Blessed Assurance (All Saints; All Souls)

 

"Dancing Saints" ceiling icon by the Rev Dcn Mark Dukes; St Gregory of Nyssa, San Francisco

“Blessed Assurance”

3 November 2024

All Saints Sunday

Homily preached at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church

Grants Pass, Oregon

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

9:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-9; Psalm 24; Revelation 21:1-6a; John 11:32-44

 

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

 

When I lived in Washington DC, I would go on retreat once a year to a place called Priestfield, a Roman Catholic spiritual direction center in West Virginia.  It had lovely chapels, shrines, and trails marked with the stations of the cross.  On a side trail, there was a lone grave marked with a cross and an inscription “the unknown stranger.”  The person buried there was a vagrant who over a hundred years ago happened upon the pristine stand of forest, fell asleep at evening sheltering beneath the trees, and never woke up.  No clue to his identify was ever found.  The priests there gave him rites and buried him, but without ever knowing his name.  The grave now serves as a place where people with unnamed grief can come, or those who mourn loved ones whom they can never bury nor whose graves they cannot visit can come, and pray in a beautiful place focused on our need for intimacy in a sometimes anonymous and brutal world.  Like the tomb of the unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery, the grave honors those whom we know need to be honored but who, due to the messiness of life and war, remain unavailable or unknown. 

 

In church, we talk a lot about the saints.  Nearly every day of the year has a name, or several, attached to it for commemoration.  Originally, the Feast of All Saints was a commemoration of the early martyrs of the Church whose names went unrecorded.  Their story was not known, and as a result they could not be included for commemoration in the calendar, since the day of their martyrdom too was unknown.   In later Church parlance, they were saints, but had not been canonized.  All Saints was originally a catch-all to commemorate all the faithful departed regardless of whether their names and stories were known.

 

St. Bernard of Clairvaux was the great reformer of medieval monasticism who preached against sterile scholasticism and legalistic religion by urging a personal, intimate experience of God and, as part of this, personal devotions to the Blessed Virgin.  Almost alone among medieval clerics, he preached against persecuting Jews, and for this he was named a “Righteous Gentile” in that tradition (that’s why “Bernard” became a beloved Jewish name, like Bernard Baruch).   In a great sermon Bernard preached on All Saints’ Day, he said,

 

“Why do we praise and glorify the saints and keep festival for them? Of what use to them are earthly honors when the heavenly Father honors them? What is the point of our praises? The saints do not need our honors and devotion. Evidently, then, our commemoration of them aids us, not them. For my part, I confess that I am inflamed with desire whenever I think of them.”

 

The Church originally called all the baptized hagioi, or saints, because Christ’s saving work was seen as effecting the sanctification of sinners.  Then it began to reserve the term “saint” for those among us whose lives showed the triumph of grace most clearly, and who stood as models for us.  Just as we ask our family and friends to pray for us, we also began to address petitions to these signal saints that they pray for us, even as we continue to pray for our own beloved departed.  That is why the traditional church calendar makes a distinction between All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day.     

 

This last week, we saw the autumn Triduum (three day festival): All Hallows’ Eve (Oct. 31), All Hallows or All Saints’ Day (Nov. 1), and All Souls’ Day (Nov. 2).  It mirrors the Spring Triduum (Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday).  Where spring reminds us of life and new beginnings, the fall reminds of death and the endings that must precede new things. 

 

All Hallows’ Eve on October 31 reminds us not to be afraid in the face of death, asking God to preserve us from, as the old Celtic Prayer says, “ghosties and ghoulies, and things that go bump in the night.” 

 

All Saints’ or All Hallows on November 1celebrates the blessed departed whose lives and witness to the faith were such that we look to them as examples, believe that they are in the presence of God, and hope they are praying for us.

 

All Souls’ or the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed on November 2 remembers the larger

of the dead for whom we hope and pray.  As our Prayer Book puts it, “Remember all who died in the peace of Christ, and those whose faith is known to you alone; bring them into the place of eternal joy and light” (p. 375). 

 

We read our litany of the beloved departed here at St. Luke’s, an All Souls' devotion, on this All Saints’ Sunday.   That is because sometimes it is hard to distinguish between those whom we ask to pray for us, and those for whom we pray.  

