For the Sake of the Gospel
Notes
Transcript
What does the cross mean to you? I wonder if you were to do a count, how many would you find in your house? Is it part of your home decor? Is it part of your jewelry collection? I remember in our first home, Jim and I had a whole wall of crosses in our dining room. It was a lovely display.
It does seem that we have grown accustomed to crosses. We comment on how beautiful they are. I myself in worship settings have fashioned many different crosses: crosses made of roses, mosaic, wood, moss, and more. But what does the cross truly mean to you?
To most of us, the cross represents life. It represents victory. It is a symbol of hope and eternal life through the sacrifice of Christ.
But to Peter, it was an embarrassment.The cross was a criminal’s death. Peter had just had this epiphany moment in realizing that Jesus was the Messiah, the long-awaited Holy One to save Israel from Roman occupation and oppression.
But then Jesus started talking about how he was going to be rejected and suffer and be killed and in three days rise again. I’m sorry.......what! Everything comes screeching to a halt. Can you imagine? Peter had left everything to follow Jesus. He had put all of his eggs into the Jesus basket, all of his hopes into this one man to lead them into freedom, and now he’s just talking crazy.
Peter has had all he can take of this talk and grabs hold of Jesus and“corrects” him. The verb here is used elsewhere in Mark for silencing unclean spirits and savage forces (1:23; 3:12; 4:39). In other words, it is a strong word. I imagine Peter putting some quarters in the swear jar here in a literal “what on earth are you thinking” kinda way. Jesus, you are the Messiah, and the Messiah doesn’t just suffer and die.
Jesus turns to Peter in front of everyone by saying “Get behind me Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” The Message translates it as “you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”
Why did Jesus say “Get behind me Satan?” Just as it was in the wilderness, the devil is always trying to offer a back road to glory. In Peter’s rebuke, he is tempting Jesus to become king by the world’s methods, to reach the crown of life without the cross. Messiahship and cross don’t match up. Christ the King is supposed to rule with an iron fist, not a wounded body.
Are we really any different than Peter? It is easy to look at him here and think, “man he has got some nerve.” But maybe we too have had our own vision of what the Messiah should look like and act like. Christine Painter says we have to renounce “even our images of God so that we can meet God in the fullness of that divine reality beyond the boxes and limitations we create. Images of a judgmental God, of a vending machine God, a capricious God, a prosperity God.” Any God who is made in our image.
We want a God who will always answer our prayers with a resounding yes, who will bless us with health and a good job, a loving spouse, and a sweet tax refund. We want God to be our American dream, not the latest headline in the tabloid. Truth-be-told, we sometimes want the benefits of saying we are Christian without actually walking with Christ.
Martin Luther believed that there was a contrast between what he called a theology of glory and a theology of the cross. In describing this, Joseph Small says “the theology of glory confirms what people want in a god; the theology of the cross contradicts everything that people imagine that God should be.” This is hard for us to imagine as we often hear the gospel seated on a padded pew surrounded by stained-glass windows. The theology of glory would be like rallying Jesus as President when the theology of the cross is more like going to visit Jesus on death row. Small says “To confess Jesus as Messiah is to recognize his dying body on the cross, and to recognize that discipleship is the way of our own cross.”
Jesus says “take up your cross.” He didn’t just say this to Peter. He didn’t just say it to his disciples. He said it to the whole crowd.
The image of the cross was gruesome. Hulitt Gloer says that “Jesus’ hearers knew exactly what taking up the cross meant. In 6 CE they had watched the Romans crucify two thousand Galilean insurrectionists.” The cross was a death sentence.
Jesus says if you want to follow me, you have to deny yourself and take up your cross. Somehow in losing our life, we save it. Peter wanted to take hold and direct the course of the Messiah to where he wanted it to go. But discipleship is about followership. Henri Nouwen says that “Jesus has a different vision of maturity: It is the ability and willingness to be led where you would rather not go.”
To follow Christ and take up our cross, we have to get our “self” out of the way.
Thomas A Kempis says this well in saying, “There will be many who love Christ’s heavenly kingdom, but few who will bear his cross. ..He finds many who share his table, but few who will join him in fasting. Many are eager to be happy with him; few wish to suffer anything for him.”
Like Peter, we have to die to our ideas of what we think the Messiah should be so we can fully see who the Messiah actually is. Like we are looking at in our Lenten study, this may mean dying to our distractions, to our fears, to our deadlines, to our people-pleasing, to our anxiety, to our need to be right, and to our desire to be in control. How can we take up anything for Jesus if our spirits and our hands are always distracted and full?
Taking up our cross is about living a life fully given over to Christ.
Samuel Wells says “If you have denied your “self,” the cross you take up isn’t exactly yours. If you want to be Jesus’s follower, you are realizing that the true human life, the true goal and destiny of all human striving, is not your life but his.” Our true self, our most authentic self, is the self that is lived in surrender to Christ for the sake of the gospel.
So what does the cross mean to you?
O Lord, help us to hold nothing back. Help us to sing with heart that you would have your own way Lord. Guide us and bring us to full surrender before you.