Draw All People to Myself (African Mass - Fifth Lent B)

“Draw All People to Myself”

Fifth Sunday of Lent (Year B)
29th March 2009
Cathedral Church of St. John the Evangelist, Hong Kong
6:00 p.m. “African” Mass
Gospel Reading: John 12:20-33

God, breathe into us a desire to change— take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Tonight’s scripture reading describes a scene that is a turning point in the Gospel of John. Several times previous to this passage, that Gospel explains that things we would expect to have happened in the story didn’t take place because, Jesus’ “hour had not yet come” (John 2:4; 7:30; 8:20). With the arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem for what John describes as his final Passover, and with the arrival of Greeks asking to see Jesus, suddenly Jesus declares that “the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all portray Jesus’ suffering and death as the necessary prelude to his being raised in glory from death. But for the Gospel of John, Jesus being raised up on the cross itself is the moment of true glory. John’s Jesus uses a parable to describe this: “unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” Where the three Gospels describe Jesus in Gethsemane begging in prayer to be spared from the cross, and ultimately accepting “not my will, but thine,” John describes no prayer in Gethsemane. Rather he has Jesus say here, “What shall I say? 'Father, save me from this hour'? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name!'" Matthew and Luke have Jesus teaching his followers to pray, “thy name be sanctified, thy kingdom come, thy will be done.” John’s Gospel sees the lifting up and death of Jesus on the cross as the answer to this prayer. Last week, we saw that John’s gospel portrays looking to Jesus lifted up on the cross the means of salvation just as Moses’ serpent lifted on a pole was a means of healing. John’s Jesus says, “But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself."

Now the fact is, some people get very uncomfortable when you point out that the four Gospels tell very different stories about Jesus, and that John's Gospel tells a story that is in great part at odds with the other three's version. But I have always taken this as an occasion for great hope. You see, Christians were a diverse lot from the very beginning. The ministers of the Word and the Gospel writers who told these stories so close to the actual events made the stories their own and let themselves be moved by the Spirit in ways appropriate to each of them. And the Church has not insisted that we harmonize this, or censor all the versions into one. The Church has let the four Gospels stand in glorious disharmony, wonderful diversity. "I will all draw all people unto me," says Jesus here. That means the Church ought to have diversity, ought to have a variety of keys in which the Gospel tune is played.

Because of the Church's history of identifying heresy and bracketing it out, we often lose sight of this. It is important to remember that as the early Church sought to define its faith, there were individuals who wanted to eliminate all diversity and possible disharmony in scripture. Some wanted to get rid of the Old Testament. Others wanted to limit the New Testament to a single theological viewpoint. One such was Tatian who created a single harmonized Gospel (the Diatesseron) and wanted it to be recognized as Scripture instead of the Four Gospels the Church finally settled on. The Fathers, seeking to truly reflect the deposit of faith given in the apostolic age, declined Tatian's offer and rejected his single Gospel along with several other Gospels that bore the marks of having come from a period after the first couple of generations of Christians. The apostolic faith thus defined included the diversity we see in the New Testament.

We are celebrating mass this evening with music, prayers, and themes draw from the peoples of Africa, among the many peoples around the world whom Jesus has drawn to himself. African Christianity is one example of the diversity of our faith. It itself includes a great deal of diversity.

A Kongo Crucifix

In a 10th century North African hymn, we see the way some Africans have reflected on the theme of today’s Gospel reading, the cross of Jesus as the moment when glory, salvation, and hope arrived for us:

The cross is the hope of Christians
the cross is the resurrection of the dead
the cross is the way of the lost
the cross is the savior of the lost
the cross is the staff of the lame
the cross is the guide of the blind
the cross is the strength of the weak
the cross is the doctor of the sick
the cross is the aim of the priests
the cross is the hope of the hopeless
the cross is the freedom of the slaves
the cross is the power of the kings
the cross is the water of the seeds
the cross is the consolation of the bondmen
the cross is the source of those who seek water
the cross is the cloth of the naked.
We thank you, Father, for the cross.

