Mark 9:1
Note
The Outer Journey to Jerusalem – The Inner Journey to Life
The journey from Galilee to Jerusalem had begun.
Jesus’ Journey.
For Jesus it would represent a deliberate choice to engage definitively with the structures of evil; it would be a journey whose outcome would rely totally on the faithfulness of God. Jesus was sure he was facing into death. He believed that somehow his God would vindicate his integrity.
The Disciples’ Journey.
For the disciples it would be a journey into personal and community disintegration – a necessary journey where they would be led to face their own emptiness and the inadequacy of their faith and love, but a journey by which breakdown would lead to breakthrough. With the power of the ever-faithful God they would learn trust, courage, insight and love.
The Christian Community’s Journey.
For Mark’s community, and beyond them across the centuries, the journey of Jesus and his disciples would be the Christian journey. The disciples’ historical journey to Jerusalem would mirror every Christian’s inner journey to life through death.
Without the inner journey to self-knowledge and to personal integration and wholeness, the outer journey of the Christian can be destructive. Our world has seen enough of terrorists who kill their enemies in the name of God, of religious structures that demand conformity at the cost of infantilism.
The inner journey involves nothing less than the death of the ego-dominated, self-made and self-determined aspect of the person to allow the blossoming of the deeper, truer self, fashioned by God and christened at baptism. It is a journey of self-knowledge, of the gradual, indeed lifelong and painful, recognition of unrecognised motives and energies and unconscious drives. It is a journey into loving, of learning genuinely and freely to put the true good of the other, the common good of the community, above the wants and fears of the personally focused ego. It is discovering that liberating love is more than inner attitude, and takes shape in practical ways of engaging with others. Either it is service or it is illusion.
The inner journey allows the person to see that to be specially loved by God does not mean that others are not also equally specially loved and precious. It is the prerequisite for any genuine ease with and respect for that freedom of others, that marks the way that God deals with all. It recognises that the freedom to love reaches out to those who do not reciprocate the love, even to enemies, and that violence of any kind, even for otherwise worthy ends, is a denial of love and so a denial of the essence of God.
Mark’s Narrative.
The continuing story noted some details of the disciples’ struggle on their inner journey.
- Jesus had already stated clearly that following his way would call for the death of the ego-oriented self. Peter was not at ease with that.
- Mark would show John and James wrestling with the fact that being specially loved did not mean being superior to others;
- They would be told that enthusiasm for the cause of Jesus did not justify violence against those who opposed him, nor rejection of those who did not belong.
- Jesus would show how the powerlessness of children modelled the voluntary surrender of power necessary for adult disciples of Jesus.
- He would insist that difference did not mean superiority or even invite comparison, but called for mutuality. He insisted that this applied also to the practical ways that men and women were to respect and to cooperate with each other.
- He would show how attachment to wealth became easily addictive and paralysed the genuine search for life through the following of the way of Jesus.
Next >> Mark 9:2-13