Readings
Isaiah 50:4-9a
Psalm 116:1-8
James 3:1-12
Mark 8:27-38
As I reflected on our Gospel passage this past week, I recalled an event from decades ago. Thirty-one years ago, I started my seminary education, and in the first few days of being there I remember going to an orientation session. It was what you might expect. We talked about classes and where they took place. We talked about how to change your schedule. We talked about campus life including worship services in the seminary chapel. And a whole host of other relevant topics.
When all of that was done the dean of the seminary got up to speak to us. Unlike the presenters before, who were joyful and exuberant, the dean’s demeanor was serious. He looked around the room and said something I have never forgotten. He said, “I want to warn you. This is serious business you are about to embark on. If you do this, you will never be the same again. It will challenge your assumptions. It will shake your beliefs. It will fundamentally shift your faith. You will not be the same person you are now when you leave this place.”
You could have heard a pin drop after he said this. People looked around at each other with uncertainty in their eyes. One person even got up and left. But the rest of us stayed, and he was right. When we left three years later, I was a different person, and my faith and convictions had shifted as well.
In today’s Gospel Jesus says, “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.”
You can imagine the crowd. It probably wasn’t much different than in my seminary orientation after the dean’s words. You can hear the silence. You can imagine people looking around at each other with uncertainty. Perhaps even some people got up and left.
The call to take one’s cross would have been both shocking and terrifying to those who first heard it. The cross was a symbol of Roman occupation. It was associated with criminal behavior. It was both torture and punishment. It was possibly the worst way someone could die in the ancient world. When someone was crucified, they were usually beaten before being hung. In contradiction to our tradition, most people were nailed to the cross. And finally, one did not die quickly from blood loss, but rather slowly over days from suffocation. Then to add insult to injury, few if any were allowed to be buried in a family tomb. Most were left on the cross to be carrion for crows and wild animals. Their bones scattered and shattered.
This is the image that confronted the crowds when Jesus called them to follow him. Jesus, apparently, is calling them to sacrifice everything for the faith he has. He is calling them to recognize that there is nothing in this life that can save them and that they should be willing to let it all go.
But was he being literal in his remarks, or was he, as in so many other occasions, using the cross as a metaphor for what it looks like to practice the faith of Jesus rather than simply having faith in him.
Perhaps, just perhaps, his shocking language was intended to rouse the crowd out of their social complacency and comfortable religion. Perhaps he was trying to get them to understand that nothing less than a radical realignment of values would get them to the place where he lived. Perhaps he was trying to get them to realize that faith in him was insufficient to achieve the fullness of life they craved.
Jesus’ words call us to recognize that nothing in this life is permanent and nothing in this life will give us an abiding sense of wellbeing. Some things are fleeting, like a vacation. While other things may last a significant amount of time, like a good marriage. But whether fleeting or long lasting nothing in this world is permanent. Nothing, not even our own lives, lasts forever.
Jesus by inviting us to take up our cross, is inviting us into a practice that Buddhists call non-attachment. Here in the west, we often mistake indifference for non-attachment. But that is not the case, and it is definitely not what Jesus is commending in today’s Gospel.
Non-attachment is a practice of accepting what is without holding on to it. When we practice non-attachment, we can still feel love, passion, interest, and excitement. But we do not become overly attached to the people and things in our life. We do not substitute them for the meaning and purpose we desire.
You know, we substitute things and people for ultimate meaning all the time. Take a moment and think about all of these things and how they become a substitute for the sacred. Think about your spouse, the flag, money, your politics, or countless recreational activities (for example, the Seahawks). Any and all of them are temporary things that pass away and yet we seek meaning and purpose in them, even if only indirectly.
The cross then is the call to practice a different way of living. It is a call to live in the world but not be of it. It is a call that ultimately will lead to the loss of everything while we gain all that we desire.
This is a journey that will lead to us rethinking everything we currently assume to be true. It will lead to us reimagining our relationships. It might mean the end of some of those relationships and the start of new ones we would never have imagined before. It will fundamentally change our sense of ego and what we need to be ourselves. And finally, it will change our relationship to God and cause us to rethink what we have believed in the past.
Yes, this Gospel passage today, like my seminary experience many years ago, is an invitation into something powerful and profound. But we need to be sure we want to take that step, because if we do it will challenge our assumptions. It will shake our beliefs. It will fundamentally shift our faith. We will not be the same people we are now. But we may just find meaning. We may just find purpose. We may just find the sacred we so deeply desire.