DESTINATION JERUSALEM!
32 They were on their way up to Jerusalem, with Jesus leading the way, and the disciples were astonished, while those who followed were afraid. Again, he took the Twelve aside and told them what was going to happen to him. 33 “We are going up to Jerusalem,” he said, “and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death and will hand him over to the Gentiles, 34 who will mock him and spit on him, flog him and kill him. Three days later he will rise.” Mark 10:32-34
Once again, Jesus attempted to orientate His disciples to the idea that a cruel and violent death awaited Him in Jerusalem. He was still in Galilee but, although Mark does not mention it, the Passover was drawing near. It was time to head south for the most important annual festival of the year. The disciples had no problem with that. They joined Jesus in all His faithful observance of the Jewish festivals but what they could not grasp was that, this time, He was about to become the Passover Lamb.
No matter how many times He brought up the subject, it was as though they had selective hearing. Two things were fixed in their thinking; one, that Messiah was a king and that He would set up His kingdom in Israel; two, that He would drive out the Roman oppressors and re-establish the Davidic throne in Jerusalem. Dying did not fit into their scheme of things. It’s no wonder, then, that they imagined themselves to be cabinet ministers in this new Israeli government. The issue for them was, “Who would be Prime Minister?” In the very next paragraph, James and John try to secure the positions for themselves.
All of their reactions, their deafness to Jesus’ warnings about His coming death, their squabbles over positions, and their insensitivity to the spiritual nature of the kingdom, revealed that they were locked into a concept of the kingdom of God that ignored sin and the true nature of the two kingdoms at work in the world. They watched Jesus at work and admired His power over nature and over the demonic realm but they did not connect Him with a dimension of which they were to be a part, a kingdom which would transcend geographical boundaries and reconnect them with the Father who rules over all the kingdoms of men.
This kingdom is governed by a constitution based on the nature of God and expressed in obedience to only one law – the law of love. It is God-centred and self-forgetful and allows no place for any kind of imperfection. It is open to all who give Jesus the right to rule over their hearts.
It would take the memory of a limp and very-dead Jesus hanging on a Roman execution stake, the mind-blowing experience of a very-alive Jesus standing among them, eating fish and showing them His wounds, and the powerful intervention of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost to write the truth of all that the prophets had spoken on their hearts. Only the reality of God’s kingdom once again breaking into their world would finally to set them on the path to understanding its true power and glory and give them a place in it.