Embracing Mortality
Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message
February 21, 2018
This coming Sunday’s reading from Mark’s Gospel (8:31-38) tells the
story of Jesus’ reaction to St. Peter’s confession that Jesus is the
Messiah. Jesus tells Peter that he
has understood "Messiah" wrong. Jesus
will not triumph militarily over Israel’s enemies and make it a great thing to
be a Jew. Rather, Jesus says “The Son of
man is going to undergo great suffering, be rejected by the religious and
social leaders, and be killed.” Then he adds that even in death there is hope, alluding to Hosea (6:2), “after two
days God will revive us, and on the third, raise us up.” Peter can’t accept this and tells him he is
wrong. Jesus replies, “Get behind me, Satan! For
you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things. … If any
want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross
and follow me.”
Clearly, the way this is phrased in the Gospel comes from a
post-Easter perspective. But these
sayings have a clear, though different,
meaning on the lips of the historical Jesus. “Son of Man” (bar enash) in the Western Aramaic
that Jesus spoke simply meant a “human being,” and was a way of referring to
oneself in a humble, self-deprecatory way.
Occasionally when one of the Synoptic Gospels has “Son of Man,” another
has “I” or “me.” Jesus is saying, “this average
person you see before you is going to get himself killed after great suffering”
if he continues proclaiming the Reign of God.
He adds, “But there’s still hope.
And if you want to follow me, you too must embrace this surety of death
as well.”
Only later, after Good Friday and Easter, did the Church see
this quirky way Jesus had of referring to himself, “Son of Man,” as a claim to
be the Messiah: they linked Jesus’ use
of it to a passage in the Book of Daniel that refers to a coming future saving
figure as looking “something like a human being,” literally, “a son of
man.” It took Easter to make them see
the phrase with new eyes, just as it made them see Jesus’ references to God as
“Abba” or Papa not a teaching of the intimacy of each and every person with
God, but rather a claim to Jesus’ unique divine sonship.
If indeed these sayings go back to the historical Jesus,
then, they must mean something like, “Human beings, if they live how they’re supposed
to, are bound to suffer. And you must
embrace this fact or you’re not really understanding my teaching, not really
following me.”
Embracing the bad that goes along with the good God gives
us, then, would be the point of this teaching by Jesus.
The idea is very close to what we find in the Book of
Job. When Job’s wife tells him to curse
God and die because God has been so unfair to him, Job replies, “You are
talking like a foolish woman. If we are willing to accept good things from
God and bless him, shouldn’t we be willing to accept hard times from him as
well?” The narrator adds, “ In all
this, Job did not sin in what he said” (Job 2:0).
We must accept the good and bad that God gives us. This isn’t to say we need to reject feelings of
hurt and pain when we suffer. Feelings
will come, and that’s O.K. That’s one of
the great lessons from the Book of Psalms, that has about every emotion under
the sun.
But trusting in a gracious and good God, a loving Abba or
Papa, means trusting. That means we need
to have equanimity and patience. It
means acceptance.
Acceptance is not gritting your teeth, holding your nose,
and putting up with the intolerable.
Acceptance is embracing what is, good and bad, and letting that embrace
be part of our love for God and God’s love for us. Acceptance is not judging, but watching and
being present.
There is a traditional Chinese story that tells of accepting
the way things are, the Tao: A farmer
had only one horse. One day the horse
ran away. The neighbors came to commiserate over what they saw as his terrible
loss. The farmer said, "What makes you think it is so terrible?" Later, the horse came home--this time
bringing with her two beautiful wild horses. The neighbors became excited at
the farmer's good fortune. Such lovely strong horses! The farmer said,
"What makes you think this is good fortune?" The farmer's son was thrown from one of the
wild horses and broke his leg. All the neighbors were very distressed. Such bad
luck! The farmer said, "What makes you think it is bad?" A war came, and every able-bodied man was
conscripted and sent into battle. Only the farmer's son, because he had a
broken leg, remained. The neighbors congratulated the farmer. "What makes
you think this is good?" said the farmer.
When Jesus says he will suffer terrible things and we must
be willing to suffer terribly too, I think he is calling us to acceptance. And this is because our Father in heaven is
ultimately good and kind, despite what may appear before our eyes. Trusting God, having faith, means
acceptance.
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