Note here that the theology of the cross is not one of sorrowful suffering, but rather of triumphant life even within suffering. While not minimizing the sufferings of our Lord nor the hardships each of us faces in this world, this African hymn’s theology of the cross is one of joy. Joy is one of the core themes recurring again and again in prayers and hymns from Africa.

There is a prayer from Ghana in West Africa that speaks to me. It sums up what I consider to be the essential joy and thankfulness of the African spirituality that I encountered again and again while living in Africa for three years in the mid-1990s:

Lord, I am happy this morning,

Birds and angels sing and I am exultant.

The universe and our hearts are open to your grace.

I feel my body and give thanks.

The sun burns my skin and I thank you.

The breakers are rolling toward the seashore,

The sea foam splashes our house.

I give thanks. Lord, I rejoice in your creation,

and that you are behind it, and before, and next to it, and above

-- and within us.

Part of the joy and affirmation of life that we see in the faith of Africans comes from the tenuousness of life itself there. Faith matters there, and indeed the hope that faith provides is there often a matter of life and death.

Often how people traditionally greet each other tells you about their experience and shared culture. In China, where famines and natural disasters have been a fact of life since ancient times, people traditionally greet each other by saying “have you eaten?” In Benin, West Africa, where I lived for three years, people greeted each other in the local language by saying, “Oh, you woke up this morning.” In a place with high infant mortality, endemic disease, and relatively short life spans, waking up in the morning was not something that you assumed.

Generalizations about a place with such an intense diversity of peoples, languages, ethnic groups, political structures and cultures are inherently prone to be oversimplifications and overstatements. But in my experience, the poverty throughout much of Africa, its relative lack of development, the prevalence and severity of disease, and the youth of its rapidly growing population with a relatively short life span—all of this makes life very precious there. People generally thank God for the good they have, and rejoice in their lives while they can.

But the tenuousness of life there also produces a sober honesty about what all of us share—the fact that we all one day will die, we all get sick, we all need help, we all experience bitterness and harshness in life together with its exquisite joys. In my experience, Africans in general have a great honesty in recognizing the reality of evil, and how easily it can find place in every human heart.

It is this honesty coupled with a true thankfulness and joy for life that makes African hymns, prayers, and worship forms so attractive to many Christians throughout the throughout the world.

Here are two prayers, both from African Christians, that show this honesty and practicality in dealing with the reality of evil.

O thou great Chief, light a candle in my heart, that I may see what is therein, and sweep the rubbish from thy dwelling place.

God in Heaven, you have helped my life to grow like a tree. Now something has happened. Satan, like a bird, has carried in one twig of his own choosing after another. Before I knew it he had built a dwelling place and was living in it. Tonight, my Father, I am throwing out both the bird and the nest.

Christ in an Ethiopic Gospel Manuscript

The Church in the global south is growing and gaining strength, even as it appears to be weakening and shrinking in the global north. This is in no small part due to the strength of African faith.

It is important to note that this fervency is not simply the product of simple, unreflective hope, or the fundamentalism that seeks simple, sure, and certain answers in a rapidly changing and threatening world. African Anglicanism produces people like Desmond Tutu as well as like Peter Akinola. Differing parts of the Church in Africa have reacted to the current controversies within the Anglican Communion differently. A residue of resentment among churchmen built up because of colonialism and imperialism and the slowness of some colonial churches to develop local leadership is a major driver in African reactions to developments in North America and Europe.

The issues under discussion are viewed through very different lenses in Africa.

On the GAFCON side-- The 19th century young Christian men whose martyr blood was the seed of the church in Uganda, for instance, were tortured to death for disobeying a royal order to submit to their King’s abusive sexual advances. Such a history is bound to color how one views discussion of sexual ethics and same-sex partnering. In countries where Muslims make up a major part of the population, news reports of recent developments in North American and European Anglicanism that are patently offensive to conservative Muslims have on occasion provoked attacks on Christians. In several countries where polygamy is still widespread and the family clan is the still major constitutive and positive force in most people’s life, the discussions of Europeans and North Americans about equality between the genders look overly individualistic, far removed from day-to-day experience, and threatening to social support networks. The submission of the individual to traditional conceptions of purity and order is a main concern in the Churches who have reacted in this way.

