The Gospel of Mark is my favorite Gospel for two reasons. (1)
It’s direct and to the point, and (2) the disciples are really dumb. Those two
things give me comfort because I need to be reminded of what matters most of
all pretty much every moment; I cannot hear about the cross often enough. And
I’m also comforted by these disciples because if these were the guys Jesus
chose as his right-hand men, then following Jesus really is open to anybody. If
the disciples had been super big-head geniuses we could never know if we are
enough, but since they are complete dunderheads we can all have hope. I can have
hope not just for myself but maybe more importantly for those other Christians
who never seem to get it either, because, Lord knows, I have seen some
Christians justify terrible positions in the name of Christianity.
Like the disciples and the Pharisees both, we are always obsessing
about the wrong things. We quickly sort everything into good and bad, success
and failure. Meanwhile, Jesus is standing on the mountaintop transfigured,
having just told the blockhead disciples that he is more than the messiah they
expected; he is, in fact, coming to die for the sake of the world and rise
again. And the disciples watch him transfigured and they say to themselves, “Ya
know, I think we should put this guy next to Moses and Elijah. He’s almost as
amazing as them!”
We shouldn’t be surprised. Jesus called these guys from
their work as fisherman and tax collectors, tradesmen and carpenters,
merchants, but never scholars of the Torah. Those who practiced trades like
these would have lacked even basic literacy. They were elementary school
drop-outs, not smart enough to make the cut to continue toward a professional
career as a scribe or a lawyer. They were practicing the family trades because
they weren’t good enough to do anything else.
In light of their simplicity, it makes sense that the
disciples didn’t want Jesus to die. The simplest faith is to say “Death is bad,
and life is good.” If it weren’t such a loaded political term today, we could
say that the disciples were “Pro-life,” while the life they were in favor of
was ultimately meaningless. Their faith in Jesus was misplaced not because they
were bad guys but because they could not imagine anything better. Simple faith
is not bad faith because it is simple, but simple faith is no assurance that
your faith is in the right thing either. The disciples have bad faith not
because they believe too much about Jesus but because they believe too little. Yet,
far from disqualifying them, this seems to be precisely why Jesus chooses them.
It takes a leap of
logic that the disciples simply don’t have to believe that Jesus could possess
a deeper power revealed in death. Meanwhile, the ones who are the super-smart,
bighead geniuses—the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the legal experts and
scribes—also assume that Jesus is coming for some kind of political game—they
also sell him short—because that’s what they would do. If the Pharisees could
have pulled off the whole Son of God racket, they would have—absolutely. You
know the type: They are religious but only to the extent that it helps them
hold power. The Pharisees are threatened by Jesus because they believe he is
playing a cunning game. There’s that old expression that chess players hate
that he’s playing chess while they’re playing checkers, but it’s more like
they’re playing checkers and he’s playing God. Because he is.
Nobody understands Jesus at all. Such are the trials of
being the messiah. Jesus tells the disciples everything, but they hear what
they want to hear. He is a healer, after all! How could a healer who removes
suffering from others willingly choose to suffer himself? Yet, as it turns out,
understanding who Jesus was is easy compared to following the path of
discipleship Jesus would have the disciples walk.
“Take up your cross and follow,” Jesus says. Now there’s a
command that is as disliked today as it was 2000 years ago. To be a Christian
is to suffer, which, honestly, we don’t want to hear. So, we like to say this
in a different way. To be a Christian is to be compassionate, we say, not
realizing that the root of compassion is “passion”—or “passio,” Latin for
suffer, so compassion is to suffer alongside. The road of the
cross is compassion, which is to suffer with Jesus. Christianity done properly requires
that you suffer.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer is everybody’s favorite Lutheran
example of this. He lived it, and eventually he died on the way of the cross in
a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. He wrote, “When Jesus Christ calls a
disciple he bids him come and die.” For all the language in American
Christianity around having a personal relationship with Christ, you don’t often
hear that that personal relationship requires you to die alongside him.
