Gracious and loving God, mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace ☩ in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Truly, it is good to be back with you all this morning. Even a great whale, which can swim for long periods of times in the depths, needs to come up for air periodically. That’s what I did last Sunday and the week prior – I spent some time where I didn’t check emails or worry about projects so that I could more fully rest and be present in prayer and breathe in God’s grace. Certainly, it’s not only clergy who have been exhausted by this pandemic – we all have. So make sure you’re taking time to come up for air as well.
We’re
picking up the sermon series on the topic of “What is the Church?” In previous
sermons, we’ve considered the Church’s purpose, why we should come to Church,
and what makes a Christian a Christian. If you’ve missed those sermons, you can
find them archived both in written and audio form. The short summary is that
the Eucharist is the key to understanding these sorts of foundational topics.
Today, the question to ponder is – What does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus?
Already,
the fact that this is a question supposes that the answer is different than it
was for the question of what makes a Christian. As I said two Sundays ago, what
makes a person a Christian is Baptism – both the Sacramental act and the reception
and use of the gift of grace. I’m sure you’ve heard the term “cultural Christian”
which is used to describe people who identify as Christian but whose lives reflect
the old Adam rather than the new. And so the term disciple, which we heard in
the Gospel text from Mark to describe those who follow Jesus, helps us to talk
about those who actively seek to live into the gift of Baptismal grace.
As
I mentioned in a sermon a few weeks ago, the term “disciple” means something
like a student or an apprentice. A disciple is someone for whom Christian is
not a noun, a status, but rather a verb, a way of being. The way Jesus speaks
of this is by saying “If any want to become my followers,” which literally
means to “come behind me.” Disciples are those who follow Jesus in the same way
that chicks follow the mother hen. I recently saw an interview with someone who
was a self-described Christian and was at a protest against what she called the
tyranny of vaccines and masks. She told the interviewer that this pandemic was
God’s way of separating the sheep from the goats. When asked which she was, without
skipping a beat, she responded, “I ain’t no sheep that is told what to do, so
that makes me a goat.” If you’re missing the irony, check out chapter 25 of Matthew
later in which Jesus says that the goats are cast into hell and the sheep
inherit the Kingdom.
What
this tells us is that discipleship is about both mimicking Jesus in the same
way that children learn language and behavior by mimicking their parents, and
discipleship is also about following Jesus. This means that we don’t get to
make up the rules of faith. We don’t get to set the course of discipleship. We
don’t get to determine what works best for us. Either we are following Jesus,
or we are off on some other path.
And
what is this path of discipleship? What is the central teaching that we must
learn and imitate as disciples of Jesus? What does it mean to be a disciple?
Well, don’t take my word for it because Jesus has clearly spelled it out for us.
As we heard, “Then Jesus began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo
great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the
scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again… and Jesus said to
them, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up
their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it,
and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will
save it.’”
There
it is: both a clear summation of the Gospel as well as an explanation as to why
so many of us prefer being cultural Christians to following Jesus. Being a
disciple takes us to the Cross.
I’ve
been rereading a book that I’ve mentioned several times over the past couple of
years that helps us to understand the Biblical context of this passage. The
book is called Seculosity. The thesis of the book is that all humans are
religious – meaning that we all look to some external system to determine our
sense of identity, purpose, and worthiness. Some turn to religion, but few, if
any, of us are monotheists, because we all seek validation in multiple places.
The subtitle of the book gives us a sense of what these other things are: “How
Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion
and What to Do About It.” In other words, we are being discipled by so many
other forces and ideas that, like Peter, we need to be rebuked and reminded to
follow Jesus, lest we focus too much on human things instead of divine things.
This
Biblical event happened at a place we would call the Golan Heights – a part of
Syria that is currently occupied by Israel. There’s a spring there that is fed
by the snowmelt from Mount Hermon which feeds into the Jordan River and gives
life to what would otherwise be a largely uninhabitable desert. At the time of
Jesus, this site was associated with the Greek gods. There was a sizeable
shrine there of which you can still see the ruins if you visit. And in the shrine,
there were many niches where statues of various gods would have been. Perhaps
those gods didn’t go by the name “social media” or “401k,” but the idea is the
same. They were things that compete for our loyalty and allegiance. And Mark
makes it clear that this happened as they traveled around the villages of
Caesarea Philippi, which is a clear imperial reference. So not only does this
passage take place in sight of these others deities, but it happened in the
shadow of the empire.