On the Canterbury/Lambeth middle or the North American Church side-- A major part of the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa was the theological battle against a Calvinist fundamentalism where the doctrines of predestination and a chosen covenant people were mixed with a hateful and anti-scientific political doctrine of racism. Such a history tends to make one suspicious of any appeal to scripture to justify the oppression or marginalization of any group for something which they seemingly have little choice about. Christian commitment to social justice is the major concern here.

In a word, how Africa’s diverse but fervent Christian faith is preached and how its communities are administered in large part depends of the theological orientation and local experience of its communities. Often the difference stems from the theological persuasion of the missionary society that spread the faith to that particular part of Africa.

But to look at these differences to the exclusion of seeing what all African Christians have in common would be like noticing each tree and not noticing that you are in a forest. Listen to the fervency, honesty, and joy in this African prayer:

I implore You, God;
I pray to You during the night.

How are all people kept by You all days?

You walk in the midst of the grass;
I walk with You.

When I sleep in the house,
It is You with whom I sleep.

To You, I pray for food and water to drink,
and You give it.

Set me free, I implore You with all my heart:
If I do not pray to You with my heart,
How can You hear me?
But if I pray to You with my heart,
You know it and are gracious unto me!

Even something as traditionally Anglican as the great Canticle for Morning and Evening Prayer, Benedicite Omnia Opera, takes on new freshness when rephrased by Africans for Africans:

All you big things bless the Lord.
Mount Kilimanjaro and Lake Victoria
The Rift Valley and the Serengeti Plain
Fat baobabs and shady mango trees
All eucalytptus and tamarind trees
Bless the Lord. Praise Him and highly exalt him forever.

All you tiny things bless the Lord.
Busy black ants and hopping fleas,
Wriggly tadpoles and mosquito larvae
Flying locusts and water drops
Pollen dust and tsetse flies
Millet seed and dried dagaa
Praise the Lord. Bless Him and Highly Exalt Him Forever.

In all these songs, drumbeats, dances and prayers, we see Africa’s faith: young, vibrant, yearning for the justice and holiness of God.

Let me close with an Ashanti Christian prayer, from Ghana.

O Lord, O God, creator

Of Our land, our earth, the trees, the animals and humans, all is for your honor.

The drums beat it out, and people sing about it.

They dance with noisy joy that you are the Lord.

It is You who pulled the continents out of the sea.

What a wonderful world you have made out of the wet mud,

And what beautiful men and women!

We thank you for the beauty of this earth.

The grace of your creation is like a cool day between rainy seasons.

We drink in your creation with our eyes.

We listen to the birds' jubilee with our ears.

How strong and good and sure your earth smells, and everything that grows there.

The sky above us is like a warm, soft Kente cloth, because you are behind it,

Else it would be cold and rough and uncomfortable.

We drink in your creation and cannot get enough of it.

But in doing this we forget the evil we have done.

Lord, we call you, we beg you: Tear us away from our sins and our death.

This wonderful world fades away.

And one day our eyes snap shut.

All is over and dead without you.

We are still slaves of the demons and earth-fetishes

When we are not saved by you.

Bless us. Bless our land and people.

Bless our forests with mahogany, wawa, and cacao.

Bless our fields with cassava and peanuts.

Bless the waters that flow through our land.

Fill them with fish and drive great schools of fish to our seacoast, so that the fishermen in their unsteady boats do not need to go out too far.

Be with us youth in our countries, and in all of Mother Africa, and in the whole world.

Prepare us for the service that we should render.

In the name of Christ, Amen.


PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE
(Adapted from the Kikuyu Peace Prayer)

Praise ye Lord,
Peace be with us.

R: Im Pharadisi, where all the dead are living (3x),
May we one day join there with them.

Say that the elders may have wisdom and speak with one voice.
Peace be with us. R.

Say that the country may have tranquility.
Peace be with us. R.

