Real Triumph

Well, good afternoon, and again, happy Sabbath! Many of you will soon be getting a magazine in the mail. I don't know if any of you have received it yet. You might have seen some on the way in. This is the next edition of the Beyond Today magazine, and the cover is pretty striking on it. It's got this picture. You might not be able to see it. You'll see it soon. The headline is, The Ultimate Triumph. The ultimate triumph. The Gospels in our Bible make a shocking claim that Jesus' execution was not a defeat that God later fixed, that he later solved through the resurrection. It was the way. It was the way. His humiliation, his suffering and death were a victory, and the resurrection magnified that. We're going to look at just one of the ways that this is conveyed in the case of the Gospel of Mark. In the Roman Empire of Jesus' day, the highest honor a leader could get was what they called a triumph. It was basically a massive military parade. It was as religious as it was political, in fact. It was a way to show that Jupiter, the head honcho of the Pantheon, the gods of Rome, that he was supporting this man and was even exalting him. Tom Robinson wrote the lead article here. He's here today. His article gave 12 ways Mark, through God's inspiration, includes these details from Jesus' last day through his trial and his crucifixion. 12 ways that would be like these bright flashing lights to anybody who grew up in this context for his Roman readers, screaming that this is a triumph. This is triumph, but in the most upside-down way imaginable. So if you turn over to Mark 1, the beginning of Mark's Gospel, we need to hear Mark's witness because our assumptions that we have about what power is, what glory is, they're basically Roman. Not Rome as in the place on the map, but the Rome in all of us, that culture gives us, where glory is about upward mobility, visible strength, control, the ability to make others do what you want them to do.

The Roman imperial triumph, this military parade, it was the ultimate public praise of this ethic of domination, the victory lap of a conqueror, lifting him almost to this divine status, this place that's up here above us, almost to God, representing the gods. But in the pathway of Jesus, God turns that whole glory machine inside out. His voluntary humiliation by Roman execution became the sort of anti-Roman triumph, which exposed the bankruptcy of this whole model, this whole chase after worldly status, and it exposes the nakedness of those principalities and powers that would entice us to be part of that system. And Mark throws the first punch in his very first sentence. He says, the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

If we lived in that world, again, of Mark's readers, we would feel the weight of that phrase, because this directly confronted the propaganda of Caesar. Augustus' birthday was announced as the beginning of the good news, just like this is the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ.

Augustus, beginning of the good news for the emperor. Mark says no, no. Jesus, not Augustus, is the true Son. It's this crucified Jewish construction worker. This is the one, not the emperor, who gets to define our reality and must define our reality. And so the rest of Mark's Gospel shows Jesus, just piece by piece, dismantling our idea of glory and rebuilding it into something different. And it climaxes in this moment at the end, at his crucifixion. It's this mic drop moment, you could call it, where of all people it's the Roman military commander who's overseeing the execution of this mess. He's the one who looks up and realizes that the emperor has no clothes here. And he's the one right at this point where this crucifixion, which is supposed to be the thing that proves that Rome has the legitimacy, it has the power, it won, this guy lost. He's the one who then shouts, truly this man was the Son of God. And Mark even records him saying it in a slightly peculiar way in the Greek. He phrases it in a way which is designed to flash you back to Mark 1.1, the only other place where it's said in quite that way, and reminds you of where the story all started. And by doing that, it makes this point where, as Roman of all people, he says the thesis of the whole story. It's the focal point of the whole account. So Mark is saying, this, this is what divine sonship looks like. This is what true power looks like, not the power to take life, but the authority to lay it down in faithful love. There's another funny thing about part of the way Mark's gospel works. He spends less time than you'd probably expect focusing on how Jesus gets misunderstood by the crowds and by his critics. And he puts way more focus on Jesus' own followers. He basically makes them, they're like Olympic athletes and missing the point through the gospel of Mark. And it seems like Mark is doing this in order to make a point to every successive generation of gospel, not gospel, sorry, not gospels, but followers, his disciples, he's making a point to every one of these disciples, you and me, that we can miss the point too. Jesus wasn't just giving us a philosophy. He wasn't just giving us a political movement.