 

We pray for the dead because it is a natural desire of the human heart, and since ultimately death is such a mystery to us.   The Prayer Book teaches, “we pray [for the dead] because we still hold them in our love, and because we trust that in God’s presence those who have chosen to serve him will grow in his love, until they see him as he is” (p. 862).  C.S. Lewis wrote,  

“Of course, I pray for the dead.  The action is so spontaneous, so all but inevitable, that only the most compulsive theological case against it would deter me. And I hardly know how the rest of my prayers would survive if those for the dead were forbidden. At our age the majority of those we love best are dead. What sort of intercourse with God could I have if what I love best with unmentionable to Him?” (Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer).

 

Since it is so hard for us to know what is inside the human heart, in practice many of us approach All Souls’ as an occasion to remember and pray for all the dead, not just Christians who have died, confident that God wants to save all his creatures, and hopeful that, in the end, God’s love will overcome all our human crankiness and resistance.   Perhaps, just perhaps, all the departed will one day be faithful departed since the faithfulness at issue is God’s, not ours. 

 

In the Apostles’ Creed, we say we believe in the Communion of Saints.  The blessed departed, who prayed in life and most certainly continue to pray in death, remain there for us.   They are not just a “great cloud of witnesses” in the arena seating cheering us on.  They actively work on our behalf, and give us strength, by their prayers and examples.  The great multitude of the rest of the dead—well, we pray for them, and by our prayers, hopefully help work God’s mercy in them.  

 

The Prayer Book’s Catechism teaches,

 

“The communion of saints is the whole family of God, the living and the dead, those whom we love and those whom we hurt, bound together in Christ by sacrament, prayer, and praise.  … Everlasting life [means] a new existence, in which we are united with all the people of God, in the joy of fully knowing and loving God and each other. … Our assurance as Christians is that nothing, not even death, shall separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord” (p. 862). 

 

Beloved:  we must not fear death, we must not regret death.  As the Prayer Book says, it is not an end, but a change.  The fall Triduum reminds us of the hope in Christ that is in us, of how we are all called to be saints, and in some way have already been made holy in baptism.  It reminds us of our union with all our fellow creatures, dead or alive, already holy or not yet so.  It reminds us that indeed, God is at work in the world about us, and of our blessed assurance that in the end, all will be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. 

 

In the name of Christ, Amen.

Justice in the Gate (Proper 23B)

 

 

Justice in the Gate

13 October 2024

Proper 23B

Homily preached at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church

The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson

Grants Pass, Oregon

9:00 a.m. Sung Mass with Blessing of the Animals  

 

Amos 5:6-7, 10-15; Psalm 90:12-17; Hebrews 4:12-16; Mark 10:17-31

 

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

 

 

The early Church Fathers were pretty unsparing when it came to wealth.  St. Basil the Great said that the riches common to all are held by the wealthy not because the wealthy earned them, but because they were the first to seize them.   St. John Chrysostom said that the rich do not enjoy what is their own, but what belongs to others.  St. Jerome said that every rich person is either a thief or a thief’s heir.   This near universal condemnation of wealth by the early Church is not simply poor people, like Aesop’s fox unable to reach the vine, crying out “those grapes are sour anyway!”  Some of the fathers came from well-to-do families; all of them benefited from the gifts to the Church from wealthy believers. 

 

No.  The early Church’s condemnation of wealth comes straight out of the Hebrew Scripture’s call for social justice, “justice in the gate” as expressed by Amos in today’s Hebrew scriptures reading.  It comes from Gospel stories like today’s about Jesus advice to the Rich Young Man to sell all his goods and give the proceeds to the poor.   

 

A few years ago, a major conservative U.S. media pundit, one with whom I used to share pews in All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Washington DC, challenged his listeners to stand up and walk out of Church if they ever heard “social justice” being preached.   “It’s code language for socialism,” he said, adding “Go and find another Church more willing to preach God’s word.”

 

Those of us who read the Bible seriously were appalled: “Social justice” is a defining theme of both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Testament.  If you are not preaching social justice, you are not preaching the Bible. 

 

Just in terms of number of verses that discuss specific things, the Bible is much more concerned with a how we treat the poor, fair economy, and just laws, than it is about almost anything else, including proper religious ritual or sexual morality. The overwhelming context is so great that many scholars interpret the Hebrew word zadakah, traditionally translated as “righteousness,” as “generosity,” and mishpat, traditionally “judgment,” as “setting things right [especially for the oppressed].”  

