The Power to Serve (Mark 10:35-45)

Social and cultural constructions of power, while taking different outward forms, tend to conform to an inner dynamic that is similar despite differences in social makeup or historical locale. Underlying motives for the acquisition of power are universal identity needs that unconsciously influence human striving and behavior. The compunction for an increase in control and power are psychologically grounded in the human need to belong, to fit in, to connect to social others. Control and power over one’s environment increase a sense of security – bringing a sense of order to the arbitrariness of life’s many dangers, either among one’s kin, or the larger social arena. How these identity needs are sufficiently met is dependent upon perceived cultural values. In an honor/shame society, the satisfactory acquisition of identity needs was measured by the successful acquisition of higher levels of honor.

In first-century Palestine, the social group was the source and foundation of personal identity. While aspects of what we call individualism was not unknown, group conformity was much more highly valued than our contemporary western desire for uniqueness and singularity. The Jews at this time had developed a religious imagination in which God had specially chosen their people from among all others as a chosen race, a royal priesthood. In their tradition God would eventually set them over the nations as judges and rulers. The kingdom of God would be managed by those who knew the will of God. While this ideal was adopted by Christians, it missed a very important anthropological reality. Human culture arose from violence, from murder, from scapegoating. Social and cultural structures developed from this reality which incorporated prohibitions that were meant to contain the violence that arises from conflictual mimesis. Power structures in the form of hierarchy and differentiation became prescribed through conventions, taboos, mores, and apodictic commands enforced through threats of punishment.

As the sons of Zebedee sought positions of power, symbolized by the positions near the throne of Christ, Jesus had to penetrate a false conceptualization of power that rooted itself in practices of domination. Worldly power tends towards a form of domination that compels compliance through force, many times oppressive, even deadly, force. This type of power is grounded in the violent sacred, in which the deviant, the marginal one, the subaltern must be brought to heel through violent means, either exile or death. Rene Girard writes, “we come to see that the lesson of the Bible is precisely that the culture born of violence must return to violence” (TH 148). The power that Jesus spoke of had no track with this form of coercive power. His was, and is, a power of service, a service that stives to bring about the well-being of the other, even the enemy other, the ethnic, religious, political other. This form of service does not arise from cooperation with the violent sacred, but descends from the overflowing fountain of non-violent, non-oppressive love. The Christian’s vocation is one of service; service to the will of a non-violent God who does not exile or execute in order to maintain a tenuous and violent order, one that can only elicit terror and fear-based submission. Girard writes,

Jesus invites all men to devote themselves to the project of getting rid of violence, a project conceived with reference to the true nature of violence, taking into account the illusions it fosters, the methods by which it gains ground, and all the laws that we have verified over the course of these discussions. Violence is the enslavement of a pervasive lie; it imposes upon men a falsified vision not only of God but also of everything else. And that is indeed why it is a closed kingdom. Escaping from violence is escaping from this kingdom into another kingdom, whose existence the majority of people do not even suspect. This is the Kingdom of love, which is also the domain of the true God, the Father of Jesus, of whom the prisoners of violence cannot even conceive. (TH 197)