Who Will You Service?

Read Mark 10.32-52 Pentecost +21B That’s the big question in our gospel text today, Who will you serve? I don’t know if you got a prickly feeling when you heard those words, or you just glossed over them, not noticing how much the words in the question run against your grain. Either way, I’ll ask the question again: who will you serve? As a culture and as a species, we tend to prize freedom. We tend to prize accomplishment and autonomy, and self-determination and the list could go on. This is why, if we slow down and take the question seriously, we will recognise how much it grates against our deeply held beliefs and our culturally formed sensibilities. Yet perhaps one of the most dangerous misconceptions of our culture is that we are, indeed, free. We are autonomous beings who can live independent of all bonds of loyalty, devotion, and service.