The prophet Ezekiel says that the sin that brought on the permanent destruction of the Cities of the Plain (Sodom and Gomorrah) was ignoring the needs of the poor, abusing them in the midst of abundance:

 

Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had arrogance, abundant food, and careless ease, but she did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and thus committed abominations before Me. (Ezek. 16:49-51) “Sodomy” was thus not specifically sexual abuse of foreigners, but all abuse of the poor.  

 

The Israelites themselves are defined by their early experience of being excluded and oppressed.  An early liturgical fragment says:

 

My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became … numerous. But the Egyptians mistreated us and made us suffer, subjecting us to harsh labor. Then we cried out … and Yahweh heard our voice and saw our misery…  [and] brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand, outstretched arm. … and signs and wonders.  He brought us to this place. … a land flowing with milk and honey (Deut. 26:5-9).

 

Again and again, the prophets call to the people, “Do not oppress a foreigner; you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners, because you were foreigners in Egypt.”  (Exod. 23:9)

 

Again and again, they say we must take particular care of the wretched of the earth, the poor, orphans, widows, those separated from their homeland.

 

Providing a fair playing field and then ignoring those who do not succeed is not enough.  We must see the poor, note their needs, and take care of them.   We must treat others as we would want to be treated.   Yahweh, the God of the Israelites, is God of rich and poor alike, and is particularly concerned with the poor. 

 

“Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt.  Do not take advantage of the widow or the fatherless ...  If you take your neighbor’s cloak as a pledge, [forgive the loan and] return it by sunset, because that cloak is the only covering your neighbor has. What else can they sleep in? When they cry out to me, I will hear, for I am compassionate.” (Exod. 22:21-27)

 

“Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and Yahweh your God redeemed you from there. That is why I instruct you to do this.  When you are harvesting in your field and you overlook a sheaf, do not go back to get it. Leave it for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow…. When you beat the olives from your trees, do not go over the branches a second time. Leave what remains for [those who need it.] When you harvest the grapes in your vineyard, do not go over the vines again. Leave what remains for [those in need]. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt” (Deut. 24:17-22; cf. Lev. 19:19-20).

 

This great difference between Israel’s God and the gods of the surrounding nations is this:  Baal cares for the rich and the powerful.  Yahweh cares for the dispossessed and poor.  Astarte cares for the sexually voluptuous and fertile. Yahweh makes the infertile woman a mother of children.  Ashur cares for the militarily powerful and cruel.  Yahweh defends the underdog, the stranger in a strange land, those without support networks such as family or community.   One of the epithets for Yahweh is El-Shaddai, often translated as “Almighty,” but technically “the God of the two mounds, i.e., breasts” and better rendered as “All-Nurturing.”   

 

So we too must be all-nurturing.  “If there is any poor among you … in any of the towns of the land which Yahweh your God is giving you, you shall not harden your heart, nor close your hand to your poor brother or sister; but you shall freely open your hand to them, and generously give them sufficient for their needs in whatever they lack.” (Deut. 15:7)

 

The fact is, Jesus, John the Baptist, St. Paul, and St. James all preach it.  It is found on nearly every page of the Bible.  

 

All these texts are clear. There are no excuses or exceptions.  None of them tell us to help the poor only if they are hard-working, moral, or law-abiding. None say help the poor “when you feel you can,” “when you feel guilty about it,” or “once or twice a year.” 

 

The message is simple, but insistent: help those in need.   Give them material support and take up their cause.  It's not at all hard to understand; it's just hard to do.  We must do it as individuals.  And the government does have a role as well:

 

“[You kings,] open your mouth for those unable to speak, for the rights of all the unfortunate. Open your mouth, judge righteously, and defend the rights of the afflicted and needy.”  (Prov. 31:8-10)

 

People today often are urged to make the moral choice in voting.  “How would Jesus vote?” is the question most often posed by those who think Jesus would vote for them or their program.   

 

But based on the evidence in the actual Bible, if you wanted to be a Biblical one-issue voter, you'd do well to make that one issue serving the poor.

 

I am not saying here that one party has a monopoly on justice and compassion.  None of these passages clearly says what specific way of helping the poor is the most effective or appropriate.  But even the most basic requirements of Biblical justice demand that we all, regardless of our political preferences, must work to help the poor in some way.