And the people may continue to increase.
Peace be with us. R.

Say that the people and the flock and the herds
May prosper and be free from illness.
Peace be with us. R.

Say that the fields may bear much fruit
And the land may continue to be fertile.
Peace be with us. R.

Say that the spirits of our ancestors, and loved ones now dead
May have light and joy, and may watch over us
Peace be with us. R.

Say that we to may join with them in Paradise.
Peace be with us. R.

May peace reign over earth,
May the tool match the task,
The gourd cup agree with vessel.
Peace be with us. R.

May our hearts be one, and every harsh word be driven out
Into the wilderness, far from us.
Peace be with us. R.

A KENYAN BENEDICTION

May God raise you up
Above everything.
May He make you be abundance that never ends,
Spread out like water of a lake,
Never changing.
Be like a mountain, solid.
Be like a camel, enduring all.
Be like a cloud that brings rain always.
And the Blessing of God Almighty,
†the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
Be with you and abide with you always. AMEN

Questioning Authority (Third Lent B)

Questioning Authority

Third Sunday of Lent (Year B)
15th March 2009
Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, Hong Kong
Readings: Exodus 20. 1 – 17; Psalm 19. 7 – end; 1 Corinthians 1. 18 – 25; John 2. 13 – 22

God, breathe into us a desire to change— take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Several years ago, I worked at an American Embassy in a small country in West Africa. One evening, I attended an evening dinner at my Ambassador’s residence with a visiting delegation of high-ranking American military officers. I was feeling a bit run down, and indeed was to become quite ill the next day with one of the many diseases so common in that part of the world. So I wasn’t at the top of my game in being a witty, engaging, and informative table companion. Mid-way through the meal, the Ambassador and I were called away from the table for a short time for a pressing phone call. As we were returning to the dining room together, she looked at me in her best “counseling” face and said, “I don’t know what’s got into you Tony, you’re just not helping out here tonight. You have a problem with authority, I know, but deal with it.” She had misread why I was so sluggish that evening, but had read with absolute clarity a leitmotif in my life—I did have a problem with authority, and had always had one.

I am not atypical of Americans of my age. I think that most people accept the commonplace that Americans in general have issues with authority and can be quite irreverent about it. It is a heritage, I think, from our commoner English and puritan cultural roots, and something we share with our Australian cousins, who believe they far outstrip us in their disdain for authority wrongly bestowed—something to do with their transported prisoner roots. Americans who grew up in the 1960s as I did have a particular problem in this regard—since a commonplace of the era, placed on T-shirts and lapel buttons alike, was “Question Authority.”

Moses receives the 10 commandments, Jewish prayer book, Germany, c. 1290
.

All of today’s readings have something to do with authority—the giving of the Ten Commandments as part of the law of Moses, Saint Paul talking about how the word of the Cross is foolishness when viewed by the accepted ways of thinking of his day, and St. John’s telling the story of Jesus overturning the tables of the people doing commerce in support of the sacrificial cult in the Temple in Jerusalem, and the reaction this provokes.

Many scholars studying organizational behavior recognize that there are two basic kinds of authority: the kind that grows naturally from the skills, expertise, character, and leadership of an individual or group, and one that is established by formal position in a hierarchy, rank, title, or some kind of external validation like a university degree, membership in an exclusive group, etc. The first kind is intrinsic, and rests on the person him or herself and the informal process of reputation-building in a society. The second is extrinsic, and depends on the formal processes of validation or ranking in society. A good example of the difference would be a small platoon in a desperate battlefield situation: the lieutenant who is the commanding officer present gives an order to advance, but despite his rank, the soldiers there are slow in responding to the order because they question his judgment and trustworthiness due to past experience. But a private in the platoon, loved and trusted by all and known to be physically brave, leaps out into the fray, guns ablazing. The whole platoon follows. The lieutenant is exerting extrinsic authority, the private, intrinsic authority.

