the crux of it all
Will you pray with me: Lord Jesus Christ, Have Mercy on Us Sinners. Draw us near to your cross that we too might take up the Cross. Amen.
Last week, we followed Jesus after he got dunked by John in the Jordan, he heard the voice of God resounding from the heavens declaring that Jesus was God’s beloved Son, saw the Spirit coming down like a dove and watched as the Spirit promptly tossed Jesus out into the desert to be with Satan, wild beasts, and angels (Oh my!)
Then Jesus emerged from the wilderness with a renewed sense of mission and purpose: the time had come to announce God’s good news, to say that God’s kingdom had come, that hearts and lives had to be changed as we trust in God’s good news.
This week we skip through Mark past much of Jesus’ teaching, his conflict with the scribes and pharisees, his miracles, and his exorcisms to get right to the heart of the matter: Who is this guy? Who is doing all this amazing stuff? What’s his deal?
Jesus has been fending off allegations that he’s crazy or that he’s in league with the devil (he has not been universally beloved). We the readers of Mark’s Gospel know the right answer because Mark gave it to us right at the beginning: his Gospel, his good news, is Jesus the Christ, God’s Son. But the disciples haven’t had the advantage of reading Mark ahead of time, so–while they’re walking with Jesus–he asks them, “Who do people say that I am?”
The disciples give Jesus what they’ve been hearing at the watercoolers in the towns they’ve been visiting: John the Baptist, Elijah, another prophet.
Then Jesus turns the question on them directly: Who do you say that I am?
“Who do you say that Jesus is?” — the question that all of us must and do answer in our lives.
Peter gets it right: Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the Lord’s Anointed one. Jesus is the one they’ve been waiting for, the one sent by God to deliver Israel. In Matthew, Jesus responds to Peter’s declaration by giving him some encouragement; Mark doesn’t record so much as a fist-bump before Jesus tells him and the other disciples standing there to shut up and not tell anyone else about it!
What does Jesus do with Peter getting the right answer, with his bold claim that Jesus is the Christ? Jesus starts teaching, referring to himself not as the Christ but as the “Human one,” (or “Son of Man” in his less gender inclusive parlance) assuming for himself the cryptic and apocalyptic title used by Daniel and other Jewish authors in the last centuries before Christ to refer to someone who comes from heaven in judgment at the end. But Jesus’ understanding of his role to play as the Christ and the Human One is not that he’s about to shake off the yoke of empire, take charge and fix the economy, stamp out corruption, and make everyone believe the Bible.
No, Jesus says that what’s necessarily going to happen, what’s unavoidable, what’s inevitable is that he is going to lose. He’s about to get chewed up and spit out by the alliance of religious and military power that was in charge in Jerusalem. Jesus says, “I’m going to suffer greatly, going to be rejected, going to be killed (and oh by the way after that I’ll rise again).” Mark says that Jesus was announcing this plainly, boldly, openly, frankly — almost, we might say, recklessly.
Peter doesn’t know what’s gotten into his friend and teacher Jesus who’s talking some crazy talk. Peter takes him aside and gives him a pep talk! I imagine it went something like this: “Jesus, c’mon, no need to get down on yourself like that. That stuff won’t happen to you. It’s not that bad. What’s with all this negative self-talk? Are you burned out? Do you need to take some time for self-care? A little getaway? A sabbatical? You can’t talk like that. There’s no way that our Jesus movement is going to end like that. You’re the Christ, remember? You’re going to restore, to triumph, to win — the Christ doesn’t lose. The Christ is a winner!”
Does this make Jesus feel better? Not so much. He turns around, glares at Peter and the other disciples (did they put him up to this?), and humiliates Peter in front of the class, making an example out of him: “Get behind me, Satan — accuser, liar, tempter — you’re not thinking the thoughts that God thinks; you’re thinking human thoughts, sinful thoughts, selfish thoughts, prideful thoughts, thoughts that the world has taught you to think.”
He’s not just talking to Peter here: he’s talking to all the disciples. If they want to be with him, to follow him, they’re going to have to learn to see things not just with human eyes but through God’s eyes. They’re going to have to learn that the shape of God’s reality and the shape of the world’s unreality do not match up at all.
Then Jesus calls the lingering crowd into earshot, looks out at them, and yells loudly enough that they can hear too. He lays the fearsome challenge of being a follower of Jesus: to follow Jesus is to tell your Self no and to take up your cross.
I’m sure the disciples and crowd must have been rumbling. Everyone knew what a miserable death crucifixion was. That was the whole reason the Romans liked crucifying troublemakers so much: would you want to make trouble if it meant you were going to die on a cross?
Apparently, following Jesus is accepting that you’re going to lose your life in the same kind of gruesome public execution he knows he will suffer when he gets to Jerusalem. Following Jesus is saying, “No!” to all of those reasonable, normal survival instincts, all those alarm bells designed to protect you from harm, all of those expectations you’ve inherited from your community about how to lead a good, respectable life.
