Most mornings while I eat breakfast I read in the One Year Bible. Recently I was reading in the Old Testament about Job. I’m usually at a loss about Job. He was doing just fine until God let the devil test his faith. That test, which he passed, costs him everything. Bad news is followed by more bad news which is followed by really bad news. I wish somehow Job could have been spared from his pain. It seems to me he had done nothing to deserve the devil!
Still feeling for Job I read Matthew’s gospel for this morning’s sermon. I wish someone would have warned me. Now the bad news is for Jesus. It begins when he says he must go to Jerusalem where he will undergo great suffering and be killed. Then, more bad news, Peter gets into trouble when he tries to intervene. He innocently tries to help so his friend won’t have to suffer and die. But his attempt backfires. Then the really bad news. We learn that to be a disciple of Jesus we must deny ourselves and take up our cross.
It’s not good news about Jesus. And Peter, well he’s been in trouble before. But deny ourselves! Take up our cross! Surely we have done nothing to deserve the devil! We’ve worked hard, we’ve been true and faithful. Are we to now consider our success and wealth come at the cost of our soul! Is the news so bad this Sunday we are to become like Job and lose our lives to the devil? Where is the good news, we scream!
When bad news overwhelms us we respond in different ways. Sometimes we become angry, sometimes we look for someone to blame, sometimes we cry, and sometimes we feel sorry for ourselves. One thing we all have in common is our desire that somehow bad news will just go away, that someone will protect us and make life right. Sometimes we discover we are to be that someone.
There are certain times when we feel a duty to protect those we love. Good parents especially seem to feel this way and that is a very good thing. Our caring parents worked really hard at keeping us safe and out of harm’s way.
Others protect us too, those in law enforcement, fire protection, medical care, people like that. Truth is, we all have a roll to play in protecting those we love. We keep a lookout for potentially dangerous situations and we help one another. That is what people who love one another do. We help. Especially when we see that someone may be taking a risk we feel they need not take.
I wonder if Peters response to Jesus’ shockingly bad news was a response rooted in a deep love for him, a cry to not take a risk he doesn’t have to take and the desire on his part to shield Jesus from what awaited him in Jerusalem - great suffering and death.
While this may have been Peters intention, Jesus did not take it that way, he did not turn to him and say, ‘Oh, don’t worry about me friend, I’ll be alright. God is watching after me.’ No, Jesus reacts quite unexpectedly. “Get behind me Satan,” he says. Then he tells all his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”
Or did Jesus think Peters’ response was rooted in his own fear? Fear of loosing the person he loved more than anyone, fear of being left to do God’s work alone, or fear of being abandoned forever. We don’t know.
Perhaps it had nothing to do with Peter and everything to do with Jesus. Jesus’ response seems harsh. It is as if he tells Peter, ‘Don’ tell me what to do you Satan.’ Doesn’t Jesus know Peters response could save his life?
Ah, perhaps that is exactly the point. For those who want to save their life will lose it. Jesus has drawn his life to the core focus of his being and his reason for living. To save his life and ours he will offer his all. He will lose his life so we may realize ours. Jerusalem is the necessary way.
First of all Jesus wasn’t ASKING about Jerusalem, he was TELLING about Jerusalem. He was telling his disciples “I must go.” Jesus makes it clear, he is not being forced to go. He realizes Jerusalem is the path he must take to be the person Peter has declared him to be, Messiah. He realizes to suffer and die on the cross is his destiny, for he must be what he really was meant to be.
He has been a great moral teacher, a great prophet, and he has healed many people. But there is something greater ahead. Who do you say that I am? And Peter said, ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” And because of who you are, there must be another way other than the road to Jerusalem. Jesus tells him, no, there is no other way and then the most painful truth, you are a stumbling block to me my friend!
As shocking as it is to Peter and to us, for Jesus to be Messiah ‘he must go’ to Jerusalem, suffer, and die. To find another way would radically change who he was.
It is also shocking to us that if we are to be Jesus’ disciple we too must go and take up our cross to follow him. For to find another way would radically change who we have been called to be. Beloved, there is no place for a limited and partial disciple in God’s kingdom. It is all or nothing for us.
All or nothing demands a high price. Jesus paid his and now we learn we must pay ours too. There is a road that awaits us. A road and a shadow. Suffering and a cross. Hard truths. We don’t save ourselves by holding on to ourselves. We don’t save ourselves at all.