It
is no accident that it is in this context that Jesus asks the question “who do
you say that I am?” Discipleship is not something that we add to our lives to
maximize ourselves. It’s not a dash of yoga, a bit of exercise, a little Jesus,
and then making sure that we’re getting a promotion every 5 years and doubling our
net worth every decade. No, following really is the right way of understanding
this. To follow Jesus means to not follow those other things. This is what
makes discipleship such a challenge – to say “yes” to following Jesus is to say
“no” to a lot of other things. This is why Baptism has to be understood as
death to self, death to the world, death to all of those other gods so that we
can be fully transformed in the new life of Christ.
This
is what the cross symbolizes – an end to human achievement, a repudiation of worldly
success, a rejection of taking the easy way out. As the theologian Robert
Farrar Capon has put it, “If the world could have lived its way to salvation,
it would have, long ago. The fact is that it can only die its way there, lose
its way there.” Disciples are those who have learned that the cross stands at
the heart of all things and follow Jesus on that way.
One
writer has called the cross the “abyss of wonders, center of desires, school of
virtues, house of wisdom, throne of love, theatre of joys, place of sorrows,
root of happiness, and gate of heaven.” Indeed, the cross is all of these
things. But the thing is that the cross is not what we would choose. As St.
Paul writes in First Corinthians, “For the message about the cross is
foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the
power of God… Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim
Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” Notice
the words that Jesus uses in this passage from Mark to describe the life of
discipleship: suffering, rejection, death, deny, forsake, lose.
These
are not the words that we have been taught to embrace, rather, we pursue the
opposite. We project strength, power, greatness, riches, and winning. The cross
is the complete rejection of all of those things. Perhaps, this is what led the
English author GK Chesterton to write, “The Christian ideal has not been tried
and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” The cross means
what we fear it means. The Roman philosopher Cicero once wrote, “To bind a citizen
is a crime; to flog him, an abomination; to slay him is an act of murder. But
to crucify is – what? No fitting word can possibly describe a deed so horrible.”
The
cross is about humiliation, rejection, defeat, and death. And that is where
Jesus tells his disciples that he is going and if we are going to follow him we
must also take up our cross. Now, Christians often try to get around this by
speaking about any little hardship as “our cross to bear.” This is to miss the
point. We are to follow Jesus on the way to his cross so that we might see God’s
gracious and merciful love for us. When we look upon the cross, we are assured
of our salvation as we see what God has done for us. Then, trusting that if God
would endure the cross for us and for our salvation, we then find the strength to
take up the cross.
It’s
not that we bear our cross in order to find our salvation, rather it is in
coming to the foot of the cross that we see our salvation and are strengthened
to follow Jesus in the way of the cross. What the cross says to us is that God
is always for us and with us. If God endured the cross, then what can separate
us from the love of God in Christ Jesus? Not a thing. This reality is what led
Dietrich Bonhoeffer to say “Only the suffering God can help.”
It
is in the cross that we see the difference that Christ makes. Humiliation
becomes exaltation. Violence leads to peace. Hatred is transformed into love.
Degradation turns to veneration. Despair becomes hope. Estrangement is converted
into reconciliation. Death blossoms into life. This is the grain of the
universe, and we see this grain in the wood of the cross.
Yes,
we might prefer an invincible God to a crucified one. But just look at our
lives, our society, our world. It’s broken. What we need right now isn’t some
warrior god who has turned his back on us or is impotent to do anything about the
world’s suffering. Rather, what we long for us is a God who knows pain, who can
redeem suffering, who can promise us that all really shall be well. And this is
what the cross gives to those who are able to gaze upon the cross and see the Lamb
of God who takes away the sin of the world and grants us peace. Once we see the
difference that the cross makes to our salvation, we are transformed to take up
our cross and follow that in that way which leads to abundant and eternal life.
One author has put it this way, “People who have nothing to lose are free to
give everything away.” And the reason why we have nothing to lose is because of
the cross of Christ.
To be a disciple in the way of the cross will not be easy. It will take community, which is why we need the Church. It will take grace, which is why we are given the Eucharist to nourish us. It will take transformation, which is why Jesus shows us that his is way, the truth, and the life. As Jesus asks, “For what will it profit us to gain the whole world and forfeit our lives?” God has given us the key to the Kingdom, and that key is cross-shaped.
