Mark 8:31-38
Presented March 8, 2009, by J.D. Kline
The Second Sunday in Lent
While visiting my mother in the Hanover, PA hospital a week and a half ago and reading The Evening Sun, the local Hanover-Gettysburg area paper, I came across an editorial beginning with the observation, “Life is made up of the small things.” The writer shared the story of Mike Martin, a formerly homeless man who had resurrected a community garden in the area, providing some 1400 pounds of fresh produce last year for local homeless agencies and neighbors in need. In these troubled economic times, suggested the editorial writer, this was an idea that could well spread throughout the community, creating opportunity for the sowing of seeds that make a significant difference in the quality of life. As I considered the words of the editorial, I was reminded that the sowing of seeds impacts our own lives every bit as much as those of our neighbors. The educator and author John Erskine once observed, “I have never had so many good ideas, day after day, as when I worked in my garden,” reminding us that the art of gardening not only has the potential of making produce available for our neighbors, but equally so, providing healing and wisdom for our souls.
Our Lenten theme this year is “Seeds of New Life,” offering a similar reminder that the life of faith nurtures our souls, planting seeds that may well bring new levels of healing and wholeness to the world around us. Our calling as followers of Jesus is to live and proclaim a radically new way of living, planting seeds of compassion and grace, seeds of mercy and peace, seeds of generosity and gratitude, seeds of kindness and hope. You and I are called to plant seeds of risky love, the kind of love Jesus had in mind when prodding his followers to deny self, take up a cross, and follow in paths of discipleship. It is a matter of letting go of self-centeredness and self-preoccupation—an experience Jesus speaks of as losing life in order to find life.
This morning’s Gospel lesson from Mark, chapter eight, is a familiar one—the story of Jesus teaching the disciples that he “must undergo great suffering and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again” (8:31). Surely the disciples, by this stage of their life with Jesus, had gotten the sense that it could well be risky business to keep company with Jesus. But now Jesus is telling them, not just that danger is ahead, but even more, that he must walk straight into that danger. What’s more, it is for Jesus a danger that will lead to certain death.
We’ve heard these words so frequently that they little shock us, but such was not the case for the first disciples, who shared the common hope of the day that the Messiah would lead a successful revolt, sword in hand, against the despised Roman oppressors. Peter, speaking for the twelve, is so appalled that Jesus would speak of approaching death rather than victory that he pushes Jesus aside and begins to scold him. In Matthew’s version Peter is pictured as crying out, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you” (Matthew 16:22). But Jesus’ counter-rebuke is even stronger: “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” (16:23).
Setting our minds on diving things. How is it that we set our mind on divine things, but by learning to view and experience life from a markedly fresh perspective, grappling with what it means to take up a cross? When Jesus talks of cross bearing, he doesn’t have in mind simply coping with life’s difficulties and uncertainties—with a bad health problem, for example, or an annoying neighbor, or an irritating spouse, or even an obnoxious boss, as challenging as those experiences may be. No, Jesus is talking about following him, putting on his spirit of compassion and peace and grace, learning to walk with a new set of values, a new purpose, a new heart that reflects the very heart of God. In his book Finding My Way Home Henri Nouwen asserts that “when God looks at our world, God must weep.” Why? “Because,” says Nouwen, “the lust for power has entrapped and corrupted the human spirit.” Cross bearing means that we too weep at life’s brokenness and pain, life’s injustices and oppressions. It is a matter of lamenting, as Nouwen acknowledges,
In the news and even in our families and ourselves we see that instead of gratitude there is resentment, instead of forgiveness there is revenge, instead of healing there is wounding, instead of compassion there is competition, instead of cooperation there is violence, instead of love there is immense fear.
We weep with God, confessing that we have not yet learned to embody the truth Jesus proclaimed centuries ago, prodding us to embrace a new kind of power, the power of self-giving love. Martin Luther King, Jr. affirmed this same truth, proclaiming in his final sermon, delivered in Memphis the evening before the day of his assassination, that people of faith are called to develop “a kind of dangerous unselfishness.” It is an unselfishness that empowers us to look beyond questions of our own safety and self-interest to questions focusing on our deepest calling in life. Referring to the familiar parable of the Good Samaritan, Dr. King suggests that it is not enough to ask, as did the religious leaders who passed on by, “What is the price I must pay, if I stop to help this man in need? What will happen to me?” No, the real question of faith, asserts Martin King, is rather, “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?” Dangerous unselfishness, risky self-giving love—these are critical aspects of discovering what it means to set our minds on divine things, embracing life with God at the center of our living.
