request of two of His disciples. Let us ask ourselves: "What are my prayers like?" Perhaps Jesus is saying to me too, "You do not know what you are asking"?

As if clarifying His earlier words, Jesus says: it is hard for one who trusts in riches to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. It would seem that there is hope in these words: one can be rich while relying not on what one has, but on God. In practice, however, everything proves much more complicated.

The disciples are horrified: they are sure that they will not see the Kingdom. Peter, more decisive than all the rest, as often happened, asks the Teacher the question that everyone wanted to ask but was afraid to. He says to Jesus: look, we have left everything and followed You. Is that not enough? Is something else needed? What will we receive after doing what we have done? Who are we, rich or poor? What are we hoping in?

Such questions are usually asked when something incomprehensible is happening. And that is how it was: the apostles truly understood almost nothing. They trusted the Teacher, but they always had difficulty understanding Him. And now a real theater of absurdity was beginning, behind which something so terrible could already be seen that the apostles were paralyzed by the very thought of that horror.

Jesus points them to the only way out: to look only to the Kingdom, to live only by it, to abide in it constantly. To the question "what will there be for us?" He answers: not "will be," but "is," already here and now. And ahead of you something still more joyful awaits. But if you do not see it, if you cannot receive it here and now, there will be no "later." For the Kingdom has already drawn near. And one must enter it now, without putting it off until later.

"Many who are first will be last, and the last first." What do these words mean? Why must it be this way? Have we become so used to words of this kind that nothing in them surprises us anymore? It is clear, we think, that justice requires the very last, the poorest and most unfortunate, to be repaid in another world with honor and power. But, as we have said with you more than once, such logic does not go beyond the logic of the communists: "whoever was nothing will become everything." And it is impossible even to imagine joining this soul-destroying force to the teaching of our Lord. In the late Soviet years there was a joke: in 1917, an old princess looks out the window and asks a man passing by what all the noise is about, what is happening. The man answers that the Red Army soldiers want there to be no rich people. Strange, she replies; my grandfather wanted there to be no poor people. This logic of shaking the world upside down, which the Bolsheviks served, has nothing in common with the teaching of our Lord, who is the God of ineffable kindness. It is only an evil parody of it. So let us try to think about what these words mean after all: many who are first will be last, and the last first. Imagine this scene: a group of runners at the starting line. The signal is given and everyone begins to run. Someone breaks ahead, and someone falls behind. Suddenly a signal is given to run back to the start. Who will arrive first? Obviously, the last. And we see this movement of return as repentance, because metanoia is a turning, a return. Let this be only an image. But why could it not be that this is exactly what the Lord wanted to say? Let us remember Psalm 84: You forgave all the iniquities of Your people; You covered all their sins; You turned back from the wrath of Your anger; turn us back, O God of our salvation. The same situation appears, for example, in the Vulgate, where this conversus - converte sounds twice, while it disappeared in the Synodal translation, where it says "turned away - restore." All this appears to us as an argument, perhaps not a very weighty one but still an argument, in favor of our image for today's words of the Lord, even if we have differed somewhat from the way the apostle Paul uses this image.

After the rich young man was unable to follow the word of the Lord Jesus, to give everything away and become His disciple, the Lord, addressing the disciples, speaks about how hard it is for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Explaining to the disciples what happened, the Lord says: "How hard it is for those who trust in riches to enter the Kingdom of God." A camel trying to enter through the eye of a needle is an image the disciples remembered forever. Usually the readers' attention is drawn to this strange, even somewhat surreal picture. It may be that the translation of this saying into Greek, made by the evangelist Mark from the Aramaic in which Christ spoke, and in which Peter told this story, is not entirely perfect; we do not know. It is obvious that the Lord is speaking about something absolutely impossible, and this is what Peter remembered and Mark translated.

The words about those who trust in riches, however, are found in late versions of the Gospel text. The copyists may have inserted them there by analogy with the accounts of the other evangelists; in the Middle Ages there was such a tendency toward unifying the accounts of the Synoptics. The most ancient manuscripts do not contain these words, and Mark's text in them sounds simply astonishing. The Lord says: "Children! How hard it is to enter the Kingdom of God; it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God." Thus the issue is not even wealth: according to Christ's words, it is hard in general to enter the Kingdom of God. Wealth and reliance on it are only a particular, especially vivid example.

This is exactly how the disciples understand Christ's words. That is why they do not speak about wealth, especially since they do not have any. "Who then can be saved?" they ask the Lord. Peter, perplexed, asks an even more specific question: "And we, who have followed You? Is it really hard for us too to enter the Kingdom of God?" The disciples get the impression that entering the Kingdom of God is impossible for absolutely anyone, even for them, who have left everything. It is to this question that the Lord gives us a word of great hope: "With men this is impossible, but not with God, for all things are possible with God." No human merits will help a person enter the Kingdom of God. Only God Himself accomplishes our salvation, and our human ideas are powerless here: many who are last will be first, and the first last; for people this is a mystery. But the main thing is that this is a great hope, open to all.