September 22, 2024
I’m not sure why, but a lot of things recently have made me reminisce about the pandemic—the social distancing, the lockdown, the isolation. I’m not sure how you all coped with it, but for me, it was often music that helped get me through the days, and weeks, and months of 2020 (and beyond). There’s a choir from South Africa that I’ve long followed on YouTube—starting well before anybody had ever even heard of covid. It’s the choir from Stellenbosch University near Cape Town, and I think the song that first got me following them was the Lord’s Prayer in Swahili.
But in 2020, when they couldn’t sing together in person, they still managed to do something amazing. In the darkness and fear of the pandemic, they each sang from the isolation of their homes—each of them wearing black and singing in darkness—and a sound engineer managed to take all the individual recordings and blend them into one perfect production. The piece was a mashup of two old South African pop songs—one from way back in 1992 and the other from 2009. Both songs were about darkness. And that was the name of the recording: Die Donker, or The Darkness. I can’t tell you how many times I watched this video in 2020, but it was a lot. I still go back and listen to it sometimes, and it’s no less beautiful now than it was then.
I liked this music so much that I started to really get interested in South African music in general. Some of it is quite good. But a lot of it is just tacky. But, of course, I’m not above listening to tacky music when the mood strikes me. One of the dumber pieces is a song called Superhero, which, ironically, also mentions darkness. It starts out: Can I be your Superman, Batman, Ironman, Spiderman? I’ll watch over you in the darkness and be a hero to you. One of the most noteworthy things about this song is that large parts of it seem to be a copyright infringement of a Disney song from Hercules called Go the Distance.
I saw a meme online a couple of weeks back that immediately made me think of that dumb South African pop song. It was an illustration of Jesus surrounded by the Hulk and Spiderman and Captain America and a few others. And in this picture, Jesus was saying, “And that’s how I saved the world.”
When I first saw this picture, I immediately dismissed it as trite. I suppose I thought it was belittling my faith and making Jesus into a joke. But then I gave it a second look through less suspicious eyes, and decided it was probably the case that the artist, or cartoonist, or meme-maker, or whatever they were really wasn’t mocking Jesus. This mem seemed to be more of a theological statement. And the statement in question was that, for all their strength and special powers, the superheroes weren’t actually able to save the world. But Jesus was, and he was telling them how he did it.
Now, all this really is relevant to this morning’s reading from the Gospel According to Mark [9:30-37]. Here we find Jesus spending some quiet time alone with his most trusted followers. And I want us to think about who they were and what they believed—maybe even to put ourselves in their shoes for a minute.
Using Peter’s voice, these twelve disciples had just said that they believed that Jesus was Messiah, the Christ, God’s Anointed One. This was great. But when Jesus tried to tell them what this meant, they refused to believe it. Peter actually tried to correct Jesus and tell him there was no rejection in his future, no crucifixion, no death.
You see, the disciples had a pre-conceived notion of who and what Messiah was. Messiah was to be powerful. Messiah was to be a great ruler. A dominant person recognized by all the other powerful people. He was the One who would restore the ancient glory of David and Solomon. With him in charge, Jerusalem was going to be the center of empire, with the kings of the earth paying tribute to Israel. In short, Messiah to the disciples was supposed to be the first century version of a superhero.
Compare what most people back then expected Messiah to be to what Jesus said was going to happen to him: The Son of Man is going to be betrayed into the hands of his enemies. He will be killed, but three days later he will rise from the dead [Mark 9:31]. If Messiah was going to be a hero, these were not the sorts of superpowers the disciples had in mind for him. Mark tells us simply that they didn’t say anything because they didn’t even know what to say.
It was clear that they didn’t understand, though, because instead of thinking about what Jesus had just said, they argued among themselves about who was the greatest. The Bible doesn’t tell us what sort of greatness they were talking about—was it wisdom or holiness or renown or just pure strength? We don’t know. But whatever it was, it clearly had nothing to do with Jesus’ revelation that he was going to be rejected and executed.
And then Jesus said two things the disciples didn’t expect. They should have expected it, considering what Jesus had been talking about. But even so, they were caught off-guard. And in both of these sayings, Jesus re-defined greatness.
First, he said, Whoever wants to be first must take last place and be the servant of everyone else [Mark 9:35]. And then he hugged a little child, and said that anyone who welcomes a little child like this in my Name welcomes me, and anyone who welcomes me welcomes not only me but also my Father who sent me [Mark 9:37].
One of my commentaries pointed out that the little child Jesus embraced was more than likely a household slave, which just adds another layer of meaning to what he said. He was making it known to anybody who believed in him and everybody who would come to believe in him not only that the servant of all was the greatest of all, but that if we would seek the presence of God in our midst, we must embrace the least among us.
So let’s go back to that meme I mentioned earlier—the one where Jesus is talking to the superheroes. When God came into the world to show us what divine power really looked like, it wasn’t in the ability to scale great heights and leap long distances like Spiderman, it wasn’t in the raw strength of the Hulk, it wasn’t in the wily cleverness of Thor, it wasn’t even in the agility and stamina of Captain America. The power of God that we find in Jesus Christ—the power of God that Christians believe is the salvation of the world—is found in love and sacrifice. The One who gave all he had for the sake of others was the One who brought wholeness to a fragmented world.
I can’t imagine what the fantasies were of that little child Jesus brought into his discussion of greatness. But we know that today’s children imagine that they might have superpowers. We know this from the shows they watch, the games they play, and the costumes they wear on Hallowe’en. By the time we grow up, however, we should probably let go of the idea of having superpowers.
Or maybe not. If Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world, then he must’ve had superpowers. And if he did, then perhaps so do we. And you and I really do have superpowers:
- The power to love people, whether or not they love us back.
- The power to give what we’ve got, whether or not people want to accept our gifts.
- The power to forgive—to forgive even those who hurt us the most.
- The power to speak the truth even when we are afraid.
- The power to trust the One who made us and embraces us.
—©2024 Sam Greening
