February 28, 2021
/The Second Sunday in Lent
Romans 4:13-25 | Psalm 22:22-30 | Mark 8:31-38
The Rev. Bradley Varnell
Jesus didn’t come into the world to start an organization, he didn’t come offering pithy teachings that we could incorporate into our lives. Rather, he came to inaugurate the rule of God in our world. Jesus’ mission is bound up with the kingdom of God coming to earth as it is in heaven. In his life – his teaching, his healing, his exorcising – Jesus brings the love of God to bear on the world around him. That’s what made Jesus so incredibly threatening. Jesus didn’t simply preach love, Jesus acted in love. Jesus allowed the love of God to impact the world around him. Through Jesus, the love of God made its mark on the world: causing the blind to see, the lame to walk, to possessed to go free. Jesus preached the kingdom of God in a world controlled by kingdoms of sin and death. Jesus was the crack in the foundation of the empires of Rome and Herod.
The disciples put a lot of hope in Jesus. Just before today’s reading, Jesus asks them “who do you say that I am?” Peter replies straightaway: you are the messiah. Now, there were expectations of messiahs. Messiahs were triumphant, they were winners, they cast off the enemy and liberated the people. If Jesus is the messiah, then Peter and the disciples know what to expect! Or so they thought. Today, Jesus teaches them what it means for him to be the messiah: it means he will end his earthly career in suffering and death. Jesus isn’t the kind of messiah they are expecting, and so Peter rebukes Jesus! The audacity!! You’re going to rebuke the messiah because you don’t like what he’s doing? It’s an impressive move on Peter’s part…and, I think, one that we should sympathize with. How often are we like Peter? Rebuking Jesus, or challenging Jesus, or just ignoring Jesus in favor of our own visions and fantasies of what Jesus should be like. The danger which Christians must always avoid is making Jesus into our mascot. The living Jesus is not someone we can conscript to support our own ideologies and prejudices, rather he is the living, free Son of God who demands that we become like him, not the other way around.
It is for this reason that Jesus lays out in stark clarity what it means for others to follow him. To be his follower is to follow in his footsteps, to tread a path filled with suffering and death. 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. If we want to call Jesus our Lord, our master, our messiah, then we must walk the walk. We must share Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of God and we must allow ourselves to be so given over to the love of God that it makes waves in the world. This is why Jesus must die in the first place. Jesus must die not because he is bound to some blind fate, but because the life Jesus lives, the love Jesus shares, the hope that Jesus inspires will always lead to suffering and death in a world filled with sin and evil. When love moves from mere sentiment to action, it’s always threatening to those who have closed themselves off to love, those who have traded love for power and security. Our world, simply put, does not easily respond to the free, life-giving, liberating love of God. This love turns things on its head, it destabilizes us, it calls the ways things are into question, and challenges us to let go of fear in favor of love. The love of God does not remain in a box or in boundaries, it spills over! It makes a mess of the worlds we have so meticulously created – bringing in the outcast, the undesirable, enemies and friends!
If we want to be more than admirers of Jesus, more than members of his fan club, if we want to follow him, then we have to love so deeply, so fully, so recklessly that it will cause waves. We must become like Jesus. This will involve suffering – suffering with others and suffering for others. It will also involve death – the crosses we pick up are not the inconveniences of life, they are the deaths which the love of God leads us to. Deaths to self, deaths for others. Metaphorical deaths and physical deaths. To suffer and die is simply to follow Christ. It’s part of the package. It doesn’t mean it’s good, it simply means that that’s the reality of the world we live in. The Christian hope is for a day and time when death and suffering will be no more because the love of God will be all in all. The love of God overcomes suffering and death, not by avoiding them, but by exceeding them. In the words to his disciples today, Jesus says the Son of Man must undergo great suffering…be killed, and after three days rise again. Peter seems to have missed the “rise again” part, and so do we. Jesus can face the future before him, he can bear the costs of his mission because the God he loves and serves will not let suffering and death be the final word. So it is for us, the courage to love God and love others with the passion of Jesus doesn’t come from a belief that God will then protect us from the bad things, but from the trust that God will not abandon us to suffering and death.
The world does not need more members of the Jesus fan club or more admirers of Jesus. The world needs more followers. The world needs more people who are so committed to the rule of God in the world, to the healing and wholeness which the love of God brings that they are willing to venture to the edges of society to bring that message, that they are willing to confront the powers of the world, willing to accept suffering and death for the sake of Jesus and his gospel. This path will cost us our lives, but better to lose our life for the sake of sharing the love of God than gain a world that is so afraid of love that it would kill it. Amen.