He was giving us a method, a way of life that's about giving up a life that leads to death and accepting a kind of a death that leads to life. Let's turn over to Mark 10. Mark 10, verse 37. There's actually a curious set of scenes in Mark from Mark 8 through 9 through 10, Mark 8 through 10, that plays out in an interesting way. Jesus kind of turns a corner and he's moving, and he's moving, and he's going to move to Jerusalem. The end of that forward motion ends in Jerusalem with his crucifixion. And during that stretch, there's an inordinate amount of times that Mark uses the phrase, on the way or on the road. And so this stretch that's kind of defined by on the way in Mark 8 through 10, it has these bookends too. It starts with Jesus healing a blind man, and it ends with Jesus healing a blind man. In fact, the first one, Jesus has to try multiple times to fully restore his sight. He's got to do it multiple times before the man fully sees. And between these two bookends and this period on the way, it's defined by successive times, multiple times, Jesus struggles to get his own disciples to see something. Jesus starts speaking plainly about his suffering, his rejection, death, and resurrection through this part. And the disciples again and again respond like people who've only ever learned the Roman definition of glory. It happens three times in Mark 8, 9, and 10. In Mark 8, Peter hears the words suffer and basically says, well, that can't be Messiah talk. Messiah can't talk that way. In Mark 9, after Jesus again tells him what his mission is, that it's going to be a sacrificial mission, they react by arguing about who's the greatest among them. That's where that conversation seems to go into. And then Mark 10, when he tells them once again, the next thing that happens is James and John ask for the top seats. In other words, every time Jesus tries to teach them what this way looks like, they keep translating it back into the old language again. The language of status, ranking, control, visibility. They keep trying to turn Jesus into a means of their own self-exaltation. They want the glory without the stake. So here in Mark 10, 37, they ask to be one on your right hand and one at your left in your glory. And Jesus replies to them, you don't know what you're asking. You don't know what you're asking here. And in fact, the only other time that Mark pulls that exact phrase out later on in chapter 15, verse 27, it's not going to be James and John at his side. That's where Mark writes, with him they crucified two robbers, one on his right and one on his left. That's why Jesus' teaching in this on-the-way stretch of Mark is so relentless. He doesn't simply say, well, stop wanting greatness. He says, you want greatness? Fine. I'm going to show you what it looks like. I'm going to tell you what it looks like. This is what my kingdom is actually about. It's not lording it over. It's not securing your life at all costs.

It's taking up that that staros, that execution stake. It's becoming the servant. It's losing your life for his sake and on the way finding it. And this is where the inner Roman and all of us, it sort of wakes up, I think, and climbs back out and says, oh, wait, wait, wait, wait a minute here. Wait a minute. Our misaligned humanity does this to us. We want a Christianity that adds the glory but does not subtract the pride. We want resurrection without fellowship in his sufferings. We want the right and the left seats, but we don't want that stake in the middle. But Mark's not going to let us have that conclusion. He's going to shake it out with us. If we keep reading his gospel, Mark forces us to walk on the way with Jesus until we either accept Jesus' definition of triumph or we quietly swap Jesus out with a messiah of our own design. So as we approach Passover, it's good to ask the question, how do I measure success? Do I measure success like a Roman by winning, by dominance, by being untouchable? Or do I measure it by Jesus' standard, letting God's goodness and righteousness flow out of us to others through our submission to the Father's Spirit in us, and by letting all the glory flow back to the Father? If Jesus' ultimate triumph is self-giving love, then following him is going to mean the death of our self-protective instincts.

It's going to involve costly obedience when the cheaper route is available. It will involve humiliation at times, being misunderstood, being passed over, not getting credit, suffering wrong without retaliation, and serving when it doesn't benefit our image. But that's not a detour from glory. That is the road into glory. As Mr. Robinson puts it in his article, he writes, Jesus' triumph came not in hoarding power and majesty to himself, but in giving his life away in love and sacrifice to others. And he leads us in the same way, directing us not to self-promotion, but to laying down our lives in service to him and others as the path to true victory and glory. That is real triumph.