 

It is not enough just to give help.  We are also called to “plead the cause” of the poor, and stand with the down-trodden, i.e., defend their interests and be advocates for them.  When others are silent, do you speak up for the poor in your work place, your school, your church, your community, and your political party?

 

The poor are real people.  The oppressed are real people.  It is sometimes too easy to filter them out of our vision.  If they are a different color from us, speak a different language, have different morals, we can perhaps say they are not deserving of our attention or our help.  But would you like to go before the Almighty and explain how you did not help someone in need because they were different from you?  Isn’t that the very point of God’s love of the poor?  He wants us to help them because they are different from us.  He wants us to help them because they are undeserving. 

 

Are you unwilling to help, or have the government help, someone because that person is an “illegal alien?”  Can you imagine having to explain such thinking and feeling to the God who has been so gracious in giving us all that we have?  The very phrase suggests that an entire class of human beings is “illegal” and thus not worthy of compassion.   

To such thinking, the Bible tells us, “Care for the foreigner in your midst, because you too were once foreigners.”
 

Helping others merely because they are in need is a central demand of our faith.  It is just that simple.  We often fail to reach out due to fear, especially fear for our own security.  Love and gratitude drive out fear and enable us to do what God has in mind for us.   “For God, all things are possible.”  

 

Social Justice is a core biblical doctrine, and anyone who wishes to truly preach the Bible must be willing to preach social justice.  Anyone who truly wants their faith and actions to be grounded in the Bible will make it a major part of their efforts.   Anyone who wants closeness to God, will make detaching from one’s wealth and giving to the poor a key part of their spiritual disciplines.   

Establish justice in the gate.  Loose the bonds of injustice, undo the thongs of the yoke, let the oppressed go free, break every yoke. Forgive loans owed to you.  Feed the malnourished, if not hungry.  Clothe the shabby, if not naked.  Provide shelter for those without a roof over their heads.  Help the poor and oppressed, and take up their cause.

 

In the name of Christ, Amen. 

 

Fire and Salt (Proper 21B)

 

Fire and Salt 

29 September 2024

Proper 21B

Homily preached at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church

Grants Pass, Oregon

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, Ph.D, SCP 

9:00 a.m. Sung Mass 

Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29; Psalm 19:7-14; James 5:13-20; Mark 9:38-50

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen

Yikes!  “Hack off your foot, poke out your eye, chop off your hand—if any of these cause you to stumble!”  How in the world to preach this saying of Jesus?  It is not only harsh—insanely so!—but doesn’t even make sense.  The imagery here is deliberately grotesque: If your hand makes your feet stumble, maybe you should walk upright or lift your arms, not cut off the hand!.  Of course, stumble here is simply a metaphor for moral failing, for sin.    But even as a metaphor, this is one of most macabre “hard sayings” of Jesus.   The image is so grotesque that Matthew (18:8-9), who normally follows Mark when he uses his material, reduces Mark's seven verses to two, while gentle Saint Luke omits it altogether (17:1-4).

 

Taken literally, this saying actually led third century Church father Origen to cut off body parts that had gotten in the way of his efforts at chastity.  As a result, Origen—one of the age’s best preachers and scholars of scripture—was never named a saint or a doctor of the Church. In fact, one of the first canons of the Council of Nicaea was to ban such self-mutilators from the priesthood. 

 

The saying thus is not an announcement of divine law, but a vivid and sarcastic reply to the disciples’ complaint that starts the reading: “Jesus, look at that guy there!  He is not one of us, but he uses your name to heal people. He is ruining our brand, infringing on our trademark! We told him to stop but he won’t. You make him stop. Punish him!” 

 

They have just failed to drive out an evil spirit from a boy afflicted since childhood (Mark 9: 14-28), but this interloper seems to be succeeding just fine.  Jesus replies, “Don't stop him. Just using my name might bring him closer to the kingdom. Whoever is not against us is for us.” 

 

Clearly, not all of Jesus’ followers agreed.  The oral tradition turned the saying into its opposite “whoever is not with me is against me,” and this twisted Q form of the saying shows up in both Matthew (12:30) and Luke (Luke 9:49-50; but cf. 11:23). 