In the last few weeks’ readings, we have seen several times Jesus challenging the authorities of his day. One of the things that we see clearly in the Gospels’ tellings of Jesus’ ministry is that the crowds of Galiliean peasants he attracted recognized that he exerted authority of some kind. Most of the Gospels associate this with his unusual success at faith healing and working wonders. (Matt. 4:24; Mark 3:10; Luke 5:15; John 2:23). Some passages write this off as an unworthy or inadequate response to Jesus: “Do you follow me simply because you have seen this wonder? Let me tell you, you will see much more” (John 1:20). “You follow me simply because I made you bread to eat” (John 6:26). But elsewhere in the Gospels, people follow Jesus, or mark him as an enemy, because they recognize in his teaching something unusual—they see that he is teaching “not as the scribes and the Pharisees, but as one having authority” (Mark 1:22; Matthew 7:29).

Clearly, from the point of view of rank, status, position, and publicly known pedigree, Jesus was not exerting extrinsic authority. His authority was intrinsic—it came from who he was, from his acts, and from the effect of his teaching.

This was not because he simply “questioned authority” as a knee-jerk reaction or default position. After healing a leper, he tells him to go and be ritually cleansed by a priest, as prescribed in the Law. St. Matthew has Jesus saying “I have come not to abolish the Law, but to complete it.”

Where he did question authority, however, was when he saw that the extrinsic authority of a person, group, or institution did not match their intrinsic authority, that is, when their rank, position, and legal or societal power was not matched with actual worth, value as an example, and honesty. It is for this reason that he uses the word “Hypocrite” in his sharpest criticism of his opponents. The Greek word simply means “actor.” By using the word, Jesus accuses the religious leaders of his day of just pretending to serve God and lead God’s people. “You are placing overwhelming burdens on others you are not willing to place on yourselves,” he says. “You bar the gate to salvation to others while you yourselves do not enter it.” He is particularly sharp in criticizing those he believes are using authority to exploit or abuse people.

It is important to understand this use of the word “hypocrite” by Jesus. It criticizes those who are failing to live up to God's expectations but use play-acting as a means of staying the way they are, where they can exploit and control others.

There is a big difference between that and actually trying to behave better than you think you are in order to amend your life. Sometimes our sense of guilt or unworthiness is such that we think we are being hypocritical if we go to church, try to avoid the situations that seem to lead us inevitably to our besetting sins, or actually try to replace good practices and actions for our past bad ones. “Fake it till you make it” means pretend you are better than you believe you are so that you can actually become a better person. To my mind, this is not “hypocrisy” to be condemned, but rather simply one tool of trying to respond to God’s call. "Hypocrisy" in contrast is pretending to be better than you are so that you can stay the same way or even get worse.


Today’s Gospel reading is John’s retelling of the story of Jesus turning over the tables of those doing business in the outer courts of the Temple. The different Gospels tell the story variously. The Synoptic Gospels put the incident on Monday of the week that Jesus was killed, the day after his entry into Jerusalem. John puts it at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. Most scholars believe that John has moved the incident for theological purposes and think that historically it was probably this incident that forced the hand of Jesus’ opponents and led to his death.

Jesus is pictured causing a major disturbance in what is probably the Court of the Gentiles immediately outside the restricted precincts proper. Using violence or threats of violence, he turns over the tables and seats of business people who made the sacrificial cult of the Temple possible. These are the money changers who take in Roman and Greek coins–ritually impure because of the images minted on them—in return for kosher ones without images that could be used in the sacred precincts, and those selling the small animals needed for the sacrifices. In the Synoptics, Jesus drives them away saying they have made what should have been a house of prayer for all nations into a refuge for thieves. This means he is accusing them and the system their commerce supports of robbing the people of the land, of exploiting them and cheating them. John’s Jesus gives a reason less critical of the system itself as oppressive: he criticizes the commercialization of what he calls “my Father’s House.”

