God is Not a Master
I.
Before I take up today’s Gospel, I want to turn to the other readings, beginning with Isaiah 53, the fourth of the Songs of the Suffering Servant, which Christians have long taken as a description of Jesus—misjudged, abused, bearing our sicknesses, bearing away our sins. Jenson refers to the song as the church’s first doctrine of atonement:
4Surely he has borne our infirmities
and carried our diseases,
yet we accounted him stricken,
struck down by God, and afflicted.
5But he was wounded for our transgressions,
crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the punishment that made us whole,
and by his bruises we are healed.
6All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have all turned to our own way,
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.7He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
like a lamb that is led to the slaughter
and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
8By a perversion of justice he was taken away.
Who could have imagined his future?
For he was cut off from the land of the living,
stricken for the transgression of my people.
9They made his grave with the wicked
and his tomb with the rich,
although he had done no violence,
and there was no deceit in his mouth.10Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him with affliction.
“It was the will of the Lord to crush him…” This line, in particular, disturbs. All the more so when heard alongside today’s Psalm, Psalm 91, which promises protection to all who dwell in God's refuge:
9Because you have made the Lord your refuge,
the Most High your dwelling place,
10no evil shall befall you,
no scourge come near your tent.11For he will command his angels concerning you
to guard you in all your ways.
12On their hands they will bear you up,
so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.
13You will tread on the lion and the adder;
the young lion and the serpent you will trample under foot.14Those who love me, I will deliver;
I will protect those who know my name.
15When they call to me, I will answer them;
I will be with them in trouble;
I will rescue them and honor them.
16With long life I will satisfy them
and show them my salvation.
One Scripture celebrates the servant whose affliction comes because God wills it. The other assures us that those who make God their habitation suffer no wrong. Let yourself feel the pressures of the tensions. If living under the shelter of the Almighty shields one from every harm and calamity, why does Jesus suffer as he does? He certainly did not live a long life. Evil befell him. And if it pleased the Lord for Jesus to suffer, how can we trust the Lord is good and to be relied upon in our times of trouble? Does God’s care truly protect us from all harm? If not, why not? Does God at certain times will hardships upon us? If so, in what sense and to what end?
Today’s epistle, a reading from Hebrews 5, serves only to deepen the confusion:
7In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. 8Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered, 9and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him, 10having been designated by God a high priest according to the order of Melchizedek.
What sense do these claims make? If Jesus is God, how is he learning obedience? How is he being made perfect? Why is he suffering at all, if he who hides in the Almighty will not be harmed? Why is he, the Son, beloved and consubstantial, needing to be saved from death? Or why is he crying out to be saved if it is indeed his Father’s will to afflict him? And how, given the way his life ends, can Hebrews say his prayers for deliverance were heard?
Attempting to answer questions like these, we usually try to maintain something we call “balance,” working from the assumption that there is a hierarchy in which higher, greater goods like power, glory, and justice must take precedence over lesser ones like goodness, humility, and mercy. Very often, the Father (imagined as pure divinity) is identified with the first and the Son (because he is human) with the latter. I should not have to tell you how disastrous such thinking is—how blasphemous, in fact. Such a separation between the Father and the Son reduces the Spirit to an interminable, irredeemable conflictedness. And if God is at times necessarily at odds with himself, what hope is there for us?
II.
Somehow, we’ve been convinced that the most basic truth—for God and for us—is the truth of mastery, the reality of the master-slave relationship. That logic has come to dictate what we think and feel about more or less everything. Admittedly, it is useful, providing a certain rationale for faith, a contractual basis for our relationship with God.
The logic works something like this: If I acknowledge God as master, if I give him my total devotion instead of bowing the knee to other gods, then I can be sure he will show up for me when I’m desperately in need. As God, he has the right to be the sole object of my worship and obedience. But I, in turn, am owed protection and the assurance of reward—so long as I remain a loyal subject.
