2 Lent – February 25, 2024
Mark 8:31-38
Just before this part of the gospel of Mark that we hear today, Peter stumbles onto the truth about his teacher, about Jesus – “You are the Messiah”, Peter realizes.
And now, whatever great aspirations the disciples attribute to the Messiah, Jesus shuts down. He tells them he must undergo great suffering and be rejected and be killed. But he will rise again.
Peter wants none of it and takes Jesus aside to rebuke him. I think that’s understandable. But Jesus rebukes Peter and the stakes are so high, that it becomes a real life-and-death clash between the divine and the diabolical. “Get behind me, Satan”, Jesus says. “You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
This is a difficult passage to hear because almost every day all of us are tempted by worldly standards of prestige and reputation. So, let’s consider Jesus’ words as not condemnation of Peter but as a necessary reminder to Peter — and to us. As soon as we set our sights on someone or something other than the cross, we have most definitely traded the death and resurrection of Jesus with a more convenient and acceptable means of imagining what it means to follow Jesus. What it means to be a disciple. What it means to live and be in a world that desperately needs to know that being a Christian is not an easy ticket to heaven. Is not your guarantee of prosperity. Is not your bypass around the hardships of life. Peter needs this reminder — and so do we.
Jesus is essentially helping Peter, and us, to face what we try so hard to avoid – suffering and death.
As Debi Thomas asks: “What would Jesus say, I wonder, to the multi-million-dollar industries that invite me to deny my mortality through cosmetics, fashion, leisure, sex, entertainment, real estate, sports cars, weight loss, beauty? What would he say to a culture that glorifies violence but cheapens death? A culture that encourages rugged individualism and “freedom” at the expense of self-giving compassion and empathy? What would he say to my own frightened heart, that prioritizes self-protection over so much else that matters in this life? What if Jesus’s call is for us to stop clutching at this life so desperately? To step out of the vicious cycles of denial, acquisition, terror, and violence that seek to cheat death, but in fact rob us of the abundant life Jesus comes to give us?
To take up a cross as Jesus did is to stand in the center of the world’s pain. Taking up the cross means recognizing Christ crucified in every suffering soul and body that surrounds us, and pouring our energies and our lives into alleviating that pain.
How shall I die in order to live? How shall I lose in order to save? Maybe by accepting — against all the lies of my culture — that I will die, and trusting in Jesus’s assurance that I will also rise again. Maybe by learning what Peter has to learn — that the way up is down, that the path to victory begins with surrender, that Jesus’s version of heroism is steeped in humility.
Rabbi Ariel Burger tells a story his son shared with him when he was on a trip during his semester long program in Israel. He made a friend named Mason and the group went on a trip to Poland. And when they got to Poland, they were touring some of the centers of Jewish life before the war, and they were also going to the camps. And on the third or fourth day of the time in Poland, Mason disappeared for the day with one of the counselors on the program.
And he didn’t tell anyone where he was going, and when he came back, he wouldn’t tell anyone where he had been. And then he told my son, because they were friends or because my son nudged him a lot to tell him. And this is what he told my son. He said, “My grandparents were survivors. They were married three weeks before the deportation to Auschwitz. And in Auschwitz they were separated, obviously, and he would go every evening to the fence separating the men’s and the women’s sides of the camps, to bring her a crust of bread or an extra potato if he could, or even just to see her.
“Until my grandmother,” he said, “was transferred to a rabbit farm on the outskirts of Auschwitz.” The Nazis were doing experiments on rabbits that had to do with finding a cure for typhus. “And the rabbit farm was run by a Polish man who noticed, pretty early on, that the rabbits were getting better quality food and attention and care than the Jewish slave laborers. So he started to sneak in food for the Jewish slave laborers and the inmates.
“And then,” Mason told my son, “my grandmother cut her arm on a piece of barbed wire, and the cut became infected. And it wasn’t a serious infection, if you had antibiotics. But of course, if you were a Jew in that place, in that time, there was no way you were going to get antibiotics. So what did this Polish man who was running the rabbit farm do? He cut his own arm open, and he placed his wound on her wound so that he would get the infection that she had, and he became infected. And he went to the Nazis, and he said, ‘I’m one of your best managers. This rabbit farm is very productive. If I die, you’re gonna lose a lot of productivity. I need medicine.’ They gave him medicine, and he shared it with her. And he saved her life.”
So Mason said to my son, he said, “Where was I, when I left the other day and I disappeared? I went to see that Polish man. He’s still alive and living on the outskirts of Warsaw, and I went to say, thank you for my life. Thank you for my life.”
So my son told me this story this year, and it raises a lot of questions about, what does it take to be the kind of person who will share someone else’s wound, in spite of all the pressure to see them as less valuable than a rabbit? What does it take to push against all that pressure and do the right thing, with courage and moral clarity, and to see another person as a person, when everything around you is telling you not to?
We stand at the foot of the cross and there is hope that lies in the power of the resurrection. And so, I end with a blessing in the shape of a cross written by Jan Richardson. Please take this moment to make the shape of a cross in both of your palms.
Blessing in the Shape of a Cross
Press this blessing
into your palms—
right, left—
and you will see
how it leaves its mark,
how it imprints itself
into your skin,
how the lines of it
meet
and cross
as if signaling you
to the treasure
that has been in
your grasp
all along.
Except that these riches
you will count
not by what you hold
but by what you release,
by what you lose,
by what falls from
your open hands.
—Jan Richardson
Amen
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