Either way, Jesus’ disruption is a critique of the system of Temple worship as it existed in his day. Like the Qumran covenanters who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls before him and John the Baptist, he not only questions, but outright rejects the authority of those who run the Temple. The priestly class and its high priests were in varying degrees collaborationist with the Roman occupiers, having been put in their positions by the Herodian ruling elites, the local enforcers. The Temple as center of Jewish cultic life was a key part of the national life, and as such was watched over closely by the Roman authorities, especially at highly politically sensitive times like the Feast of Passover, which, after all, was a feast celebrating national liberation in an earlier time.

It is a prophetic act of symbolism, like Amos taking back his unfaithful wife Gomer, Isaiah walking naked and barefoot for a year, or Jeremiah not marrying. He seeks through the act to reveal God’s assessment of the Temple establishment.

In the story as John tells it, the people whose authority Jesus has just denounced reply by questioning his authority, “What sign can you show us that this little tantrum of yours really reflects God’s mind as you seem to think it does?” They want unassailable evidence, presumably in the form of another marvelous deed performed by this Galilean wonder-worker, that Jesus truly is speaking on behalf of God. But John’s Jesus replies not with another healing, or calling down armies of angels to defeat the Romans, but by saying “tear down this temple, and God will raise it up again in three days.” John explains this as a prediction of Jesus’ his own death and resurrection, and notes that those questioning Jesus misunderstand it to be a reference to the actual Temple.

John’s Gospel, alone of the four canonical Gospels, portrays a Jesus who has perfect knowledge of everything, and is only play acting when he asks any question. It is John’s way of expressing that he believes Jesus was indeed the eternal Word of God made flesh. The other Gospels portray a Jesus much less certain about the future. If the historical Jesus said anything like “tear down this Temple and in three days God will raise it up,” he probably was affirming the trustworthiness of the miraculous power of God to raise up his people when struck down wholly in words borrowed from the book of Hosea, “[the Lord] has struck us, but he will bind our wounds. He will revive us after two days; on the third day he will raise us up, to live in his presence: (6:1-2). It was only after the surprising events of Good Friday and Easter that a disciple like the writer of the Gospel of John could say with confidence that this referred to the “temple” of Jesus’ body.

Another of those post-Easter disciples is Saint Paul. In today’s epistle, he refers to the demands for various kinds of signs for authenticating authority. He contrasts the intellectual demands of two of the major systems of moral authority in his era by saying, “Jews demand signs [indicating God’s power] and Greeks look for wisdom.” That is, in Jewish legal interpretation and practice, one needs to establish the bona fides of someone claiming God’s authority by seeing whether adequate evidence of God’s intervention existed to warrant such a claim, while in Greek philosophical systems, one claiming our intellectual and moral allegiance needed to demonstrate the internal coherence and consistency of their teaching and its congruence with accepted standards of prudence and wisdom. The world seeks to authenticate authority by either power or wisdom.

To such standards of establishing authority, Paul says, “we preach Christ crucified” or “we proclaim the Messiah on a cross.” He says this is “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” And indeed it is a problem for anyone—regardless of religion or nationality—who seeks authenticating evidence based only in our external experience and what we can see in this world only. If we take just what we experience here as the basis for our judging authority or God’s intention, there is little if any room for any justice, fairness, or possibility of hope. There is only meaninglessness, randomness, and despair. Bold, existential attempts at creating meaning and hope within an empty universe begin to appear rather hollow if we base our judgment only on what see here.

But Christ on the Cross was followed on the third day by Christ raised from the dead. And that risen Lord, though gone from our sight, still speaks and calls. He is the ultimate intrinsic authority. When we hear his voice, everything starts to fall into place. He calls to us all. As we hear him, we begin to learn that here is reliable, trustworthy, and empowering authority. The risen Lord is the ultimate sign of God’s intent, God’s love, and the universe’s meaning. He is the ultimate cohering principle and moral standard. "Christ on the Cross," says Paul, is "foolishness" to those who are perishing in a limited, hopeless world. But to those who hear God's voice, regardless of whatever limited standard of power or wisdom they once used, "Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

In the name of God Amen.

A Sign in our Hearts (Second Lent)

Detail, Jan van Eyck, The Crucifixion. c. 1420-25.