 

The historical Jesus was more welcoming and inclusive, less controlling and hierarchical than his followers.   I just saw a great Brazilian movie about a religious man falling in love with a younger man who tries to save himself and his friend both by telling him how much Jesus hates same-sex love.  “Don’t you believe in God?” he asks his friend.  The young man replies, “I do.  But I think God isn’t an uptight nasty piece of work.  I think he’s like my mother, and is pretty chill about stuff.”  “Pretty chill.”  I think that’s what the Bible is trying to say when it says “God is slow to anger and of great patience.”   “Pretty chill.”  That describes Jesus too, except for when he faces the one thing he can’t abide:  using religion and God to abuse people, especially the vulnerable,  

 

“Punish that competitor!” the disciples say. Jesus replies the strange exorcist is actually on their team!  Even a simple kindness like giving someone a sip of water advances the kingdom. And petty nastiness, sticking out your leg to trip up any of Jesus’ “little ones” can lead to worse things than being drowned in the ocean.  This is a warning to keep Jesus’ own over-zealous followers from running roughshod over people like the unnamed healer. 

 

My son Charlie, when he was in 8th grade and suffering all the slights and insults an insular and clique-ridden group of American middle schoolers could dish out to a stranger who had grown up in China and Africa, hung a poster in his room given to him by an older sibling.  It declared, simply, “Mean People Suck.”  

 

That’s what Jesus is saying here.  “Mean people suck.  Especially when they’re mean in my name.  That strange healer is one of my little ones whether you like it or not, whether he recognizes it or not.  And doing harm to him is worse than being drowned in the ocean.  You want me to stop him, to control him, cut him off?  Wellif it’s cutting off you want, you should start cutting off your own body parts.”  Elsewhere he says it less gruesomely, but still in vivid, grotesque imagery:  “If you see a speck in someone’s eye, don’t try to remove it until you have removed the log stuck into your own eye!”   If you want to give someone hellfire and punishment, think about what you just might be attracting for yourself by being mean!”  “Judge not, lest you yourself be judged.”  

 

Jesus concludes, “Everyone will be salted with fire.”  The two great means in the ancient world of purification and preservation, salt and fire, are going to be the lot of us all.  How to be saved from suffering in that fire or drying up by that salt? You yourself must be salt for the world, leaven for the loaf, light in darkness. “Have salt in yourselves, by being at peace with one another.” 

 

He is saying,  We need to live in peace with each other, and not constantly go about seeking the punishment or correction of others.  Purification is a serious business, getting rid of faults is too. The only way we can do it without being destroyed by it is by gently caring for others.  Be a light, not a judge. 

 

For Jesus, God is not a mere tribal deity, not a petty partisan. God blesses both the righteous and the wicked by making the sun rise on both and sending the clouds to rain on both (Matt. 5:45). He is Israel’s God, to be sure, but only so that Israel can be a city on a hill, a light on a candlestick, salt to give flavor to and preserve the world (Matt. 5:14-16).  God is not just for Jews, not just for the “righteous,” not just for Jesus’ authorized franchise-holders, but for all.   Because we are all in God’s hand, we must embrace the tensions implicit in diversity.

That ultimately is what the parable of the wheat and the weeds is all about—don’t worry about which plants are good or bad, because if you pull up the bad you’ll surely kill good ones as well. Wait until the harvest comes, and God will sort it out (Matt. 13: 24-30).  

 

It is also what today’s Hebrew scripture is about:  Moses’ deputies come to him and ask him to silence the two commoners prophesying in the camp.  They do not know that the two were part of the 70 chosen to have God’s spirit but who failed to show up to meeting.  “Silence them?” replies Moses, “Oh I wish that all of the people were prophets like these two!”  

 

Jesus urges solidarity among all God’s creatures. That’s why even unbelievers’ offers of glasses of water build the Kingdom. That’s why Jesus here says the strange exorcist is one of his own “little ones” in need of protection from being tripped up.  

 

Living peace doesn’t mean making nice, papering over evil, or thickening our conscience with an amoral detachment. Ask any marriage or family counselor, any labor mediator, or any mediator or negotiator in international or inter-ethnic conflict. They’ll all tell you that truly seeking peace is not easy, and not harmonious. It is not a hold hands and sing kumbaya, a false “let’s all just try to get along.”  It is about honestly addressing real problems.  It is about doing so in a spirit of shared endeavor, of mutual effort to let shared desires and aspirations force us to listen carefully to the other party.