When things go wrong in this world, as they must, the logic of mastery says it can be only because I have somehow failed to meet God’s expectations. Certainly, I cannot say God has failed me. God made me, owns me. Who am I to question him? The only move left is total capitulation: “The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
You don’t need me to tell you that this kind of thinking has done incalculable damage and underwritten unspeakable evils. Even Christians find themselves caught up in defending the most abhorrent acts as “necessary evils,” kowtowing to the powerful instead of standing up for the weak, more concerned with keeping a supposed political order than helping their neighbors heal.
Bonhoeffer saw this clearly, not only in Germany but also during his times in America:
Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness, and pride of power, and with its plea for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear ... Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offense, shock the world far more, than they are doing now…
“The worship of power,” that is the engine and the fuel driving the dynamics of the master-slave relationship. It dehumanizes us—because it dehumanizes God. We must be freed from it, and nothing but a vision of Jesus as the truth of our being and God’s can do that. Thankfully, the Spirit shows him to us in the hearing of the Gospel. Listen to today’s reading again (Mark 10):
35James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” 36And he said to them, “What is it you want me to do for you?” 37And they said to him, “Appoint us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” 38But Jesus said to them, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” 39They replied, “We are able.” Then Jesus said to them, “The cup that I drink you will drink, and with the baptism with which I am baptized you will be baptized, 40but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to appoint, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared.”
41When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John. 42So Jesus called them and said to them, “You know that among the gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. 43But it is not so among you; instead, whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, 44and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. 45For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many.”
“… not to be served, but to serve and to give…” Let that sink in. The Son comes among us, lives as one of us, not to take but to give, not to be served but to serve. This, I think, is the hardest of all truths to accept. We do not know even how to begin to take it seriously. How can it be that he serves us? But what if it were true? What if we’re trying to serve a God who wants to serve us? What if we’re trying to treat him as if he’s our master when that is the last thing—literally, the last—he is interested in being?
Saint Paul tells us that Jesus, as the Son, does not cling to the equality he shares with the Father. Instead, he empties himself into life, pouring all that he is into the work he does for us. When the Gospel is proclaimed, we’re not hearing that God, our master, loved us so much he was willing to appear as a slave for a while. God’s fulness can be seen only in the form of a slave—because the form of a master is too small for God.
God is more unlike than like anything we know. But God is most unlike the great man, the man of power. The monarch, the emperor—this is the most doubtful image of God, the most misleading. The least among us, especially the suckling baby, are nearest to the fulness, and so offer us the least misleading reflection of God’s likeness. This is why Jesus says prostitutes and tax collectors are going to enter the Kingdom before the experts, rulers, and authorities. And why he says those who want to be welcomed into the Kingdom must become like a little child—insignificant, helpless, weak, neither seen nor heard—just like God.
III.
When Jesus says he’s not here to be served, we should believe him. We can believe him because he needs nothing from us. The disease at the heart of the master-slave relationship is that the master is the one with the needs. Slaves exist to meet those needs. But there is no need in God for us to serve—least of all a need to be worshipped and obeyed. He is the one who makes the sacrifice. He is the one who washes our feet. He lays down his life.
This the heart of Christian witness. Jesus is not the slave of the Father. He’s the Son, the Father’s fullness. He lives with absolute transparency and without any internal discord or conflict, enjoying full equality with the Father. And thanks to the Spirit and to Mary, the same intimacy and equality he shares with the Father is offered to us, to every creature. The Son is not less than the Father. As we say in the Creed, he is God of God, light of light, very God of very God; of one being with the Father; begotten, not made. The Son and the Father are identical in every way except that the Father is the Father and the Son is the Son. And, again, the fullness of the infinite, unbroken and unbreakable intimacy they share in their Spirit opens to include us.
What happens in the life of Jesus is that the divine and the human are brought into communion. See his cross: the horizontal arms intersect with the vertical beam, and at the center of that intersection the divine and the human, the heavenly and the earthly, the eternal and the temporal are perfectly one. We live there, right at the heart of that at-one-ment. No rivalry exists between God being God and me being myself. This is why the culminating fruit of the Spirit is self-control. Where God is, and only there, I am.
