The Greek origins of the word sophomore is sophos which means wise and moros, which means foolish, so a sophomore is a wise fool, which I think is fitting description for most teenagers and quite frankly most adults. The disciples were certainly sophomoric at times, they argued among themselves about which one of them was Jesus’ favorite, completely missing the point of everything he had taught them. A defining characteristic of being a wise fool is believing that you know all the answers, even when you clearly do not. Truly the word is an oxymoron, it combines two things that are the complete opposite and rightly so because a fool, by definition, is not wise and if you are wise then you are by definition, not a fool. Yet, our behavior as a species often makes me wonder if there is any wisdom left in the world.
Jesus settles the dispute between the twelve by saying that whoever wants to be first, must be a servant of all. All! As in everyone and everything. Notice that Mark does not say all people, he ends the phrase at all. All what? Our sophomoric selves assume he meant all people because what else would it be, but once we apply a little logic and dig deep into our scriptural knowledge, we remember that God created humanity to have dominion over creation, which means that we have sovereignty over it, or to put it another way we are tasked with caring for it and because we have been bad at our job and because God so loved the world, they sent their only begotten son to redeem the world. God sent Jesus to return us to our purpose, which is to be a servant of all.
During the enlightenment, philosophes, such as Rousseau and Locke, spoke of government as a contract between the people of a nation. A contract in which the people agreed to follow their leaders as long as their leaders were caring for the people. It was from this idea that the phrase servant of the state came into being. Frederick the Great of Prussia was the first to use the term, he said that he was the first servant of the state, meaning that his role as sovereign was to serve his kingdom, not dominate it. Freddy, as I like to call him, deserves some credit here because he recognized that holding dominion over something does not mean that you should simply use that thing for your own selfish devises, because that is what a fool does. A fool thinks that they can extract minerals from the earth under the guise that they are using those materials to better humanity by facilitating the creation of gadgets that make life easier and that doing so causes no harm. A wise person recognizes that the process of this removal is harming the environment in ways that cannot be repaired in their lifetime. A sophomore, a wise-fool, agrees that harming the earth is bad and then posts a video about it on TikTok from their iPhone, completing our circle of irony.
God gave us dominion over creation, but with power comes responsibility and because our species tends to lean more towards foolishness than wisdom, God sent Jesus to give us pearls of wisdom, like those who want to be first need to be last and a servant of all. This is God telling us we messed up because having dominion over creation means that we must serve creation, not dominate it. We started to understand this during the enlightenment, we started to understand the wisdom of Christ, the wisdom that said, by serving all; all people; all animals; all plants; all that was and is created by God, we can and will see the heaven and earth that John speaks of in his Revelation. I suspect we have a long way to go before we will see the new heaven and the new earth, but I have hope. I have hope because if nothing else in this world is true, I know that God will never give up on us, even though we act like sophomores most of the time.
Learning by Fire! 