Jesus only sorta explains this difficult teaching when he puts it in other words: Trying to save your life is guaranteeing you’ll lose it; losing your life for his sake and the sake of the good news is saving it. What are you going to do with the whole world if you’ve lost your life in the process? What’s worth your life? What’s worth your life?
You can hardly blame Peter for thinking human thoughts if these are the divine thoughts. What Jesus is teaching here in front of God and everybody is scary stuff, stuff that threatens the status quo, confusing stuff, stuff that doesn’t fit with anything else we’re hearing anywhere else. It’s bad enough that Jesus thinks he’s going to be a loser but now he’s saying that we need to be losers too.
Then, Jesus continues making a bad thing worse: If we’re unwilling to be losers with Jesus, if we’re ashamed to listen to his teaching and be part of the crucifixion club, if we don’t want to be a follower when it means giving up who we are, if we’d rather be counted among an unfaithful and sinful generation than with Jesus, then the Human One — Jesus in the power and glory of God and surrounded by all heaven’s angels — will be ashamed of us.
The demands upon Jesus’ followers are incredibly, impossibly high (utter denial of self, possible crucifixion, the same tribulation which awaited Jesus in Jerusalem) and the consequences for failing to follow him are far more than what we can see in this world.
Lent is a time where we take a good honest look at things we’d rather not look at most of the time. This Sunday, Mark reminds us that Jesus was not the expected sort of Christ, the Messiah they thought they were waiting for, reminds us that Jesus knew he was going to lose, contrary to the expectations Peter and everyone else had for what Jesus was supposed to be as the Christ: He didn’t lead a national revival nor unseat Caesar’s minions from their thrones. Instead, just as he expected, he was crucified.
And Mark reminds us that if we’re going to be Christians, if we’re going to be those who follow the crucified Messiah, then our lives are supposed to imitate his.
Sometimes, in phrases like, “We all have our crosses to bear,” Christians talk like taking up their cross means encountering hardships or struggles in life. Christians do go through rough times and deal with difficult situations in this vale of tears just like everyone else. In this world marred by sin and wracked by heartache and injustice, suffering is part of being alive. You can hold off suffering for a while maybe with money and caution and juice cleanses but not forever.
This year of global pandemic, of a half-million Americans dead from a novel virus despite lockdowns and masks and social distancing has made clear just how vulnerable we all are and especially how incredibly vulnerable our most vulnerable are. It has been a terrible trial, has been the cause of much suffering. Jesus’ disciples lived under the tyranny of Rome in a backwater part of a backwater province: they didn’t need a metaphor of crucifixion to learn that suffering was a part of life. They suffered too.
“Take up your cross” must mean something besides “sometimes in life we have times of trouble.”
As the disciples would quickly learn, following Jesus has some serious occupational hazards in addition to those that simply come with being alive. It might really mean dying with him. When the authorities came to arrest Jesus (and could’ve arrested his disciples and tried and crucified them with him), the disciples more or less quickly scattered like cockroaches when the light comes on. They didn’t yet understand; they weren’t yet ready to follow Jesus; they weren’t ready to take up their crosses; they wouldn’t tell their Selves, “no.” They weren’t really on the way with Jesus.
As we will see during Holy Week, it happened to Jesus just like he said it would. They arrested him, tortured him, made him carry his cross, and then hung him on it to die. Somehow, just as he told them, before they would die, they would see the kingdom of God in power come before their very eyes: they saw Jesus — the Christ, God’s Son, the Human One — hanging on a tree, utterly denying himself, giving everything, holding nothing back. He lost his life. He lost. Jesus Christ was a loser.
But even in that defeat was the stirrings of God’s victory. Even in losing his life for our sake, he gained our salvation. Three days later, it happened just like he said it would and he rose again.
Those same disciples–whom he called to follow him and who decided they would rather not follow him if it was going to mean taking up their crosses too–those same disciples, after the resurrection, would begin again learning to follow him. And as far as we know, those disciples did all lose their lives for him and his words.
Perhaps this Lent, as we together walk on the way towards Jesus’ crucifixion with Jesus and the disciples, the same miracle Jesus worked on the disciples will be worked in us too. Impossible it seems, but hey, this is Jesus we’re talking about. He took unlikely, unqualified, cowardly disciples like Peter and Co and used them to make known the good news of God, the news that by Christ’s death and resurrection death and sin were the real losers. So, perhaps, if Jesus is calling us to be his community of disciples, we too will be given the miraculous courage we need to say no to ourselves, to take up our crosses, and to follow our Lord Jesus Christ.
Will you pray with me?
Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched your arms wide on the cross to bring all of us into your loving embrace. You lost your life to give us life. By your Spirit, make us into a people who can say no to ourselves, who can take up our crosses, who follow you that losing our lives for your sake and the sake of the Gospel we might receive our salvation. We know this is a big ask, but we trust that you live and reign over all, that you are God together with the Father and the Holy Spirit, now and forever, Amen.