Second Sunday of Lent (Year B)
8th March 2009 10:00 am Eucharist
Discovery Bay Church,
daughter church of the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, Hong Kong
Readings: Gen 17:1-7, 15-16; Psa 22:23-end; Rom 4:13-end; Mark 8:31-end

A Sign in Our Hearts

God, breathe into us a desire to change—
take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Today’s Gospel reading from St. Mark tells the story of what happens just after Peter first tells Jesus that he believes that he is the Messiah. In it, Jesus is quick to tell Peter that what he has been taught about this hoped-for future King of Israel is wrong. Contrary to common expectations of the Messiah, Jesus tells Peter that the Messiah he has just confessed has to undergo great suffering, be rejected by the religious and social leaders of his people, and be killed. Peter reacts strongly to what Jesus has said and rebukes him. That means he tells Jesus off, he blasts him for being out of line.

St. Peter confesses Jesus as Christ

Clearly what Jesus is saying here is something unexpected, something new. Most of Jesus’ contemporaries draw their image of the Messiah from combining a series of prophetic and apocalyptic scriptural texts that together describe the ideal future David as a conquering hero for his people and his God, who sets up a new, just government and society that exerts world hegemony--the kingdom of God.

Jesus, in contrast, draws a very different picture of what a Messiah is by linking the idea of “Son of Man” with the idea of “suffering.” The first comes from the image of the mysterious figure in Daniel 7 who is seen in the distance coming in clouds of glory looking something like “a human being” (“a son of man) who receives kingly dominion over all nations and then destroys the evil kingdoms ruled by “beasts” or wild animals. The other image suggests, though it does not directly refer to, the “Suffering Servant” of Second Isaiah, a figure probably representing God’s people and their sufferings in history. Second Isaiah sees this suffering as not in vain, but rather as a witness to help bring people of all nations to knowledge of the true God, a suffering that is for the benefit of others because it brings the possibility of God’s peace and grace to all.

It is the linking of these two disparate ideas—the idea of the Messiah and suffering—that upsets Peter. Jesus is telling him to put away any hope that Jesus is somehow—magically, militarily, or otherwise—going to make the hated Roman oppressors go away, or somehow win over the powerful elites in Jerusalem. The “elders, priests and scribes” there, in greater of lesser degrees, collaborate with the Romans. They are the beneficiaries of a huge system of oppression having at its heart the Temple cult, strictly interpreted Law, and the influence that money can buy. The major objects of this system of oppression are the very people whom Jesus has been attracting throughout the Galilean rural areas by preaching the arrival of God’s kingdom with such words as “blessed are the poor, God’s kingdom belongs to them; blessed are the downtrodden, for they shall inherit the earth.”

The Sermon on the Mount

No, he says to Peter: ‘God wants me to go to Jerusalem to confront the powerful. Those powerful people will reject my message. If I go on preaching my message and if I go to Jerusalem as God wants, I will have to suffer, I will be have to killed. But despite this I still trust in God—on the third day, he will raise me up.

Jesus is using here an expression of trust in God from the book of Hosea, “[the Lord] has struck us, but he will bind our wounds. He will revive us after two days; on the third day he will raise us up, to live in his presence: (6:1-2).

That is why Peter gets so upset. I imagine that he just cannot believe what he has just heard. “God blesses the righteous and punishes the wicked” he says. “Don’t be so negative. Prospects can’t be so glum as that, especially with God in charge” he says. “Where’s your faith, Jesus?” he says. “How can this be the kingdom of God when evil triumphs by killing you?” he says. Or he might be saying, “Then just go a little easier on it, okay? You don’t have to go to Jerusalem. God will be happy with you for what you have already done.”

Jesus’s reply is biting: “Get away from me, Satan.” He knows that Peter’s pep-talk is not in accord with reality or with what God wants. He must go to Jerusalem to bear witness of the Kingdom of God to the authorities, and he knows what this means. The powers that be will not let it go unchallenged. It is in their nature that they must respond brutally to any challenge to their power. Accepting God’s will means accepting that, and in persevering in the call despite it all. To think or feel otherwise is a defection from God’s intent, and to argue for such opposition to God’s will as Peter has done is to present temptation, just like the devil.

