The Cost of Discipleship (Proper
17A)
30 August 2020
8:00 am Mass in the Labyrinth;
10:00 am Mass with Sung Antiphons
The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)
Jeremiah 15:15-21; Psalm 26:1-8;
Romans 12:9-21;
Matthew 16:21-28
God, give us hearts to feel and love,
take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”
Jesus here is inviting us to put first things first, to order our lives in accordance with what God intends for us. He assumes that there is an ordering of things in the universe, that there is right, that there are first things. Living as we do in a liberal democracy that acknowledges freedom of belief or unbelief, that places all such things conceptually in a “marketplace of ideas” where faith is seen as little more than a consumer choice, it is hard to hear Jesus’ call. He asks us to put what our society and culture see as marginal or on the sidelines first and foremost in our lives.
Abuse of this word of Jesus by fanatics or on-the-make clerics doesn’t help. I have to admit it. I hear someone say “Lose your life to save it! Give all to the Church! God demands it all, and nothing less!” and my fundamentalist feelers start wiggling. I start listening very carefully for the catch, for the moment when the person calling for total sacrifice substitutes himself or his faction for God in the equation. I have been beaten up by hierarchs who abuse authority. I have suffered from pastoral abuse. So I am wary. I was attracted to the Episcopal Church because of its moderate and wise ways. When it comes to religion, I am wary of too much spice.
We Episcopalians tend to want to have things moderate, rational, and done in good taste. Our besetting sin seems to be summarized in the experience of young Anglican priests John and Charles Wesley when they first began to try to preach a gospel of going all out. The vestry and wardens of Charles’ church in Islington thought he had gone too far, and asked the Bishop to intervene. The Bishop of London, the Rt. Rev. Dr. Edmund Gibson, called both brothers in for a chat. After hearing one of them explain why they thought that grace was by faith alone, and how important it was to have a sense of God at work in our lives, he famously replied, “Enthusiasm, Mr. Wesley, enthusiasm! This simply will not do!” He removed Charles from the church in Islington.
But here’s the thing. Jesus himself said “If you want to follow me, deny yourself, pick up your cross, and follow me.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his magnificent The Cost of Discipleship, summarized the idea this way: When Christ calls a person to follow him, he calls on them to die.”
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. The Romans reserved
crucifixion for revolutionaries, mutinous slaves, and bandits who fought
against the established order. It was a brutal form of slow torture ending in
death, where you were stripped naked, fixed in a posture impossible to hold
without pain and slow suffocation, and left there to lose control of your
bodily functions, and beg, moan, and gasp out mad gibberish until you stopped
breathing. All this was conducted in
the most public of places, along a major highway, for instance, 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. You must be willing to lose your
dignity, to become the object of disgust, horror, and pity if you want 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 mistakenly think that this
saying presupposes a knowledge of what was going to later to Jesus, his own
crucifixion. But Jesus here has no clear
idea of exactly what is going to happen to him, though he is all too clear of
the risks he is running. Orthodox Christology is that Jesus is wholly God and
wholly man, and that he suffered like us in all ways save for sin. That 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. He is asking us to take risks, in fact, to
risk everything for God’s Reign.
Jesus is not asking us to deliberately set out to kill ourselves or to be drama queens, constantly trying to deliberately annoy people so that they will persecute us, and then whining about the persecution we have baited. When he says “come and die” he is telling us to lose our false selves, to turn our backs on the falsehood of the past.
The great Roman Catholic defender of Christian Faith for the common person, G.K Chesterton wrote, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and been found wanting. It has been found difficult and never been tried” (in What’s Wrong with the World).
May we find the heart and courage to follow Jesus, to go all out, to commit, to risk. May we be willing to embarrass ourselves, to fail, to lose our false selves. May we take Jesus at his word, and put him first and foremost above all.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
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