True Greatness: Servanthood Over Status in Christ

Now they were on the road, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was going before them; and they were amazed. And as they followed they were afraid. Then He took the twelve aside again and began to tell them the things that would happen to Him: “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and to the scribes; and they will condemn Him to death and deliver Him to the Gentiles; and they will mock Him, and scourge Him, and spit on Him, and kill Him. And the third day He will rise again.” [00:31:04]

But Jesus said to them, “You do not know what you ask. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” They said to Him, “We are able.” So Jesus said to them, “You will indeed drink the cup that I drink, and with the baptism I am baptized with you also will be baptized; but to sit on My right hand and on My left is not Mine to give, but it is for those for whom it is prepared.” [00:112:16]

And when the ten heard it, they began to be greatly displeased with James and John. But Jesus called them to Himself and said to them, “You know that those who are considered rulers over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. Yet it shall not be so among you; but whoever desires to become great among you shall be your servant. And whoever of you desires to be first shall be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.” [00:152:96]

There are several things in this somewhat lengthy passage that I just read to you, and I feel a little guilty of trying to cover them all in one message because there are elements of this text that are worthy of several weeks of reflection, but be that as it may, the die is cast. We’ll cross the Rubicon and any other metaphors we need to confuse you. But let’s look now at the text in verse 32, “Now they were on the road, going up to Jerusalem,” and they spoke of going up to Jerusalem whether they were going south or north because of its elevation. [00:280:88]

But in any case we have this detail that Jesus was going before them, and they were amazed. Why would that amaze them? After all Jesus was a rabbi, and we’ve seen in the past in our study of Mark that it was the custom of the students of rabbis in that day to walk behind the rabbi as he would teach orally, and they would listen and remember his teachings through memorizations, and that was the way of the peripatetic teacher, who walked round about as he instructed his disciples. [00:319:60]

So why would they be amazed that Jesus went ahead of them? I think the reason for that detail that Mark gives us here, is that what amazed them was the resolute determination that they saw in Jesus to go to His destiny. His face was set like a flint, and He knew that He was called to give Himself over to His enemies there in Jerusalem, and He had been teaching His disciples that on more than one occasion. [00:360:96]

And now as they set out for that point of destiny, Jesus does not linger. He moves quickly, keeping pace ahead of His disciples, going to His death with a firm step. And they couldn’t get over it. Most of us, if we knew we were going to our death, would be in the survival shuffle, dragging our feet, reluctant with every step that we took to advance any further in such a journey, but not Jesus. He was prepared to obey the Father. [00:401:68]

And so He led them, and as they followed in their fear, He took them aside and began to tell them the things that would happen to Him. Now this almost sounds like just bare repetition because we’ve heard this before. This is the third time now in Mark’s gospel that Jesus tells His disciples what will await Him in Jerusalem. But the difference of this third time from the other two is that it’s much more specific. [00:443:60]

Before He spoke generally about being betrayed and being delivered unto death, but now He gets specific of what’s going to take… in fact, He’s so specific about what will occur in Jerusalem that the liberal critics who tear apart the pages in the New Testament, declare that this must obviously be what they call a “vaticinium ex eventu,” that is an account that was written after the fact. They are so allergic to anything supernatural, and so opposed to any idea of predictive prophecy that they assume a certain fraud in the writing of the gospel by Saint Mark. [00:475:60]

But never mind they are so antithetically opposed to the gospel that they say, “Well, the details here are so accurate that Jesus couldn’t possibly have known them.” Well, there are several ways He could have known them. In the first instance, if He knew that He was going to be taken to Jerusalem and betrayed into the hands of His enemies, He knew what the way of execution would be, being familiar with the Roman system. Not only that Jesus was not just a student of the Old Testament Scriptures, He was the actual subject of the Old Testament Scriptures. [00:505:44]

And He was aware intimately of Psalm 22, which He quoted on the cross and also aware of all of those passages in the later portion of the prophet Isaiah, particularly Isaiah 50 and Isaiah 53, which reads almost like an eyewitness account of the crucifixion. But remember that the Jews did not associate the suffering servant passages of Isaiah in the Old Testament with their hope of the coming Messiah, but Jesus knew that those texts applied to Him. [00:572:96]

So even without any direct revelation from the Father, He would know that He would be treated with scorn, that He would be scourged, that He would be spat upon. But perhaps most important in this text is His announcement on this occasion that He would be delivered into the hands of the Gentiles. Let’s look at that for just a second, where he says, “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and to the scribes.” [00:624:96]