Second Sunday in Lent, Year B, 2015 – Genesis 17:1-16; Psalm 22; Romans 4:13-25; Mark 8:27-38
This week my brother-in law was chatting with me about his recent trip to old Jerusalem. He spent a lot of time on David Street, a steep and narrow cobbled thoroughfare crowded-in on both sides with houses and shops. His guidebook explained that historians now agree that this, rather than the Via Dolorosa was more likely the path that Jesus took as he carried his cross to Calvary. ‘This was the route on which the bloodied and humiliated Jesus stumbled’, he said, his voice breaking and his eyes starting to fill up with tears. I was myself drawn in to the scene emotionally and found myself, as it were, reaching out to Jesus and saying, “Lord, let me help you carry that!”
It’s carrying the cross that is the central theme of today’s gospel. These verses in Mark chapter 8 present a turning point in Jesus’ ministry. Until now Jesus had been trying to show people who he truly is. The healings of the blind and deaf were meant to connect him with the prophesies in Isaiah concerning the Anointed One. By the time Jesus came on the scene the title, Anointed One or Messiah was meant to refer to the expected one who would deliver Israel and establish God’s righteous rule. The healings then, announce God’s final salvation – the coming of the reign of God. All this Mark indicates was prologue to what happened next.
Jesus now begins to teach his disciples about his impending death. Pulling the disciples aside he asks them what people are saying about who he was. They report that some think he’s Moses, others that he’s one of the prophets. But Peter blurts out, “You are the Christ”, a title derived from its Hebrew equivalent, Messiah or Anointed One. Peter senses what is true but we soon find out he doesn’t know what that means. He doesn’t know that Jesus isn’t a king of common expectation, someone like David who would deliver Israel and establish God’s righteous rule.
Having his identity settled we are at the crucial turning point. Jesus now tells the disciples that the Son of Man must suffer, be rejected by the Jewish leaders, be killed and then rise again in three days. Most of us can sympathize with Peter’s indignant response. This route through suffering and death and then to exaltation was completely unexpected. Jesus is an anti-King says one commentator.
When Peter rebukes Jesus, Jesus returns the favour. Then he teaches about discipleship and its cost. It’s about the cross.
‘If anyone wants to follow me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me.’ These are strange and difficult words – taking up your cross and losing your own life in order to experience the life of the Kingdom.
As we try to remember in each Lenten season, Jesus made a real application of this teaching by carrying his cross along David Street up to the hill at Calvary, losing his life in order to gain it resurrected, at Easter. The most striking thing in this passage is that this same lesson is made compulsory for anyone wishing to follow him.
No wonder, you may be thinking, no wonder so few people are interested in coming to church. Dying to self is inverted logic – vastly different from the principles and the logic that we know reign in this world of ours. We need to advance our interests. We need to push for what is rightfully ours. Such principles govern the kingdoms of this world. Jesus comes and turns it on its head. He urges us to put others first, to enter life fully and bear the burdens and suffering of others. By so doing, says Jesus, we will find life and we will find God. Take up your cross!
What did the cross mean for Jesus? Agony, betrayal, scourging, humiliation and forgiveness. He was the king paying a price for the deepest love – so deep that he comes to rescue even the cruellest persecutors, the mockers and deriders. Why? – So that a vision is placed before them that will cause them to step into the kingdom of God. Jesus calls us, if we follow him to take up the same kind of cross not out of extreme, almost masochistic piety, but out of love, really. The cross is offered to each one of us, Jesus teaches.
Sometimes the cross can be unimaginably brutal and public. Many will have read about the terrible beheadings of several Coptic Christians by ISIS in Libya. Christians in Egypt, next door, have taken this as an opportunity to tell of the love of Christ. They have designed a tract with a still-shot of these martyrs dressed in orange with a hooded executioner beside each one, in black marching along a shoreline and headed toward the place of execution. These brave Christians publicly forgave their executioners and the tract takes up the theme of forgiveness in Christ. “The intention of the tract is not to cause offense to Muslims but to comfort the mourning and challenge people to commit to Christ”, said Ramez Atallah ( the courageous and visionary leader of the Bible Society of Egypt, who once lived in Toronto and worked for Inter Varsity Christian Fellowship here.) The tracts had statements like this, “We learn from what the Messiah said, ‘Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you”. Apparently, the response to these tracts has resulted in enormous sympathy for Egypt’s Christians. We must pray for them.
Take up your cross and follow me are words which, whatever our situation, still captures God’s call to us to demonstrate what it means for God to love this world and to bring each person to life in God’s reign as King.
For every Christian disciple – even in seemingly safe places, places where the hand of perversity and cruelty is not front and centre, a disciple is still offered the cross to carry. Will we pick it up? Shall we refuse suffering? Kierkegaard once said, that resentment is refused suffering. We know what happens when resentment becomes a settled condition, when a root of bitterness extends deeper into our hearts and begins to resemble hatred. There’s a danger to refusing suffering.
Jesus calls us to take up the cross and lose our lives. Perhaps it’s the only real way to experience life or the deepest love, this giving away of ourselves or losing our lives for his sake when we would far rather move away from pain. ‘We are normally taught’, said one pastor ‘that the way to security is through possession and power. Against all of this comes Jesus urging us to give ourselves without trying to save little corners of our lives. Possessions and wealth are fleeting and so is power.
How strange then the call to take up the cross. What might it mean in our lives? Are they the wounds that are hidden – disappointments, physical struggle, the excruciating parting from those we love, inner turmoil, economic hardship, uncertainty about the future, unfairness. Pick up those things that are your crosses says Jesus. Only the hard things, the painful things show us who we are and tell us what God wants us to know and experience. They are our crosses and we carry them to follow Jesus. Because carved into the pavement on David St. upon which he walked with that huge cross we find inscribed the word love. God’s example of self-giving. It’s the call to die to yourself that Christ offers to those who follow him. This is hard. This defies logic.
One pastor wrote this week that Jesus doesn’t take on the burden of the cross to save us from ours. He does just the opposite. He takes on the burden of the cross so we can take on ours, quietly as we think on these things in Lent.
Kierkegaard once wrote this:
“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss – an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. – is sure to be noticed.” Losing yourself for the sake of the gospel is the required start of a converted life. Daily, a Christian is in the midst of conversion as we know form the Jesus prayer: “Lord Jesus, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
There is good news in this my friends. Jesus promises that his followers who take up their crosses and follow him will find life in its fullness. Lent doesn’t end in death. The promise at the end of this season is the glory of the resurrection. We will know life truly as our hearts are converted each hour and each day.
Recognize your cross, and with courage take it up as you follow the Lord this Lent.
