Do you remember that guy who was hiking
around the country toting a cross? I do
. . . he visited Tuscaloosa when Pam and I lived there, and there he was,
walking down McFarland Avenue, one of the town’s main drags, a big white cross
slung over his shoulders with what looked like training wheels bolted to the bottom. He'd been doing it for seven years,
reminding us of the need for God in our lives . . . apparently he thought
Tuscaloosa needed a lot of reminding, because he’d been there several times . .
. anyway, I wonder what was going through his mind? Did he think that’s what Jesus meant in
today’s passage, where he says that to follow him we must “take up our cross?” Did he take him literally? Or did he look upon it as a bit of holy
theater, a symbolic act with evangelical overtones, like the man who traveled
all over the South years ago, erecting crosses in groups of three? Or was he just nuts?
Whatever the case, the question of how
literally to take Jesus in this passage has bothered Christians from the start
. . . there were some, in the early centuries, who carried large wooden crosses
around, to show their devotion, presumably without the training wheels, but
early theologians took a more nuanced view . . . “Your cross” wrote Tertullian
around 200 AD “means your own anxieties and your sufferings in your own body,
which itself is shaped like a cross.”[1] A couple of hundred yeas later, Augustine
identified our cross as our “preoccupation with domestic cares,” and summed it
up by saying “what else does the cross
mean than the mortality of the flesh?
This is our very own cross which the Lord commands us to carry . . .”[2] Over the centuries, the cross we are
commanded to bear has been identified as our frail humanity, our weak flesh,
our condition of sin, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Of course, this saying has entered into the
vernacular as a maxim, an aphorism,
as in “That’s just a cross I have to bear,” accompanied by a heavy sigh, and meaning
something that we suffer that we can’t get
out of. Perhaps this is the kind of
thing Paul called “thorn in his side,” and that he asked Christ three times to
remove, without discernible results . . .
But what does all this have to do with
Jesus’ famous command “Get thee behind me, Satan?” And what does it have to do with “Who do
people say that I am,” the question that begins this whole episode? . . . he’s
on his way to Caesarea Philippi – Philip’s Caesarea – when he asks that
question, and the disciples answer by telling them what they’d heard – John the
Baptist . . . Elijah . . . one of the prophets . . . but then he asks them what
they think, he says “Who do you say I am?” and good old Peter, who
represents here all the disciples, answers “You are the Messiah!” And you’d think
he’d get a little praise for his confession, you’d think he’d get a little
approbation, but instead, Jesus sternly orders them not to repeat it, not to
tell anyone about him.
And what’s remarkable about this is that
in the Greek, it’s much stronger than our English translation . . . literally
it’s “rebuke,” as in he rebuked them
so that they would-not-tell anyone about him.
So poor ol’ Peter, he gives the right answer, and he gets slammed for it, he gets rebuked for it . . . and immediately,
Jesus launches into the first of three predictions of his passion and
crucifixion: “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 the thing is, it’s
not an accident that it follows
directly after the rebuke, and in fact it, like the rebuke, is provoked by Peter’s declaration that he
is the Messiah.
And it all hinges around one little word .
. . must. Jesus teaches them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be
rejected, and be killed, and after three days rise . . . and we usually
interpret this as some kind of theological necessity, as in it’s necessary for the Son of Man to suffer
to fulfill the prophecies, to carry out some divine plan, called by some “God’s plan for salvation.” But that’s a theological reading, it attempts to answer why it was necessary in
terms of the inscrutable mechanics of God . . . there’s another reading, equally valid, an anthropological reading, as in the suffering and rejection and
killing and rising again must necessarily
follow certain human actions, that they are logical consequences of what
was happening and what will happen .
. . the Son of Man must undergo great suffering why? Because the Romans and
the religious authorities got nervous, fearing that Jesus came to seize their
power, that he came to usurp their authority . . . and we know that this did happen, just as did the readers of
Mark.
Now we’re in a position to answer the
question of why Jesus rebukes the disciples, why he keeps them from spreading
the news that he was in fact the Messiah . . . he knows that it will only inflame
an already volatile situation, it will only bring his murder on more quickly,
it will only bring on the inevitable.
Calling Jesus Messiah will inflame Messianic expectations, it will
increase the agitation of the people, increase their revolutionary fervor . . .
they expected the Messiah to be a warrior-king, who would restore the Davidic
Kingdom to its former position of ascendancy.
Talk like this would make the rulers of Palestine – the Romans and their
Israelite Herod toadies – very nervous, because no military dictatorship wants
a popular revolution on its hands . . .
And so the fact that Peter’s declaration
of Jesus’ identity is followed immediately by the Savior’s rebuke is not really
a mystery . . . Jesus is trying to put a lid
on the violence, he’s trying to avoid a revolution – which would inevitably
lead to thousands of Israelite dead, and indeed it did 40 years later, when
Jerusalem was burned to the ground . . . Jesus is trying to live up to his
title of Prince of Peace, and he explains it all by pointing out what
inevitably follows that kind of Messiah talk, which was indeed what did follow it: he became a scapegoat for all the contagious
violence, all the unrest of the day, as peace in Jerusalem was momentarily
bought – and the Romans momentarily appeased – by his blood. As the high priest Caiaphas said to the San
Hedrin, “better . . . to have one man die for the people than the whole nation
destroyed.”[3]
Jesus explains it all quite clearly, he
says it all quite openly, for God and the world to hear, and it enrages Peter .