Then, as if to underscore the point that it is the Romans who are the ultimate powers-that-be, Mark tells us that Jesus summons the crowd and announces, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.”

Feodor Andrejeitsch Bronnikov "The Damned Field, Execution place in the Roman Empire" 1878

The word “deny” here means disown, renounce claims to ownership. “Picking up your cross” refers to the fact that prisoners who were to be executed by crucifixion had to carry the crossbeam to the place of execution. Crucifixion was the Roman execution reserved for revolutionaries, slaves, and bandits who fought against the established order. It was a brutal form of slow torture ending in death, all conducted in public to make sure that the shameful punishment had deterrent effect on anyone else even thinking of challenging Roman power.

So what Jesus means is something like “If you want to follow me, you must give up any claims you may think you have of owning yourself. You’ll have to stick your head in the hangman’s noose to follow me.”

We often misread what Jesus is saying here. We think he is praising suffering for suffering’s sake, and extolling the virtues of a stoic victim-hood, or worse, of a vicarious suffering for someone else’s wrongs. “This is my cross, and I’ll have to bear it” is the proverbial expression of the idea. Sometimes this wrong idea is actually used to encourage passivity and enabling behavior by the abused or the oppressed. Or we think that Jesus had perfect knowledge of what was going to happen, and that he is referring here to his own (future) crucifixion and resurrection that any of his followers, reading the story after the fact, automatically think of. In this wrong understanding, Jesus is telling us to suffer for other people’s wrongs like he was to suffer for the sins of others.

Jesus here has no such idea in mind at all. Orthodox Christology is that Jesus is wholly God and wholly man, and that he suffered like us in all ways save for sin. That for me means that He shared our unknowing fear of the future.

What Jesus is calling for is this: He is calling for those who wish to follow him to actually follow him: follow God’s call, work for God’s kingdom, announce the liberation of the captive, help the sick and the downtrodden—and do this even when we know that it may very well have a high price.

The difference between Jesus and Peter here is this: Jesus is open to God and whatever God can throw at him, and trusts. Peter thinks he already knows what he can expect from God, and grasps at that expectation, to the point of getting upset when told that it just isn’t what God is going to do.

There is a lesson is this for us, and it is a basic lesson of the Old Testament and Epistle readings today, as well. It is the matter of trust. Belief in God is not just intellectual assent to the idea that “God exists.” It is trust in God, in God’s love and goodness, and in God’s ability to finally bring things aright. This is not a naive and silly “everything will be OK.” Nor is it “things have to go well for me, because God owes it to me and I deserve it.”

God's Covenant with Abraham

Saint Paul in today’s epistle says that God establishes his promise to Abraham even before Abraham has shown a sign of that promise by making a seal of it in his flesh by the rite of circumcision. He says that the key is that “Abraham trusted in God” despite all the evidence around him that God’s promise could not be fulfilled. Later in the same letter, Paul says that nothing can separate us from the love of God even as he lists all sorts of things that may go wrong. Again, the key is trust. For him, trust in God is a response to God’s loving act in reaching out to us. It is a seal in our hearts even more real and enduring than the seal that Abraham put into his flesh by the rite of circumcision to show his acceptance of God’s covenant.

God's Covenant with Abraham

Jesus asks his disciples to risk death and not worry about it by following him as he followed God. He asks us to trust God because of who God is, and his promises to us. He asks for single-minded trust in God. He asks us to place this seal in our hearts.

Following Jesus means letting go, and letting God. It means doing the right thing even when counting the cost tells us it will be hard. It means stone cold clear assessment of what we face, and not putting on the rosy lenses of self-deception in order to work up a false sense of that all will be well when it won’t be. It means accepting that God’s plans may not be what we thought they were. But through this all, it means trusting God--beyond the limits of reason, beyond the limits of our experience, beyond the limits of our fear—because God’s basic nature is to love us unconditionally.

May we all learn to so trust in God.

In the name of God, Amen.