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.