Sunday, March 8, 2009

2 Lent


March 8, 2009

Mark 8.31-38

In today’s Gospel, we find Jesus explaining to us in very blunt words what it means to be a disciple. Hopefully, those of us who have gained any sort of maturity as Christians have come to the realization that being a Christian doesn’t necessarily mean being happy and cheerful all the time. Trust me. I know too many of these kind of Christians. These are the people who think being a Christian means having bright sunny days every day. They think every day is some Technicolor musical from the 1950s, where everything just works out for the best in the end. And when it doesn’t work out that way, they despair and lose faith. They rail at God and shake their fists at eh sky and cry to God, “Why?”

Now that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be joyful Christians. Yes, we should be filled with a deep and sincere joy. But, as the old song goes, no one promised us a rose garden. Nowhere in scripture have we been promised that life is going rosy and sweet all the time. Being a Christian means not always strolling around in comfort and joy in arose garden. As we are reminded in this season of Lent and especially in that week preceding Easter, being a Christian means following Jesus wherever he goes. And where he goes is not to the rose garden. It is to the garden of Gethsemane—to that place where he too would feeling anguish, where too would sweat blood, where he too would cry out to God.

Being a disciple means following Jesus. Now when we initially think of this, we no doubt have marvelous images of following Jesus as enraptured students following a great teacher. Certainly, I think, most of us would like to follow Jesus much the same way Buddhists get to follow the Buddha, or even Muslims get to follow Mohammed. Following in this sense is having a student-teacher relationship to some extent. We would like to take the best of his teachings, hold them close to our hearts and try to live them out in our lives the best way we can. Which is very, very good. We should try to do that as followers of Jesus. But being a follower of Jesus means doing just that, but also doing more.

Our relationship with Jesus is more than just a student-teacher relationship. Our relationship with Jesus is more like lovers. We love Jesus. Jesus loves us. And it is that love that drives us to follow Jesus wherever he goes. It is that love that makes us feel the anguish he feels. It is that love that makes us suffer with him. It is that love that makes us bleed with him. It means following Jesus not just through the moments of teaching ministry, not just through the miracles he performed. It means following him through the dark days of his last week, through the blood and excruciating moments of his dying. It means that, like him, our love for him causes us take up our crosses and follow him wherever he might go.

Jesus knew, as we find in our Gospel reading for today, that he there were certain things he had to do. He had to “undergo great suffering.” He had to be killed. He understood that fully. He in turn tells us that we too must realize that we will have to bear our share of suffering in this life. We too will have to take up our own crosses.

Now, to be fair, this statement about taking up our crosses needs to be examined a bit. The cross being referenced here might not be what we instantly think it is. Reginald Fuller, the great Anglican theologian, believed that the Greek word used for cross here—stauros—actually might not necessarily have meant the cross on which one was executed. Rather, he believed that it might actually mean the tau (the T) and chi (the X) that was used as a sign of ownership to brand cattle. This adds a very interesting dimension to this scripture. The brand of the cross that we must bear becomes God’s seal upon us. And when we look beyond the events of Good Friday, we realize that the cross on which Jesus died truly does become the brand we must bear upon ourselves as Christians as well. Even the thought of a brand is not a pleasant thought. Brands are painful, after all. And brands cannot be undone. They mark us forever. That is what the cross does to us.

Most of us probably don’t give a second thought to the crosses we see in our lives. We see this mighty symbol of Christian faith everywhere we turn sometimes. Crosses mark the steeples of our churches. We place them on our altars. We cover them in gold and silver and bronze. We wear them around our necks, or put them as magnets on our cars. We sanitize them and make them into something pleasing. But we don’t really THINK about the cross and what it is. We don’t see it as the symbol of pain and torture that it is. We certainly don’t see it as a brand upon us. We don’t see it as that place on which Jesus—as well as countless other people throughout history—were brutally murdered. The modern equivalent of the cross for us would be a hangman’s noose, or a lethal injection gurney. The cross is a symbol of degradation and physical, emotional and spiritual pain.

This is what we are marked with as Christians. This is what defines us and makes us who we are. And as such, the cross should be always before us—whether we want it to be or not. Because if it is, it is the reminder to us that following Jesus doesn’t just mean following him through the rose gardens of our lives. It means, following him all the way to that cross. It means taking up our own crosses and staggering with him along that path. It means sweating with him in the garden of Gethsemane. It means crying out with him in anguish. It means feeling with him the humiliation and loneliness of being betrayed. But, it also means following him to the very end.

Just as the cross is a symbol of death and torture and pain—it is, for us Christians, also the symbol of the temporal nature of those things. The cross is the doorway through those awful things, to the glory that awaits us beyond the cross. The cross is the way we must travel, we must carry, we must be marked with, if we wish to share in the glory that awaits us beyond the cross. And this brings us to probably the most difficult part of our passage in today’s Gospel. Jesus is blunt about the fact that those who refuse to bear the cross, to follow Jesus, to unashamedly be a follower of Jesus will be ashamed when the glory breaks through upon us. The shame of the cross will be turned back upon those who refused to follow Jesus through the shame of the cross.

Now, I said earlier that no one promised us a rose garden in scripture. I should revise that. While we might not have been promised a rose garden, we have been offered glory. It has been offered to us. It comes to us, when we follow Jesus. It comes to us when we let our love for Jesus lead us through the dark and frightening places this world can throw at us. If we let that love guide us, if we let ourselves be led by Jesus, we will find true and unending glory awaiting us.

So, as we encounter the crosses of our lives—and we will—as we allow ourselves to branded with the cross, as we allow our love for Jesus to lead us into places we might not want to go, let us do so with the realization that glory has been offered to us. When we look at the crosses we see around—on the churches, around our necks, on our altars, let us see those crosses tinged in the light of glory. And when we do, will know that there will be no shame for us. We will not be ashamed when Jesus comes in glory to us, with the holy angels, and offers us that place of refreshment and unending joy.

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