Sermon: 2nd Sunday in Lent, 2/25/24

Grace, Peace and Mercy from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

In today’s Gospel text, Jesus starts teaching some controversial things. He says, “quite openly” to everyone how He, the Son of Man, must undergo great suffering, be rejected by the authorities, killed, and then rise again from the dead in 3 days. Peter was, to say the least, flabbergasted. He was so upset by the things Jesus was declaring, that he took Jesus aside to scold Him for saying such horrible and crazy things. Peter is worried that Jesus has completely lost His mind. Jesus retorts: “Get behind me, Satan!”. Now its getting dicey between Jesus and Peter. Out of all things to be called by Jesus, Satan is not the name you want to go by. Peter is not actually being called the Devil, of course. But Peter is placing himself as a stumbling block to the mission of Jesus. Peter is acting out of place, the disciple trying to bend the Teacher to his expectations, while understandably concerned when Jesus is saying things no one in their right mind would utter. Surely the Son of Man, the Messiah will not be subject to such humiliations, and resurrection? What in the world is that about? Peter has reached the limit of what he can understand. What is also evident from this exchange, is that Jesus is breaking off from His follower’s expectations. He is revealing the truth that is to come, and not even the disciples are ready for it, or have the mind to comprehend what they will witness. Perhaps Peter thought, here we have our great winner, but Jesus clarifies that to be His disciple is to lose, not win. That He Himself will win by losing, from a human point of view. Focusing on the human, perhaps what Christ proclaims sounds crazy, what He calls His followers to do sounds contrary to worldly reasoning. But setting our minds on the divine perspective, it shifts how winning and losing, success and failure, even the cross, look like.

Jesus proceeds to clarify to everyone what being with Him entails: Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Him. To lose one’s life is to save it, to save one’s life is to lose it. To gain the world is to forfeit one’s life. In each of these pronouncements, Jesus invites His followers into the upside down life of the Gospel. Clearly, not only are the standards of discipleship raised, but also the stakes of living such a life. To engage in the Gospel way is to intensely experience the struggles that govern life and death. The Gospel concerns itself with the most important aspects of our lives, it is not some corner of the room that we dust off from time to time. Jesus is asking of His disciples to fully engage with the life that they have been given, the values of God’s Kingdom. We should not act as stumbling blocks to our own walk in the Gospel, but rather follow behind Jesus and trust in His call. So what does this commandment of Jesus entail? What does it mean for us to deny oneself and take up our cross, to lose our life to save it? There is an interpretation of this text out there in which this commandment looks rather grim, and, to be clear, these are hard words to hear, even to the disciples, many of which had already given up many things to follow Jesus. But there is also something pulsing with power in this text. It is first of all, the claim that in this way of life, which might send us to shed away our own desires for wealth, power and status, there is true life. We will know that we are really living when we deny ourselves the satisfactions we think we need. We might think that either this or that will quench and fill our spirit, that we uplift ourselves by indulging in the desires the world values, but only in limiting the power of the things that we cling to, can we realize that freedom is found only in the God that is worthy of our attention, the God that our very being needs to cling to. And to pay attention to God is to sometimes deny oneself the luxuries of wealth, power and status. To pay attention to God is to deny oneself the addictive taste of hatred and judgement of others. To pay attention to God is to deny oneself having one’s cake and eating it too. To pay attention to God is to deny oneself privileges for the sake of solidarity with the least of these. And so in following Jesus, we also take up our cross. Each and everyone of us has a particular cross to bear by which we persevere through in faith. The cross is such a radical reality. If we hear it with the ears of the author of Mark’s gospel, the cross was a scandalous symbol, associated with criminals and imperial public shaming and intimidation. Why does Jesus remark to His disciples to take this instrument of death? It probably meant that in living out the Gospel way, the powers of the world would try to shame them and kill them. To live in the footsteps of Jesus, to proclaim God’s Kingdom, is to upset the values and systems that keep many oppressed. And so to be a Christian is not necessarily to be admired. To be a Christian is to be faithful to the call of life that Jesus is making. So carrying our crosses, we do not seek to revel in a performance of pain and anguish, or even to submit to the idea that God is making us suffer for x or y reason and thus we have to bear it quietly, but rather it affirms the reality of affliction that comes from loving, prophesying, and living like Jesus. Jesus is preparing us by letting us know that by living the life of the Gospel we will be subject to affliction because of the Gospel.

In accordance with the world’s standards, you won’t get much by following Jesus. Our struggles will not be public concern for many. But we are walking in the light of God, and that makes the cross carrying, as Luther would remark: a sign of hope where there is no hope. For what Christ will do on the cross will prove God’s desire for us is to be with us in the thick of struggle to uplift us to life and renewal. He is not up there far away in Heaven, He is right here in the trenches of life with us. In many ways, this text is a plea similar to one in Deuteronomy, but from a paradoxical point of view: choose life…by picking up your cross! Choose the path by which God shows up! It is a hard path, but an authentic and true one, one that brings out the realness of our humanity and manifests by it the grace of the goodness of God. We have many cross-bearers, many who have heeded this call of Jesus, and have planted in the world the life-giving seed of the Gospel. In this our very church, we have a stained glass window depicting the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer bore the cross of his times during WW2, resisting the evil influence and corruption of the Nazi regime and actively resisting it by being a faithful Christian, praying, worshiping, loving his neighbors, actively exhibiting in his life the power of the claims of Jesus. Because of Jesus, Bonhoeffer did not submit to the mangling of Christian faith that happened in Nazi Germany, nor did he submit to the hatred promulgated by Nazi pulpits. He was ultimately persecuted for keeping his steps on the Gospel path. You see in the window, the clothes he is wearing, the barbed wire that surrounds him? He was imprisoned, this man that came from a wealthy, highly educated and good named German family, was imprisoned, shamed, and ultimately killed because could do no other than follow the call of the Gospel and not be ashamed of Christ’s words in the face of the society’s all-consuming spiral into its systemic sin. Christian love, mercy and service became a threat, and that is the cross that is picked up when we follow Jesus. But you see the barbed wire that is broken apart? Because in the cross, we do not see the end, but the beginning of God’s redeeming work. God breaks through the barbed wires and the chains of death, to lift us up to new life as He has promised. So this is not a call to suffer more than you already do. It is not a call to accumulate more merit. It is a call to adhere faithfully to the life of the Gospel, that will ultimately bring its challenges because the world will oppose such love and compassion, because such love and compassion complicates and disturbs the designs of those who want to oppress. It is a reminder that inhabiting the divine things is to throw oneself to the thick of life, accompanied daily by the love of Jesus and His mercy to counter the hostility of the world, and witness to its transformation into God’s Kingdom of Justice and Peace. Today, we in particular might not live in such life or death situations, but everyday we are surely subject to situations in which your discipleship, your cross-bearing is called for. Either in keeping integrity, or speaking the truth about a situation, or in inviting compassion and forgiveness to those around us, there is always a moment by which we must carry the cross that comes from living the way of Jesus, where we deny the world its satisfaction of making us in its image and instead glorify God in Heaven by our adherence to Jesus’ love in us. So let us not dread this call, but instead trust the One that calls us forth to journey with Him in this way.

Let us pray: Lord Jesus, you ask us to deny oneself, to take up our cross and follow you. Give us the strength to carry faithfully our burdens for the sake of the Gospel, that we may always reflect a love that transforms and recreates life in accordance to Your Will of love, O Lord. Amen.