We hold to the logic of the master-slave relationship because we are caught in the fear of death. What the master needs, more than anything else, is to be protected from dying and from awareness of mortality. Because of that fear, we give ourselves to all kinds of evil, trusting the lie that we can be kept from weakness, from helplessness, from insignificance. But Jesus, on our behalf, faces down the powers of evil, trusting himself to the God who is able to save him from death. He is not kept from dying. He is kept in his dying and in his being dead. He clings to God, not to life, fearing nothing, and so his death, the death of the one in whom and for whom all things exist, the one whose life is the light of human being, is in reality the death of death. This, then, is the glory of the Gospel: our God does not keep us from dying—because he destroys death by death.
Nothing happens to Jesus but what the Father wants to happen differently for us. When Christ is baptized, he's not washed clean—the water is made holy. When the leper touches him, he's not made sick—the leper is healed. And when he dies, he is not dead—death dies. And by destroying death, he frees forever everyone and everything death has claimed, including you and me, beginning with our enemies.
American Christianity, at least in its dominant forms, has lost its ever-loving mind. It has lost its mind because it's caught in the machinations of the master-slave logic, eaten alive by the fear of death. But God has no interest in our survival. We can’t remind ourselves of this too often: God has no stake in the future of America or the future of what we know as Christianity (which we must remember is always something different from the church). God is not afraid of what will happen when we die. And in the future, near or far, there will be nothing left of what now seems to us worth fighting for—and God will still be God in the midst of his people.
The church, in the words of Olivier Clément, “exists in the world as an opening, an exorcism: it is a mortal wound for this idolatrous and deceitful world, but for the created world, it is the offer of Transfiguration.” As proof, Clément cites this enigmatic line: “Where the carcass is, there will the eagles be gathered.” What does it mean? Hear it in context (Matt. 24):
23Then if anyone says to you, “Look! Here is the Messiah!” or “There he is!”—do not believe it. 24For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and produce great signs and wonders, to lead astray, if possible, even the elect. 25Take note, I have told you beforehand. 26So, if they say to you, “Look! He is in the wilderness,” do not go out. If they say, “Look! He is in the inner rooms,” do not believe it. 27For as the lightning comes from the east and flashes as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. 28Wherever the corpse is, there the eagles will gather.
We must be careful to look for God’s arrival here, in the gathering of the needy around Christ crucified. See him, the prophet from Nazareth, hanging dead on the middle tree; hear the echoes of his last cry, his death-rattle. And know the carcass of this marred and humiliated Jew, abandoned by almost everyone, mocked by passers-by, as the body of God, the site of the light’s descent into the very heart of darkness, the wound through which the Spirit leads captivity itself captive.
As this knowledge wounds you, pierces you as only love can, you will find you no longer have anything to fear. And when you no longer have anything to fear, you are freed forever from the machinery of mastery and its logic of necessary evils, freed to live and die with the same freedom Jesus receives from and gives to the Father.
In the Incarnation, God does not dignify slavery, although he does reveal the dignity of the slave and the glory of service. He exposes mastery as a lie. He destroys the forces of evil that weaponize our fear of death against us. He reveals himself not as our master but as our friend, our partner, our lover. He makes us not his subjects but his equals. This, nothing less, is the hope promised by the Gospel. So, to call Jesus Lord is to say that he serves us—and does so so perfectly that when his work is said and done we are made perfect just as God is perfect. In the end, Christ is our refuge because we are his joy and delight. We are not only why he prayed, we are the answer to his prayer.
Believe it.
The sermon that inspired this post was based on these texts.
If you missed it, check out this conversation on what it does and doesn’t mean to say God is not a master.
Wonderful!
Simone Weil:
"The social sentiments today have such a hold-they so elevate people to a supreme degree of heroism in suffering and death-that I believe it is good for some sheep to be left outside the fold to testify that the love of Christ is essentially a different thing."