Mark 8:31-38 The Message (MSG)
30-32 Jesus warned them to keep it quiet, not to breathe a word of it to anyone. He then began explaining things to them: “It is necessary that the Son of Man proceed to an ordeal of suffering, be tried and found guilty by the elders, high priests, and religion scholars, be killed, and after three days rise up alive.” He said this simply and clearly, so they couldn’t miss it.
32-33 But Peter grabbed him in protest. Turning and seeing his disciples wavering, wondering what to believe, Jesus confronted Peter. “Peter, get out of my way! Satan, get lost! You have no idea how God works.”
34-37 Calling the crowd to join his disciples, he said, “Anyone who intends to come with me has to let me lead. You’re not in the driver’s seat; I am. Don’t run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I’ll show you how. Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to saving yourself, your true self. What good would it do to get everything you want and lose you, the real you? What could you ever trade your soul for?
38 “If any of you are embarrassed over me and the way I’m leading you when you get around your fickle and unfocused friends, know that you’ll be an even greater embarrassment to the Son of Man when he arrives in all the splendor of God, his Father, with an army of the holy angels.”
Pain … suffering … laying down your life.
Perhaps you can think of many heroes of the faith who lived and died for the sake of others; their names may be well-known. A memorable example of risking life for another, however, is of a man who was the lead news story for a couple days, including a guest appearance on late night television a few years ago. This courageous person whose name is long forgotten saw a man who had fallen on the subway tracks in the path of an oncoming train.
Realizing there was no time to get the doomed man to safety, the news-making hero threw himself on top of the stranger between the tracks while the train traveled over them and came to a stop. Both men survived. I do not know if the courageous man was a Christian or belonged to any faith community. But his risk for the sake of another represents God’s values. His action is so memorable because it contradicts a common human value of calculated risk.
Most of us will not face giving our own precious life for the sake of another, but we do have opportunities daily to consider how we define failure or success, or to choose between self-preservation or life-giving for others. In the clash between human values and God’s values, what does it look like to lose our life for the sake of the gospel in order to save it?
Are you willing to embrace the pain of others – embrace it, rather than explain it, do you simply seek to comfort it? Do you try to fit it into some larger plan, or merely decry it? – Are you willing to trust that God is in the midst of our brokenness, working for and calling us to life?
Let’s think about that just a little more.
Over my years of ministry, I have noticed that perhaps the one thing that unifies us most fully is that each one of us has experienced brokenness:
- it may have been the abandonment of a parent,
- the betrayal of a loved one,
- the loss of a child,
- the death of a dream,
- the oppression of those who hold power over us, or any number of other things.
Yet this fact remains: to live is to struggle, to hurt, and to experience loss and brokenness.
“Every human being experiences pain at least once in his or her lifetime, and along with that pain comes a suffering unique to each person. Pain occurs in the body – we describe it by its intensity – and we experience it through physical, emotional, familial and spiritual symptoms.
Suffering, on the other hand, takes place in the soul, a place so intimate that no words can help us express how it actually feels. Suffering is truly a mystery. This mystery is not a problem to be solved, rather it is a journey we share with God, ourselves and, if we are able, with others.
Our understanding of how we have suffered gives us the ability to soften the impact it may have.” [Demaria, et al; A Meditation on suffering; Health Progress, Nov/Dec 2014]
We have this in common with each other, every homeless person who sleeps on our sidewalk, and every person who sits in worship with us.
Our pain – may well be similar to what the disciples were feeling when they heard Jesus talk about his impending suffering and death.
The reality is that on most occasions we would prefer to hide our brokenness from others. It is a challenge to speak up. Perhaps our refusal to speak comes from a kind of embarrassment –
- we do not know if others will respect us if we show our wounds.
- Or perhaps it comes from a fear of being vulnerable –
- we wonder if others will take advantage of us when our guard is down.
- Or perhaps it comes from a fear of being overwhelmed by our loss and grief.
I don’t know; I suspect it is all of these and more, varying from occasion to occasion. But I do know that we tend to favor strength, health, and self-sufficiency, or at least the appearance of these things, over weakness, pain, and dependence.
But while this choice is understandable, ultimately it is neither faithful to the Gospel nor likely to draw us more deeply toward becoming the persons we have been called to be.
The Gospel reading this week calls us to take up our cross expecting that God is most clearly and fully present in the suffering and brokenness of the world. We are called to take up our cross by being honest about our brokenness and thereby demonstrate our willingness to enter into the brokenness of others. We are called to take up our cross because we follow the One who not only took up his cross but also revealed that nothing in this world, not even the hate and darkness and death that seemed so omnipresent on that Friday we dare call Good, can defeat the love and light and life of God.
Denying brokenness and pain may indeed be so incredibly understandable. Just as understandable as Peter being struck sideways by the possibility that God’s promised Messiah had come not to conquer and rule but rather to suffer and die.
No wonder Peter rebuked Jesus. Peter looked for God in places of strength. (Isn’t that almost exactly what we mean when we speak of God’s omnipotence?)
For this reason, he could only imagine that grief, loss, betrayal, suffering, and death were things to avoid at all costs because they seemed to him to be, quite literally, God-forsaken. Yet in the cross God demonstrates that there is no place God refuses to go in the quest to love and redeem us.
People of faith, dig deep spiritually here: It requires work, courage, faith in God to enter into another’s pain and loss and that is not the end of the story.
When we embrace each other’s brokenness,
we experience first that God is with us through the cross and then also hear and experience God calling us to life and courage in and through the resurrection. How that resurrection call will take shape is hard to predict.
- Perhaps it will be to believe without question the person who has shared a story of sexual assault or to stand unflinchingly with a person seeking fair treatment.
- Perhaps it will be to keep faith with the one who no longer remembers you because of dementia
- or to hold vigil with the one near death’s door.
- Perhaps it will be to call for action when action needs to be taken.
In whatever way our faith in God’s cross and resurrection call comes to you, embracing another’s pain will not stop with “thoughts and prayers” but moves also to love for, and action with and on behalf of, those for whom we are praying.
Here are two things to think about.
First, I don’t think we can stand with people by standing over them, that is, reaching from our places of strength to comfort or help them. We meet people most truly when we admit and embrace that we are like them (sounds like incarnation, doesn’t it?).
Second, when we discover that God is not absent but indeed fully and powerfully present in our brokenness, it transforms how we look at everything and emboldens us in the struggles of this life. After all, if loss and suffering and death cannot separate us from God’s love, then what is there to fear?
Recognize that what unites us – to each other and to Christ – is our suffering, suffering that should not be glorified but is hallowed by God’s commitment to be joined to it. And if we can offer and create the possibility for a moment of candor and vulnerability, we will make room for the God of cross and resurrection to encounter, call, and eventually transform us.
