From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me, for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
Matthew 16:21-28 (NRSVue)
Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any wish to come after me, 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 will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?
“For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”
My sermon from the 12th Sunday after Pentecost Sunday (August 30, 2020).
The story of Jesus that we carry within us is usually a hodgepodge of different scenes we see in the Bible. For example, during Christmas, we celebrate angels, shepherds, and magi from the east and put them into one coherent story. But there is no one text in our Bible that has the angels, shepherds, and magi all in the place. Instead, the Christmas story we hold in our hearts is composed of different scenes from different books that make up the narrative of Jesus’ life on earth. That narrative, then, is our creation – rooted in the Bible but doesn’t exactly match with what’s written. Now I don’t consider that a bad thing. No one vision of Jesus’ life – either according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John – can be more “true” than the others. They give us a different kind of encounter with Jesus that, when pulled together, gives us a fuller picture of what God’s love is all about. It’s like if the people in our lives wanted to describe our story. The words used by our siblings, our parents, and our grandchildren wouldn’t always be the same. And it’s where those differences intersected, when we get a deeper sense of who we are. God gave us multiple encounters of Jesus in our Bibles so that we can experience him in a multi-dimensional way. And that’s important because one of those differences in Jesus’ story matters to our reading today from the gospel according to Matthew. But to see that difference, we need to go further along in Jesus’ story, to when Jesus was betrayed by his friend, arrested, and told by those in power to walk and carry the Cross.
Now this part of Jesus’ story is usually reserved for Good Friday. After the governing authorities pronounced Jesus guilty, they forced Jesus to walk through the city and head up a small hill just outside the city’s walls. The Romans, worried that this so-called revolutionary might lead a riot when the city was full of religious pilgrims, forced Jesus to carry the device that would kill him. In our wider Christian tradition, there’s a prayer service called the stations of the Cross – that describes the traditions around Jesus’ long walk. He wept, he cried, and he reached out to some in the crowd. But this walk to the hill known as the place of the skull – is not the same in all four gospels. In the words of Edith Humphrey, while quoting C.S. Lewis, “in John’s gospel, Jesus bears his own cross. He is the only one who does not cling to his prerogative as God – ‘the representative Die-er of the Universe.’” But in the other three gospels, including Matthew, a previously unknown character from the island of Cyrene named Simon, was forced to pick up Jesus’ cross and carry it to the hill. Matthew doesn’t give us any more information about his part in the story. All we know is that Simon lost the privilege of watching Jesus’ story unfold from a distance. He became an active participant in what God was up to in the world. It’s as if, for Matthew, we don’t get the luxury of letting Jesus go to the Cross on his own. The work he does is work only he can do. But we don’t get to run away from those pieces of wood. Jesus’ willingness to experience every part of life – including death – means that we have to, too. We don’t get to run from life. Instead, we get to live through it. And as we do, through our baptism and through our faith, we participate in what Jesus is already doing in the world. In a word, we get to love – because the Cross is our story too.
So when Jesus says – take up your Cross – he’s not zeroing in on the things that annoy you about yourself. He’s also not saying that your illness, pain, or disability is something that you have to overcome before you get to know his love. You are wonderfully and beautifully made – worth every dignity and every grace. Suffering doesn’t define what’s loved and what’s not. Rather, the love God has for you – is what holds you when the pain gets to be too much. The Cross we are called to raise up, to hold and to carry on our shoulders, is a Cross that always leads to new life. But when that life happens to look a little bit like the one we already know – Jesus promises that it’s different because it’s filled with a holy presence that refuses to let our world – and ourselves – be declared as anything but loved.
And that love looks a lot like the love described in Paul’s letter to the Christian community in Rome. It’s a love that isn’t a noun but rather a verb; one that moves and breathes through our life, impacting everything that we do. It’s a love that isn’t afraid to do hard things or one that waits for everyone else to do the work first. The love we’re given is a love that gets its hands dirty in the life we actually live. Jesus isn’t interested in the life we project to others – that one that looks good on Christmas cards, social media, or one that has fireworks at the end of the day. Jesus is much more interested in loving you – as you are – especially when you are feeling alone. Because those moments are the nuanced moments of our lives. They’re the places where different perspectives and understanding collide – revealing deeper truth about ourselves. It’s in those places where we admit the ways we are broken – and that we’re not as strong as we want others to think we are. It’s there where we, instead, own our vulnerabilities, admit our fears, and realize that we’re too quick to categorize our enemies. Our list of enemies usually are not recorded in some real- life version of the Mean Girl’s “Burn Book.” But if we find ourselves nodding along to posts in our social media feeds or segments on cable news that use quotation marks around the names other people call themselves, that spend all their time focused on the hypocrisy of others, who claim that we’re always on the winning side, and who feed us fear at the expense of hope – then we’ve already identified who are enemies are. It’s in those nuanced places where we see how small we want love to actually be. We have no problem with a love that exists for us and for our friends – but the love of God is just too big. And it has to be – because it’s love that says even you – with your small vision of love – is worth everything to God. And since you are worth that much, we get to love others as much as God loves us.
That kind of love isn’t easy. And it’s often a love we don’t want to give. We’re told to welcome strangers – and we’re not allowed to limit what that welcome can mean. We’re also told to share in all joys and in all pain – which will require us to sit and listen to stories that might reveal how we might have been part of the problem. We’re told to not show off our power but to use what we have so that all – including those we don’t want to associate with – can thrive. And if that’s not hard enough – we’re also called to provide a feast for our enemies regardless of how they first treat us. This kind of love is a love that knows Crosses are real. It’s a love that admits that suffering, hardship, and sadness are a very real part of life. But when the brokenness of this world becomes a little too real, the love of Christ that feeds our souls is a love that isn’t afraid to make the sacrifices needed for hope to reign. We, as individuals, are people with unique stories, experiences, and realities. There is no one perspective or point of view about who we are that sum up the mysterious nuanced corners of our lives. But it’s in those corners, I think, where Jesus’ story intersects with our own. And when it does, we get to pick up the Cross – not to save the world – but to love it more deeply because Christ has already come. He’s already lived, died, and was raised – because your life is worth nothing less. And since your life is worth so much – we get to love just as much – and to work for the benefit of all. Or, to sum up the call of love described by Paul, we get to lose what we think life is to instead live the new life that Christ has already given to us.
Amen.