When we give our life away we are living as a Christian disciple. We are living as Christ because to live only for comfort and safety is not living Jesus’ way. To be shielded from this way of denial and cross is to decide in favor of perceived comfort and safety and to decide against being who we are meant to be.
Living as we do in the near desert of central Texas we have discovered all too painfully this summer water is a valuable commodity. Life cannot be shut up and saved in comfort and safety any more than our waters from rain or rivers can be put in a mason jar to be kept in a kitchen cupboard only to be looked at. Water is not meant to be locked and stored away. It is to be drunk so that we may live, it is to water our earth so we will have food to eat, it is to enjoy in recreation and sport to give us quality in our life. It is to be poured out, to be moving, living water, rushing downstream to share its wealth without ever looking back.
Peter wanted to prevent Jesus’ life from being spilled and wasted, he wanted to save it, to preserve it, to find a safer, more comfortable way for Jesus to be Lord. What he did not see was that Jesus’ supply of life was never-ending.
In the midst of his angst Peter missed the good news. Jesus told him “…on the third day (he would) be raised.” Surely Peter missed that. Who Jesus was to be is woven into this first telling of what we call his passion prediction. Jesus was born to be God’s promised ‘anointed one’ who fulfilled the Old Testament prophecy. He was to be the anticipated king and deliverer who brings salvation to the world. You see, Jesus must go to Jerusalem and endure all the humiliation, suffering and death on that cross to be who WE need him to be. It is the only way we become who God needs us to be.
The disciples now know what Jesus had not told them before. They now know what he must do before he can truly be Messiah. And it must have scared the wits out of them. It must have scared them because this suffering and death was going to happen to one whom they dearly loved, one whom they had left everything for. One whom they desired to live like, loving their enemies, feeding the poor and the widow, forgiving sins, healing and curing the sick.
They had not bargained for the full deal. They had not realized the full cost of discipleship. Jesus was saying that where he goes, we must also go. Surely it cannot be that this is the cost disciples must pay. What kind of Messiah is this? The true Messiah wouldn’t let himself suffer and die such a humiliating death. And he certainly wouldn’t expect his followers to take the same path. Jesus cannot mean we are to take up our cross and follow him into death. Surely he must mean something else.
The minute we try to limit Jesus to something less than what he is meant to be we limit ourselves. For we are called to be full-time, all or nothing disciples. Not just when we are being like him as we teach and heal and make disciples. Not just when we are in our ‘Let’s fix the world’ mode. But even when we are called to pick up our cross and follow him to Calvary.
While Jesus’ cross was evident, ours are less so. We don’t take up a literal cross. We take up life and life is hard to pick up some days. We will suffer, evil lurks, we die and we are in the core of that storm. Yet, when we center our lives in Jesus’, when he becomes the core of our being, we have taken up the cross of life and we can only follow him for he is the light in our storm. True, living this way we lose our way. But living this way we are found by Jesus for whose sake our lives are found.
The stark reality of Jesus’ revealing his destiny to us in this mornings Gospel is that Jesus was about something bigger than the miracles he had performed, he was about something bigger than the fine moral life he was living as an example for us to follow. What Jesus was about was a love so deep he died that our sins would be forgiven and that we would realize God’s promise of eternal salvation for those who accept the invitation, “Come and follow me.”
Our challenge this morning is to follow that kind of savior. One who will not compromise on who he is called to be and who will not compromise on who he expects his disciples to be. Jesus was chosen by God to take up his cross and Jesus expects the same from us. This is the life to which we are called. This is the life that matters for Christ’ sake, not our own.
This just may be where we silence ourselves and slip into the shadows to go on to live a life that matter’s to us. Living Jesus’s way takes us beyond comfort and safety. We cannot deny the fear, it is real, but we need not let our fear stop us. It did not stop Jesus.
To become who God has called us to be means going beyond the limits we place on our lives with false securities. It means receiving our lives as gifts instead of guarding them as our own possessions. It means sharing the gifts we have been given instead of bottling them for our own consumption. It means giving up the notion that we can find another way to be a disciple of Christ that avoids giving our life, body and soul, to our Lord and Savior on his terms.
To be Jesus, our Christ took the road less traveled. His entire life was directed to that road and he took it. He took it and confronted the powers of evil. He was nailed to the cross, knew death first hand, breathed and bleed his last.
If we are to be his friends, his loved ones, and his disciples, where he goes we must go too. This is the way to the truth and the life. This is the way to the good news this world cannot give. There is no other way. If we doubt it we need only remember Job and then Jesus’ promise, “For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done…”
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen
Additional helps:
Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Seeds of Heaven.”
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