In an article entitled “An Experiment in Love,” written in 1958, Dr. King works at defining agape, the Greek word reserved for this lofty kind of self-giving love, love that reflects the very nature of our God. Writes Martin King,
Agape is not a weak, passive love. It is love in action. Agape is love seeking to preserve and create [relationship and] community. It is insistence on community even when one seeks to break it. Agape is a willingness to go to any length to restore community. It doesn’t stop at the first mile, but it goes the second mile to restore community. It is a willingness to forgive, not seven times, but seventy times seven to restore community. The cross is the eternal expression of the length to which God will go in order to restore community. The resurrection is a symbol of God’s triumph over all the forces that seek to block community. The Holy Spirit is the continuing community-creating reality that moves through history. [Those] who work against community are working against the whole of creation. . . . In the final analysis, agape means a recognition of the fact that all of life is interrelated.
This is the key, is it not—this conviction that God created us for relationship, and we are called to take the risk of active, self-giving, agape love that takes it as its goal the restoring of community. Is this not what Jesus had in mind when asking that challenging question at the conclusion of this morning’s Gospel lesson: “For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?” (Mark 8:37). What will it profit us if we gain wealth and honor and status in life, but lose sight of God’s call to embrace something more in life—a dangerous unselfishness, a love in action, a passion to restore community to the fullness God envisions for human life?
Mother Teresa, so active in her care for the poor and the dying on the streets of Calcutta, India, puts it yet another way, encouraging us not simply to worry about our own careers, our own position and reputation and standing in life, our own questions of how it is that we are to get ahead in life. Instead, counsels Mother Teresa, “Concern yourself with your vocation,” which is “to be lovers of Jesus.” Lovers of Jesus who in turn take it as their passion to love and serve their neighbors, their fellow humans, with a risky love, a dangerous unselfishness.
Kent Nerburn has a book entitled Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace, based upon the beautiful prayer written by Francis of Assisi, in which he reminds us that “when we try to understand God, we are like children trying to hold sunlight in our hands. We recognize the presence of something ineffable and mysterious, but always it eludes our grasp.” Try as we may, we cannot reduce our relationship with God to a simple compilation of doctrinal beliefs, nor to a mere list of dos and don’ts. Instead, faith is a matter of ever grappling with the what it means to be a lover of Jesus, with how we shall embrace the challenging task of denying self, taking up a cross, and following in the footsteps of Jesus, with how our lives shall change as we consider the high and noble calling of dangerous unselfishness—doing justice, loving tenderly, and walking humbly in the presence of our God.
Which brings us to the critical question: are we willing to grapple with this new way of living Jesus urges us to embrace? Shane Claiborne is one of the founding members of The Simple Way, a group of Christians in the Philadelphia area who together moved into one of the poorest neighborhoods of the city, seeking to embody Christ’s new way of living. In his book The Irresistible Revolution Claiborne asks the simple question, “What if Jesus really meant it?” What if Jesus was serious when he challenges us to an upside-down way of living that includes embracing the poor, loving the enemy, going the extra mile in relationships, forgiving seventy times seven, losing life in order to find life, breaking down walls of suspicion and misunderstanding, opening doors and welcoming in the broken, the neglected, the lonely, the forgotten, the disenfranchised?
Claiborne tells a story from a trip to Iraq with Christian Peacemaker Teams in the early days of the war, worshiping with a church body whose priest had just served six months in prison for his open proclamation of the gospel of scandalous grace. The priest told the story of a woman whose son and husband had been arbitrarily killed by a police officer. The officer was brought before a court, and as the judge was deciding what sentence the officer deserved, the woman announced, “He took my family away from me, and I still have a lot to give, and he needs to know what love and grace feel like—so I think he should have to come to visit my home in the slums, twice a month, and spend time with me, so that I can be a mother to him, so that I can embrace him, and he can know that my forgiveness is real.”
It was a remarkable expression of the scandalous grace, the dangerous unselfishness, at the heart of the gospel of Jesus. With that Iraqi woman, we are called to take seriously the challenging model of Jesus, to sow seeds of risky love, to display dangerous unselfishness, to lose our lives that we might find abundant, risky, grace-filled life. God grant us courage to sow seeds of risky love. Amen.