Bonhoeffer is rare in that his life showed he had the receipts. The rest of us
are lucky enough to be able to minimize it, suggesting that our crosses to bear
are more manageable things, things like our children. Surely, they are our
cross to bear. Or our work—that is our cross to bear—or you name the
inconvenience, that is our cross. But here’s the big secret: If you can
overcome it, it’s not really your cross. Every cross that doesn’t kill you
isn’t hard enough. So, strangely, it might be your children whoyou’re your
cross when they break you open and tear you apart or when you lose them
entirely. Or it may be some desperately hurting part of your own self. God does
not give us these crosses; God doesn’t need to. They come to us regardless.
Take them up, says Jesus. They are an essential part of who you are.
The command to take up your cross is so counter-cultural that
it’s basically impossible to preach meaningfully here in a beautiful church in
a relatively safe land filled with nice people. That’s not to say that people
aren’t suffering here; it’s just that it gets buried in our dishonesty and in
our keeping up appearances. And many of us aren’t suffering—not to that level. Nothing
I can say up here will be able to help you know what it is to suffer; it is
either something you have experience with or you don’t. And as our faith
becomes confined to a smaller and smaller area of our lives, when suffering inevitably
comes we lack the tools to actually take up our crosses. Folks like Bonhoeffer had
faith that was integrated with the rest of their lives, but our faith today is
so often disassociated from the rest of our activities. It takes real human
drama for us to consider this whole taking up our cross business. Is it going
to take trauma? War? Actual, real persecution, and not the mostly imagined
stuff about prayer in schools or Ten Commandments in courthouses?
One thing is for certain: Christianity is a faith that is
absolutely opposed to power. If it has any, it is fundamentally no longer
Christian. It is only when power is given away and when we are taking up
crosses that we are functionally Christian again. Unfortunately, everything in
America 2020 is telling you that everything is about you, and that is
fundamentally opposed to the faith.
As I’ve spent some time in the last few months interviewing
folks for my sabbatical project, one of the subjects that has come up time and
again is the distinction between type-1 and type-2 fun. Type-1 fun is water
parks and bowling; it’s days at the lake and vacations to Cancun. Type-1 fun is
all the things we typically think of when we describe something “fun.” Faith
and Type-1 fun are speaking different languages and we rightly struggle to ally
the two.
Type-2 fun, on the other hand, consists of activities that
don’t seem like much fun at the time. Running a marathon… or even, you know,
giving birth—things that would never be described as “fun.” It’s fun that involves
suffering because through that suffering comes something meaningful. And if you
talk to people in the world of Type-2 fun—people who choose to suffer a bit to
have an experience—many of them were once addicts or plagued by demons. Through
a bit of pain, they quiet the demons and find some meaning, and man if that
doesn’t feel to me like exactly what Jesus is preaching in the Gospel of Mark.
In no way is picking up our crosses fun, but it is the only
response to deep suffering and again. We are witnessing this wider cultural
phenomenon where people are pushing themselves (often on weekends) to do
extraordinary things quite apart from the church, but the more I see it the
more I think they are chasing the same thing. It’s not like a generation or two
changed human nature so much that faith is no longer relevant. Instead, I think
we are all like those disciples, imagining that what we need is a God who does
really cool shiny things on mountains when we really have a God willing to die
for our actual, terrible pain.
The way of the cross is about all
the terrible stuff that happens to us, like it or not. You’re not going to
suffer more or less. You’re just going to have some language to understand that
what’s happening to you is not the end of the story. The way of the cross is
simply honest. And that’s why I like it, even if I often don’t act like it. I’d
rather go to a water park than get crucified. I mean… show of hands—water park
or crucifixion?
But that doesn’t mean that one is good and the other is
bad. It’s more like one experience is the candy to the full meal that is the
way of the cross. That’s all Jesus is saying: This fun stuff is not going to
last—not even the healings and the Transfiguration. The suffering is much
deeper than we want it to be—it won’t almost
kill us, it will finish us off. That is the way of the cross.
And it’s good news. That’s the crazy
part. It’s actual good news. As we enter Lent, that’s where we are left—with
the cross as good news, because suffering does not have the last word.
Amen.
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