I think one of the reasons that the current Bishop of Rome holds so powerful a grip on our imaginations, why he speaks to many who have not listened to anything from a Pope in decades, is this:  Francis is a gentle soul, who leads by example.  His words have special power because he tries to model them in his life.  He is careful not to assault or berate those who may have differing views.   I think he would understand Charlie’s poster: “Mean people suck.”   So would the four Americans he regularly holds up as the leading spiritual lights of the American Experience:  Lincoln, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Martin Luther King Jr.  All were stalwart lights who did not shy away from honest difference and controversy in proclaiming the truth, but all were careful to not condemn and demonize others, even those who persecuted them.  They too, lived as examples of their message of peace.  They were unexpected prophets running within the camp, strange off-brand exorcists healing people all the same.     

 

Jesus calls us to be good yeast leavening, bright fires enlightening, and tasty salt enriching and preserving, the world.  He calls us to be prophets running through the camp alight with the flame of God’s word.  He does not call us to demonize, exclude, judge, or ostracize. 

God alone will bring this world right. We all will be purified and healed, rubbed through and through with God’s salt. We all will be put through God’s fire. I firmly believe that—all of God’s creatures will one day fulfill the measure of their creation.  And because of this, we must live humbly and simply, praying for each other, including our enemies, and seek to help each other, work for justice, and live in peace. 

 

In the name of God, Amen

Superpowers Jesus (Proper 19B)

 

Superpowers Jesus? 

15 September 2024

Proper 19B

Homily preached at the Mission Church of the Holy Spirit

Sutherlin, Oregon

9:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Isaiah 50:4-9a; Psalm 19; James 3:1-12; Mark 8:27-38

 

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen

A clip from the British television series Outnumbered went viral a few years ago (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYjfDvg1WgE).  In it, a young boy and his sister ask a priest uncomfortable questions about Jesus:  “When King Herod was trying to kill Baby Jesus, why didn’t Baby Jesus zap him?”  …  Because Herod was an insignificant little speck to Jesus, and Jesus could have squished him with a hippopotamus or something.”  Little sister replies, “Jesus wouldn’t do that, he was meek and mild.  Beside, he knew all he had to do was wait until Herod was in Hell, where he could roast forever until his eyeballs exploded.”    Brother resumes:  “When Jesus was a bit older and the Romans were searching for him, why didn’t Jesus shape shift and become a Roman soldier and wait until they fell asleep and then stab them all to death?”  The priest finds his voice, “Jesus wasn’t a Power Ranger.  God sent Jesus to sacrifice him for our sake.”  “Well, wasn’t that a bit selfish of us?” the boy answers.  Sister adds: “Why couldn’t God have done it a bit differently, like writing everyone a letter and asking them to be a bit better or something bad might happen?”   Big brother: “When Jesus was being crucified, why didn’t he ask God to send a meteorite down and kill all the Roman troops and let him off the cross?”  Priest: “God sacrificed Jesus for us because he was the most precious thing for him.”  Little sister: “So why then did he kill him?” 

 

We often, like these annoying children, mistakenly think that Jesus should have superpowers. 

 

There are plenty of stories in the Bible that might lead us to this conclusion—Jesus healing the sick, raising the dead, walking on water, turning water into wine, “torching on” at the Transfiguration and finally, flying up into heaven like Superman at the Ascension. 

 

But as we have seen again and again in the last weeks, many of the stories about the marvelous deeds of Jesus in the Gospels are told as ways of hinting, from a post-Easter perspective, at who Jesus really is and how he interacts with each of us.  Biblical scholars of all backgrounds agree that the historical Jesus was a faith healer of great renown put to death by the Romans with the punishment they reserved for insurrectionists.  Beyond that, opinions vary.  What is sure is that these stories of wondrous deeds should not be read as if they were in comics of the X-men, Captain America, or Superman variety. 

 

Belief in Jesus as a super-hero is belief in an idol.  That’s what today’s Gospel reading is all about.  

 

Peter confesses Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ.   That means he is the ideal King or Priest of the future promised in the Hebrew scriptures.  This promised Anointed One was to set things right, vindicate the right and punish the wrong, set up God’s kingdom here.  Many believed he would be a military figure who would liberate the nation, and establish a new Davidic monarchy.  Some expected a prophet or priest with wondrous powers to heal the sick, feed the people, and confound the enemy.

 

The bottom line?  They wanted a Messiah who would fix this broken world in an obvious, clear way that they expected, one that sounds suspiciously like super-powers, maybe not shape-shifting or X-ray vision, but at least the ability to zap enemies.

