NOTES for Mar 9:33-41
The question of power has always been the main one for the fallen world. Whoever has more power is greater in this world in every other sense as well. The matter, of course, is power in the real meaning of the word: power over souls, over people, over human lives, which can be manipulated at one's own discretion. This is power as such. Everything else is only means, and crude coercion is not even the most terrible among them. The true goal, though the one striving for power may not know it, is always one thing: to seize for oneself another person's life. Not physical life, but what the Bible calls the soul, the stream of life given to a person by God and unique in every case.
This is what the one striving for power wants to seize. He longs to gain access to this very life of another or of others; he wants to subject it to himself so as to dispose of someone else's life force and spend it at his own discretion, just as he spends his own life. Of course, each person understands life according to the measure of his own spiritual state, but one thing turns out to be common: the one striving for power longs to dispose not only of himself but also of others, whatever that may mean for him. Of course, if a person has not yet been completely corrupted by power and has not become a finished cynic, he tries as much as possible to hide even from himself the true motives of his striving, justifying it by lofty and far-reaching goals that he will achieve once he obtains the power he desires.
In reality, however, as the whole experience of the fallen world shows, one can avoid becoming captive to acquired power only by remaining God's person first of all, and everything else second, as King David managed to do, for example. He always remained first of all a prophet, and only afterward a king and everything else he was in life. For the Kingdom, the question of power in the earthly sense does not arise at all. There, power in that quality simply does not exist; in principle it is incompatible with the Kingdom and its life. A person's place in the Kingdom is determined only by the measure of the fullness of his life, and therefore by the fullness of his action, which draws into itself those who want to participate with him in his activity.
The initiator, of course, is responsible for the work begun, but the possibility of any manipulation of others is completely excluded here, because the goal of every activity in the Kingdom is the spiritual formation of the person, which is in no way compatible with manipulation, while all other goals are secondary and derived from the main one. Therefore there can be no power in the Kingdom in the form in which it exists in the fallen world. It can exist there only insofar as in the fallen world, according to its laws, the person is never the main goal of any activity. In the Kingdom this is impossible, and this is what Jesus is trying to explain to His disciples.