Where There's a 'Will'
As I was translating Mark 9 recently, I stumbled over a slight change that first had me scratching my head, then doubting myself. It propelled me to my Greek grammar textbook to double check my understanding of tenses.
Sure enough, when the Greek is a future tense, the English should be future too. So why do most translations read ‘must’ instead of ‘will’ in verse 35 below?
33 They came into Capernaum. Once he was at home, Jesus asked them, “What were you debating on the road?” 34 However, they were silent since they had debated with each other on the road who was the most important.
35 After sitting down, he called the Twelve and told them, “If anyone wants to be first, they will be last of all and enslaved to all.”
I understand the logic of the traditional reading. It sounds pretty Christlike in some ways: leaders should serve people, not dominate them. Yes, good!
The problem is that ‘must’ doesn’t fit the Greek. Bear with me for some grammar jargon: The verb is in the future tense of the indicative mood, not mandative mood or subjunctive mood. The importance of that fact is that while mandative moods can be used for commands or saying what people should or must do, and subjunctive moods can do many things including communicating what would be the preferable thing to do, that’s almost never the case with what we find here.
There is one exception. According to Daniel Wallace (1996) in Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, it is “in OT quotations (due to a literal translation of the Hebrew).” That’s it. The dialect of Greek used several centuries before Jesus sometimes used it with this sense of ‘must,’ but by the time Mark was written, only the one exception remained. And this certainly is not a Hebrew Bible quotation.
So what does that leave us with? Well, Jesus is not encouraging people to meet their goal of being first by serving people. Why not, if that’s what Christlike leadership is like?
Because THE GOAL IS NOT TO BE FIRST.
At least, that’s not Jesus’ goal and not what he wants for his students. Feeding our ego by serving people is still feeding our ego. And in fact, if the ultimate goal is to be “first,” it will be a never-ending endeavor, constantly working to achieve “firstness” by serving and never maintaining approval for long. The point is that full inclusion isn’t conditional or tiered for Jesus, and he doesn’t want it to be conditional or tiered for his students either.
Anything else leads to enslavement. Jesus wants to bring liberation. Liberation looks like everyone—EVERYONE—being fully included and valued, helping each other mutually to meet needs. Anything less is immature ego-stroking and mistrustful self-serving—even when it looks like serving others.