. . he takes Jesus aside and rebukes
him, and there’s that word again, rebuke . . . Mark tells us that Peter does
the same thing that Jesus did to the demons, the same thing that he did to his
disciples . . . Jesus rebukes his
disciples so they won't tell, and then Peter does the same thing to him . . . maybe he thinks Jesus is
possessed, maybe he thinks that he’s nuts, maybe he thinks that a good, stiff
talking-to will bring him around . . . but to Peter’s mind, it's crazy-talk,
it's gibberish. The Messiah was going to
take them all to glory, not die spiked to a tree . . . he was going to lead
them in a glorious military re-taking
of Palestine, not carry a cross up the via
dolorosa . . .
But Jesus calls him Satan – “Get thee behind me, Satan” – he identifies Peter
with the demonic power that leads to bloodshed, the demonic power that creates
mob violence, that threatened even then to plunge them all into a bloody,
un-winnable war, that threatened – and eventually did – make of the Messiah a scapegoat,
a sacrifice to appease the violent gods of oppression and foreign rule. Jesus says Get thee behind me, Satan, and
why? Because Peter – ever the stand-in
for the rest of the disciples, ever the stand-in for us – is setting his mind not on divine things, but on human
things. He’s setting his mind on the
ways of the world – Satan is after all
the ruler of the world – he’s setting his mind on things of the world, not on
those of God.
Anybody seen the movie Moulin Rouge? In it, the charming bohemians orbiting
around the night club are dedicated to “eternal principles,” eternal verities . . . Like the Greek idealists
before them, they attempt to live their lives informed and guided by the ideals
of "truth, beauty, freedom and love." The courtesan Satine is torn between her
love for the impoverished writer – named, I’m sure wholly coincidentally,
Christian – and the evil Duke, who stands for the money-grabbing ways of the
world, where love is just a commodity that can be bought and sold . . . the
movie plays like a struggle for her soul, as she has to choose between setting
her mind on the things of the world – money, comfort, security – or the divine
attributes, the divine ideals of “truth,
beauty, freedom and love."
Like Satine, Peter can choose to set his
mind on the ways of the world or the ways of the divine . . . and when he
upbraids Jesus for predicting his own death, for acting not like a
warrior-Messiah-king, but like a weakling, like a servant, he betrays that choice, he betrays the fact that he’s set
his mind on, that he’s chosen to think
in the categories of the world, that
might makes right, that violence can end violence, that retribution is the way
to justice. And notice that it’s a posed
as a choice . . . Peter can choose to
think in worldly terms or he can set his mind on the divine. It’s his call, his choice, his option.
And of course, we have that choice as well
. . . we can set our mind on the divine things, we can imitate God as revealed
in Jesus Christ – non-violent, non-retributive, wholly forgiving – or the world
– dedicated to the proposition that the ones with the most power – the most
guns, or political power, or money – the ones with the most power are the ones
who get their way. It’s up to us, it
really is . . . we can choose to set our minds on worldly things, or things of
God . . . and we many times take this dichotomy to revolve around consumerism .
. . put your mind on God, rather than all your stuff . . . and that’s a good
thing, but it’s not what this passage is about . . . it’s about power and
violence and hierarchy. And like Peter,
we have a choice: we can set our minds on worldly things or things of the
divine.
And now we are ready to see what carrying
our cross has to do with Jesus’ identity as the Messiah . . . Jesus uses the
metaphor to clarify what he means by setting our mind on divine things . . . if
we carry our cross we suffer—like Jesus—what the world throws at us for
preaching the gospel. Of course, in the
first few hundred years, especially before the faith was legalized by the
empire, that could be a lot. But even
today—especially some non-Western countries—the cross can be heavy. But Jesus has one more metaphor and that’s
losing our lives for Christ’s sake and for the sake of the gospel . . . and
like the carrying the cross, the meaning of this has been debated over the
years . . . some have thought that our faith is not complete, that we’re not
following Christ if we do not die a martyr’s death, others have seen it to be
metaphorical, and that we are to give up our selves, our identities, our
egos, for the sake of the Gospel . .
. and that’s perhaps the scariest thing of all.
Jesus puts the contrast sharply: we can
either be Christ’s or the worlds, we can be shaped by a Christian world-view, a
world-view that rejects hierarchy and violence and oppression, that substitutes
the rule of love for the rule of violence, or we can be shaped by another
world-view, one powered by our need for things,
by the need for more, the need for power, the need for domination . . . it’s up to us.
We have the choice.
And what’s the good news in all of
this? Well, of course, it’s that we do have a choice. God sent God’s son so that we have a choice
of how to live, and mo’ better, so that we have the power, the ability to choose . . . Christ said that
when he is gone, he will send a Spirit, an advocate,
to be with us, and through that
Spirit Christ empowers us to follow the way, to set our minds on things of the
divine. When we make the choice for
Christ, the choice to live the way Christ would have us live, it can seem like
the whole of our world is arrayed against us.
Not necessarily violently – although that can happen – but all the hype, all the culture, all the
dog-eat-dog, free-market competition that values getting ahead at any cost,
even the cost of our neighbor. But we
have an advocate, we have the Holy Spirit with us to show us the way, who will
be with us whatever the world throws at us.
God with us, Christ with
us. Ever and always. Amen
No comments:
Post a Comment