 

Peter’s experience of Jesus and his healings leads him to confess that he is the Messiah.  But Jesus quickly tells him that what he expects of this hoped-for future King of Israel is all wrong: he uses a common Aramaic expression to refer to oneself in s self deprecating manner:  “this human child you see before you” (literally, the son of man) is going to die at the hands of the elites. 

Christians after Jesus’s death, including the writer of the Gospel of Mark, would look back on Jesus’ life and words and understand them in light of Good Friday and Easter.    His use of  “Son of Man” came to be linked with a mysterious salvific figure in Daniel 7, 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. 

 

They understand Jesus as saying this figure, which they see as the “Messiah” will suffer, suggesting the “Suffering Servant” of Second Isaiah, a figure representing God’s people and their sufferings in history, and never linked to the Messiah there.  Second Isaiah sees the nation’s 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.

In today’s story, this linking of the idea of the Messiah and a suffering servant upsets Peter. Jesus is saying “Put away any hope that I am somehow—magically, militarily, or otherwise—going to make the hated Roman oppressors go away, or somehow win over the powerful elites in Jerusalem.”   These elites, after all, were in bed with Romans exploiting the very people Jesus has been healing and to whom he has been preaching the arrival of God’s kingdom.  “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 go to Jerusalem, I will have to suffer and be killed. No superpowers are going to save me from that.  But despite this I still trust in God.  And then he quotes a poetic expression of hope 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).

Peter just cannot believe what he has just heard. “God blesses the righteous and punishes the wicked,” he thinks. “Don’t be so negative. Where’s your faith, Jesus?” he says. “How can this be the kingdom of God when evil triumphs by killing you?” he says, “Going with the Messiah means going with the winner.  Be a winner, not a loser.  Use your superpowers.” 

Jesus’s reply is biting: “Get away from me, Satan.”

 

Then, as if to underscore the point that it is Rome that is the Super Power, Jesus summons the crowd and announces, “Whoever wishes to come after me must dis own themselves, take up their cross, and follow me.”  This refers to the fact that prisoners who were to be executed by crucifixion had to carry the crossbeam to the place of execution. 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.”

Jesus here is not praising suffering for suffering’s sake, and extolling the virtues of a stoic victim-hood.  Sometimes this wrong idea is actually used to encourage passivity and enabling behavior by the abused or the oppressed.

 

Similarly, Jesus is not here simply predicting in full knowledge of Good Friday and Easter what was going to happen to him.

 

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.  It took Good Friday and Easter and then a great deal of reflection and further experience for Jesus’ followers to understand and see the ultimate significance in the words “Son of Man,” “I will be killed,” “take up your cross and follow me” and “after three days God will raise me up.”

 

What Jesus here is calling for is this: those who wish to follow him should actually follow him.   Follow God’s call and empty yourself.  Let go, and let God.  Work for God’s kingdom, announce the liberation of the captive, help the sick and the downtrodden—and do this even when you know it may not do any good.  Do it even if it may ruin you or kill you.  Take up your cross and follow him.   Don’t try to be a superhero or expect a super-hero to help you.  Be willing to put your head in that hangman’s noose.  Follow Jesus.  Empty yourself.

Superheroes use force and flash, shock and awe.  A person carrying his cross loves, simply loves.  Superheroes struggle for outcomes and results.  A cross-carrier simply does the next right thing God puts in front of her, and does not worry about outcomes.  Superheroes work in zero sums. A crucifer trusts that death is not the end, and that in the end all will be well.  If all is not well, then it is not yet the end. 

 

It is a matter of trust. Belief in God is not just intellectual assent to the idea that “God exists.” It is confidence in God’s love and goodness, and in God’s ability to finally bring things aright. This is not a naive and silly “everything is gonna be OK.” Nor is it “God will zap my enemies and magically make my problems go away.”

Jesus was no superhero, and did not expect the Father to be one.  He accepted and embraced his humanity, and calls us to do the same.  Acceptance is only possible because of trust.  He asks us to trust God even when God calls us to stick our heads in a noose. 

May we all learn acceptance, and trust in God.  In bearing our cross, may we get up off our knees, stop our worship at the idolatrous altar of superheroes and superpowers, and follow Him whose love beacons to us all to follow.  

In His name, Amen.