Mark 9:30-32
Have
you ever been so afraid of someone’s reaction that you kept silent? You had
something to say, but you didn’t say it. You had a need or a want that you
wanted to express, but you knew the reaction was not worth the answer. We see
this so much in marriages. A person gets tired of asking for help and not
getting any. They get tired of reaching toward the other person and not having
them reach back. Then they give up trying to reach. Reaching only leads to
disappointment and pain. The reaching is replaced with silence.
I
remember in elementary school having questions about the lessons and not asking
the question. I didn’t want to look dumb or slow. What the other kids thought
about be was important. I moved several times while I was growing up, so I was
always trying to figure out how I fit into this new crowd. Where was my place? What
could I add to the mix? So asking a question opened up my world of unknowns to
the class. They would now know that I didn’t know what they so obviously did
know. I now know that there were many others who had learned to be silent when
they had questions.
Jesus
has again told His disciples very openly and plainly that His enemies were
going to kill Him and then He would rise from death. But they still don’t get
it. They are in Jesus’ classroom, but they aren’t willing to raise their hands
and ask the question. They all seem to have the same question, but no one asks
it.
I
think that Jesus’ plan looked so different from what they understood about the
Messiah, that they weren’t able to see the exact fulfillment of those Old
Testament Scriptures that had seemed so puzzling before. For centuries the
Jewish people had read Isaiah 53 and were puzzled. How could the Messiah
suffer? The Messiah is our triumphant hero, so there is not way He could suffer
this kind of death. Even today in many Jewish circles Isaiah 53 is puzzling.
They have reconciled this puzzle by making the singular person in that text be
the whole population of Jews, the Jews collectively.
For
the disciples, the resurrection was totally out of their realm of experience. They
had seen Lazarus be raised by Jesus, but Jesus did the raising? Who would raise
Jesus? They have questions, but they aren’t willing to ask. The text says that
they were afraid.
Fear
can stop us from asking, from reaching, from growing. They feared the unknown
response. They didn’t want to seem slow on the uptake. They wanted to blend
into the crowd. They wanted to blend in and be a team player. They didn’t want
to rock the boat.
So
instead of asking an important question, they get sidetracked onto very
unimportant matters. We either deal with the important or our lives become a
series of unimportant moments. Which do you want?