Sept 24, 2024

“You can’t get something for nothing”. Am I right? It feels like everything comes with strings attached. I create a free account on a website to get access to their content, and all of a sudden my email inbox is flooded with spam from the companies they sold my email address to. You sign up for a rewards card, only to learn that the story is tracking your every purchase, to more effectively market to you. Everything – from our labor to our information – can be bought and sold. So our value comes from how likely we are to help someone else earn their next dollar.

The idea that we value things – and people – on their perceived worth is prevalent across our society. We even do this with our own selves. Our time is valuable, society tells us, so we’re pressured to determine which activities are “worth it”. Which people are “worth it”. And by extension, which ones aren’t. And the math we do in our head is based on how much value the other person or thing has to offer us.

Frankly, it’s hard to imagine a way out of that system. But that’s what Jesus is offering today. Jesus offers us a radical vision of the Kingdom of God – a place of backward realities that the disciples can neither fathom nor accept. Where Messiahs suffer and the children are the greatest of all. Where something IS offered for nothing.

Now, that’s probably a little unfair to the disciples. After all, we at least have the benefit of hindsight. Of knowing the end of their story. It would have been a huge challenge for them to imagine their way out of the rigid structures of their society. Where honor and power and wealth meant everything.

Their society was full of relationships between patrons and clients. To oversimplify, patrons, who were higher up on the social and economic ladder, cared for and supported their clients by providing for many of their needs. Clients trusted their patrons and were loyal to them – which enhanced the patron’s honor. Each side did the cost-benefit analysis and figured out what value the other person could provide for them.

We need to know that to understand why Jesus’ disciples were arguing over who was the greatest. Because rabbis and their disciples fell into this patron-client relationship. Rabbis offered their disciples wisdom and the opportunity to become rabbis if they proved themselves worthy. Disciples offered resources like money or food, and the more disciples a rabbi had, the greater status – and the greater honor. So the greatest among them was most likely to become a rabbi and gain his own honor and status and wealth.

It’s hard to overstate the shock value Jesus’ words this morning would have had for the disciples. When Jesus takes a child into his arms and tells them that those who receive the child receive him. And by extension, receive God. Because the way we treat children is light years ahead of this culture’s. We treat childhood as a privileged time of innocence, and so our instinct is to read this passage through that lens. The reality couldn’t be more different.

In this society, a child was a non-person. The child Jesus sets before the disciples has absolutely nothing to give a potential patron. No labor. No money. He or she couldn’t do anything to enhance someone’s prestige or influence within the community. There was absolutely no benefit in offering this value-less child any of the hospitality or rituals of honor or respect that someone would have offered to Jesus the rabbi – let alone to the Creator of the universe.

Jesus might just have well told them to serve the fish in the Sea of Galilee for all the sense it made.

And that’s Jesus’ point. That in the Kingdom where God rules supreme, the dominant values of human society mean nothing. In the place where justice and peace flourish, God gifts a full measure of humanity to each person – even those with no power or privilege. In God’s Kingdom, whatever you have to offer – no matter how much or how little – is enough. You are enough.

God is pointing us toward the reality that the Kingdom of God operates on a gift economy. It’s an economy where things are bought and sold, but given away freely. And we see that over and over again in the story of God’s relationships with God’s people. The reality is that we live within the gift of creation – an act of wild generosity on God’s part that we can never repay. And Jesus will show us with servant leadership looks like with his gift of death on the Cross – another act of wild generosity that can never be repaid. These are just some of the gifts the God offers us, pure and simple, regardless of who we are, regardless of what value society thinks we have.

The common theme between our society and the one Jesus lived in is that society wants our relationships to be transactional. And transactional relationships only last as long as each side sees that the other has something of value. But God’s gift economy operates on relationship. Because when we enter into a pattern of gift exchange, we give our very selves with each exchange of gifts. The only value is in the relationship itself.

So this morning Jesus offers a hopeful vision of the Kingdom’s gift economy. Even in the midst of a world that cannot escape the powers of sin and death – even as we struggle within a transactional economy – God meets us with the economy of gift. In baptism, God gives the gift of relationship. In the gift of the Cross, God gives the promise of eternal life – a mutual sharing filled with meaning, and purpose, and value beyond measure. Amen.