So, discipleship is dispossession? So Emily argued last Sunday; and I say yes, but take it further. Yes, but not just in material terms. There’s more going on, as we see in Mark 10. We have an advantage over the disciples, of course: we know Jesus is not building a one-generation movement. The story is not “Jesus gathers support, Jesus and his supporters win, God’s plan is accomplished, the end.” He’s starting something designed to keep growing long after he has left the planet, and so he’s making disciples not just to follow him but to lead others to follow him. His disciples will be called to make disciples themselves—but not disciples of themselves, disciples of Jesus. Problem is, we naturally think of whom we’re following as the person right in front of us, and many gifted people are working to capitalize on that. There are many who want to build their own kingdoms and are happy to use building Christ’s kingdom as a pretext. There always have been. We see Paul, for instance, exasperated by this over and over again, perhaps most memorably (if not most directly) in 1 Corinthians 1.
This is worldly thinking, in which the point of following Jesus is to satisfy and stoke my own ego, and we see it clearly in James and John: Jesus is great, and if I can become one of his closest, most trusted lieutenants, I can be great too. He uses the encounter as an opportunity to teach them, and all his disciples, the hard but critically important lesson that discipleship is not only material dispossession, it is ego dispossession. Which in this case, I would argue, is disempowerment—but disempowerment of the ego, not of us. Just as we are called to let go the idea of “my stuff”—or perhaps we might better say, to detach from it, to learn to hold material things with open hands—so too the idea of “my leadership, “my ministry,” “my position,” “my authority.” After all, even Jesus did this, as Paul points out in Philippians 2. Jesus was God and had every right to be acknowledged as such, but he didn’t see that as something to hold tightly in his grip; instead, he opened his hands and became one of the lowly of the earth.
To the world, to the sinful nature, this feels like death. This is another instance of a problem which has been mentioned many times in this congregation’s history, our false views of death and false views of life. The way of the ego is one of those Proverbs 14:12 ways which seem to us to be the way of life but lead only to death in the end. If we allow the disempowerment and displacement of our egos, if we set aside the idea of “my ministry” along with “my money,” then as Emily said last week, it opens us up to entrust ourselves to God’s goodness—even our sense of our own value and significance.