Jesus predicted his suffering, death and resurrection on three separate occasions. These predictions were not made to the general public, but to his close group of disciples. These predictions usually followed some event which acknowledged that he was the messiah.

For all the Jewish people, and much more so for the disciples, to be messiah was to be king and ruler of Israel, just as much earlier David and Solomon were, and more recently Judas Maccabeus. Those were indeed glorious times, and every god-fearing Jew wished for the return of those days. Indeed, the popular notion of messiah was ‘political ruler’.

But this was far indeed from Jesus’s mind. In fact he shunned the very idea of political glory, and at the beginning of his ministry, even disclaimed the very idea of being seen as messiah.

For God had a different plan and purpose for Jesus. As messiah, he would be a ‘suffering servant’, someone who “will be given up into the power of men, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” Jesus uses a little known title for himself – ‘the Son of Man’ — a phrase which can mean two things. At a basic level, it means ‘an ordinary fellow’, a person just like any other. You can say that Jesus uses this term to emphasize his ordinary humanity, which will undergo suffering and death.

But there is another meaning, which comes from passages in the book of Daniel, where the prophet sees this ‘ordinary man’ come to full glory at God’s right hand, at the end of time. Jesus applies this symbol to himself too, for he will come in glory on judgment day.

The disciples, of course, understood nothing of what Jesus said. They were disconcerted by Jesus’s predictions about himself. It made them uncomfortable. Still none dared to ask him to clarify what he meant. As far as they were concerned, Jesus should accept the honours of a political messiah, for they would all stand to gain from this.

This passage from Mark ends with a symbolic gesture from Jesus. He knows how much his disciples fight among themselves as to who is the greatest, so he takes a little child, and sets him in their midst, saying plainly: “If you want to be great, you must become the least of all — just like a child, like one of these.”

We don’t think any of his disciples were ready to accept this!