TAKE UP YOUR CROSS
With today’s Gospel we start to look ahead to the passion, to the sufferings Jesus is going to undergo. Here St Mark gives us the first of three warnings by Jesus that his way is going to turn into a way of suffering and death.
The passage we have just heard is an amazingly rich one. In these few verses, we feel we are touching the very heart of the gospel. Here we have it in a nutshell; this is what our faith is all about.
This passage comes immediately after that great turning-point in Mark’s Gospel, where Jesus asks who people think he is, and Peter makes his great confession of faith:
You are the Christ, the Messiah.
With that confession, the disciples show that they are beginning to realise that there is more to Jesus than an inspiring teacher, a fine preacher and a faith healer. And so Jesus feels they are now ready for him to start leading them deeper into the true meaning, the strange and mysterious meaning, of his ministry. He now begins to spell out his understanding of what the Messiah really is, which turns out of course to be very different from their preconceived ideas about what the Messiah ought to be.
For Jesus, the Messiah is not going to be the conquering hero that everyone was looking forward to, at least not in the worldly sense in which they would understand that idea. On the contrary, he is going to be despised and rejected, more a sacrifical lamb than a conquering hero. So, as Mark tells us:
He beg an to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.
Well, this is altogether too much for Peter. Having just hailed Jesus as Messiah, he now takes him aside and tells him he’s got it all wrong. “No, Lord, this shall never happen to you”.
And this brings from Jesus the startling retort:
Get behind me, Satan!
Isn’t Jesus coming on a bit strong here? Calling Peter “Satan”: isn’t that a bit much?
Well, no, not really, because Peter is giving voice to exactly the same temptation that the devil expressed in the wilderness. Remember how the devil tries to deflect Jesus from his true mission by suggesting that he engages in stunts and spectacles like making stones into bread or jumping off the Temple in Jerusalem.
And remember too how the Bible hints that the forty days and forty nights in the wilderness were not the end of Jesus’s temptations: the devil departed from him, we are told, “until an opportune time”. And now here is an opportune time, and the devil returns to the attack. Using Peter as his mouthpiece, he again tries the same tactic: to deflect Jesus from his true mission.
No wonder Jesus reacts so strongly. Peter’s siren words take him straight back to the spiritual struggles he had gone through in the desert.
Peter wants to impose on Jesus his idea of how God should behave. Which is not very different from the way we also in our prayers try to tell God what to do. And sometimes, like Peter, we get very upset when God fails to dance to our tune.
The thing is that, despite his sudden flash of inspiration a few minutes before (“You are the Christ”), Peter still to a very large extent thinks as the world thinks and not as God thinks. Or as our translation puts Jesus's words:
You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.
True, Peter has made the first step of faith, and this is not to be belittled, but it is only the beginning. He still needs to undergo a whole process of conversion to God’s way of thinking, a gradual inner transformation, the process which theologians call sanctification.
And again it’s the same with us. We call ourselves Christians, and indeed we have taken at least the first step of recognising in Christ the way, the truth and life. But the process of remaking our minds, the conversion of our whole way of thinking, is still very incomplete. Most of the time, we still think as humans think, not as God thinks.
And then comes the challenge, and Mark takes care to point out that this is addressed not just to Peter and the first disciples but to us all. Jesus called the crowd and his disciples and said:
If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves, take up their cross and follow me.
Well, it’s bad enough to find out that Jesus has to suffer, but now we learn that we all have to suffer too. We must “deny ourselves”, not I think in the sense of negating our personalities, but in the sense of starting to give Christ and our neighbours first place in our lives, rather than ourselves and our own needs and desires. And we must “take up our cross”: we must willingly shoulder whatever burdens God lays upon us along the way.
Because following Christ will involve sacrifices. The degree of sacrifice involved and the degree of suffering involved will vary according to the circumstances of our lives. But for all of us following Christ means giving up things that we would like to have for ourselves. It means no longer being a free agent, no longer always getting our own way.
We like to think we are in control of our lives, free to make our own decisions, able to please ourselves. But following Christ means giving up that kind of freedom, which is really an illusion of freedom. We think that freedom means a total absence of constraints. Whereas following the way of Christ, the way of the cross, means finding true freedom; the freedom that comes from discovering who we truly are and becoming the people God had in mind when he created us.
And this is why Jesus adds the paradoxical statement that it is only by losing our life that we will save it. If we try to hang on to our life as we know it, we will lose it. If we concentrate on hanging on to all those things we enjoy, we will find that they get in the way of following Christ, they get in the way of our true salvation.
So this is a plea for us to lose our attachment to the things of this world. It's strange really: most of us spend much of our time and energy trying to build up security for ourselves in this world and trying to guarantee our security in the future. And then along comes Jesus and says: be careful, this is not what life is all about. You must learn to detach yourselves from this kind of security if you want to find true security for your eternal souls.
This is not an easy lesson for any of us to learn. Most of the time, like Peter, we still think as humans think, we set our minds and our hearts on human things not on divine things. Not many of us are the kind of saints who are able to arrive at a true detachment from the world's way of thinking.
But fortunately for us God is merciful; he forgives our failures and our inadequacies. He calls us to set out on the way that Jesus has set before us, he sends the gift of his Spirit to help us along the way, and he rejoices in the progress we make, pitifully inadequate though it may often seem.
The season of Lent is the time when we try to monitor our performance, and if we do this sincerely and with a minimum of self-knowledge, we will be the first to admit how feeble our efforts are. But God doesn't want us to waste time wringing our hands because we are still so far from truly following the way of Christ. Above all, he wants to give us the will to persevere, to keep right on to the end of the road, however many mistakes we make along the way.
Reverend John Murray, Strasbourg Anglican Chaplaincy
8 March 2009, 2nd Sunday in Lent, Year B
Gospel: Mark 8.31-38
