Matthew
16:21-28
Tomorrow
is Labor Day. We will celebrate it,
mostly, with a day off. There will be
cookouts and horse shoe tournaments and it will be treated as the last day of
summertime. That’s fine. We need holidays like that to mark the end of
one season and the start of the next. We
are humans, and the awareness of time is a big part of who we are. Just don’t forget, on the day off, that it is
also a day to remember and honor the people whose work makes leisure possible.
How
often we take such things for granted.
We like to think that things come easy.
We celebrate the talent and skill of a Yo-Yo Ma or a Serena Williams and
forget how many hours they spent as children and still spend as adults learning
and perfecting where to place their feet and how to move their arms. We read a good novel and never give a thought
to how many pages were written and then erased, how many drafts were needed to
get it right.
Peter
wanted to look at the kingdom of God that way.
Jesus told his disciples one day about the work and suffering that he
would put into our salvation and Peter almost brushed it off.
“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.’” [Matthew 16:21-22]
Jesus recognized the temptation in this, and he responded
by calling Peter on it, and even using the tempter’s name
“he turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind
me, Satan! You are a stumbling-block to me; for you are setting your mind not
on divine things but on human things.’” [Matthew
16:23]
There could be no shortcut to heaven that would go around
the work and the pain of the cross, as appealing as it would sound.
Jesus
had heard that idea earlier. Before he
ever set out on his ministry, he had been in the desert where the devil had
suggested all kinds of shortcuts and quick fixes and ways for Jesus to reach
his goals if – and “if” was the catch – he took a different road. The culmination came when
“Again, the devil took him
to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their
splendor; and he said to him,
‘All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Away with you,
Satan! for it is written,
“Worship the Lord your God,
and serve only him.” ’” [Matthew 4:8-10]
“Worship the Lord your God,
and serve only him.” ’” [Matthew 4:8-10]
Jesus tried to convey to his followers, who loved him and
did not want to see him suffer, that there was no other way. To be faithful to God and God alone means
that there will inevitably come the time of choice and of testing and of
confrontation, and with it the suffering of a cross.
It’s a
hard lesson to learn. In fact people do
all that they can do not to learn it. In
her memoirs about a particularly difficult time in her own spiritual life, when
she was feeling that she had to set aside a lot that had made her life not easy
(for she struggled to help her husband with his alcoholism and depression) but
easier than it had become, Kathleen Norris writes,
"All of us, I suspect, have times
when we're made to suffer simply for being who and what we are, and we become
adept at inventing means of escape. ...the pain that grows out of one's
identity, that grows out of the response to a call, can't be escaped or pushed
aside. It must be gone through."[1]
She had learned from what Jesus had told his
disciples. He could not turn away from
doing the work that would build the kingdom, and neither could they.
“Jesus told his disciples, ‘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 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?’” [Matthew 16:24-26]
Jesus
and his followers fell into a pattern over time, where he would teach about
what life in the kingdom is like, and they (meaning “we”) would try to modify
it, and he would have to emphasize that he meant what he said in the first
place. For instance, Jesus taught that
we should be forgiving. That seems
pretty straightforward but we all know that it is rarely so simple.
“Then Peter came and said to
him, ‘Lord, if another brother or sister sins
against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times,
but, I tell you, seventy-seven times,’” [Matthew 18:21]
or, as some ancient versions say, “seventy times seven.” Either way, it’s clear he means it. Luke has Jesus teaching his disciples,
“If the same person sins
against you seven times a day, and turns back to you seven times and says, ‘I
repent,’ you must forgive.” [Luke 17:4]
I’ll admit that I hear that and the
first thing I do is say to myself, “Aha!
They have to repent! And if they’ve
done wrong that often, how serious do I think it really is?” I look for the loophole. Yet how often do I ask forgiveness for the
same sins, over and over and over? More
than 490 times, I guarantee.
So
much of what Jesus says seems backwards and upside down and inside out. How should his death be the source of our
life? And if we have found life in him,
why would we need to have anything to do with a cross of our own?
What would make
sense would be to say that you have to work hard to become part of the kingdom
of God, then when you’ve made it, you can enjoy the ride. What Jesus says is that the kingdom of God is
right at hand, and that anyone is welcome and everyone is invited, but once you
are part of it, then the hard work begins.
“For those who want to save their life will
lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” [Matthew 16:25]
It would be as if someone invited just anybody in off the
street to a wedding reception and then looked at one of these haphazard guests
and said, “What’s the matter with you, showing up at a wedding without even
getting dressed up a little?” [Matthew 22:12]
Yet the
lives of Jesus’ followers attest that the way he works sees them through to the
end. Our common image of William Penn comes
from the Benjamin West painting of his treaty with the Indians.
There stands an older, paunchy man in a floppy, brown coat, the negotiator calmly standing between the settlers anxious
to take over the land and the natives anxious not to be tossed out. In fact, Penn could and did hold his own in
argument and dispute and had been tossed into both Newgate Prison and the Tower
of London earlier in his life. In the
Tower, Penn was allowed to have paper and ink so that he could write a
recantation of his views. He used it,
instead, to write a pamphlet he entitled, “No Cross, No Crown”, in which he
said,
“God often touches our best comforts, and calls for that
which we most love, and are least willing to part with. Not that He always take it utterly away, but
to prove the soul’s integrity, to caution us from excesses, and that we may
remember God, the author of those blessings we possess, and live loose to
them. I speak my experience: the way to keep our enjoyments is to resign
them; and though that be hard, it is sweet to see them returned, as Isaac was
to his father Abraham, with more love and blessing than before. O stupid world! O worldly Christians, not only strangers, but
enemies to this excellent faith! and whilst so, the rewards of it you can never
know.”[2]
To be faithful in a faithless
world means that sooner or later you will come into conflict with values and
practices that just don’t fit with Jesus’ ways.
When that happens, hold on tight.
The ride will be rough, but the landing will be safe, and you will be
home.
[2]
William Penn, “No Cross, No Crown” 4.xiii.
See http://www.gospeltruth.net/Penn/nocrossnocrownch4.htm
.
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