The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Year B
The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Year B, Proper 19
Sunday, September 13th, 2009
The Rev. Dr. Katharine C. Black
Proverbs 1: 20-33
Psalm 19
James 3:1-12
Mark 8:27-38
The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows God's handiwork. AMEN.
"Who do people say that I am?" And they answered him, "John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets." He asked them, "But who do you say that I am?" Peter answered him, "You are the Messiah."
Three comments on this interchange, then thoughts about Jesus' observation and invitation to take up his cross, within a generalized thought about taking up a cross to follow Jesus.
First after the question of "Who do you say that I am?" "You are the Messiah." Then Jesus bid them tell no one. Again there's the Markan secrecy hallmark. Often the emphasis on secrecy follows some healing or miracle, and the point Jesus is making is that his mission and ministry are more important than the spectacular happening, itself, and that the dramatic wonder of the spectacles detracts from his purpose, his hope, and his ultimate mission.
Even Peter's identification of Jesus as Messiah is putting a wrong emphasis on his work. Peter, and many others, expected the Messiah, the Saviour, to be a warrior, one who would defeat the Romans, the Empire, and the various layers of political authorities ruling then. While Jesus acknowledged he was "Messiah," he knew that Peter and the others misunderstood the kind of mission and messiahship he was called to do and be.
Also there are other considerations of Peter's ID of Jesus as Messiah. We're used to hearing this identification in August and deep in Lent. This is the late summer identification and it is a culmination of Jesus' teaching and traveling mission to proclaim the reign of God with his own announcing his own understanding of himself as the Son of Man and the one who lived (and would die) to save all people. We're used to hearing this scripture also sometime in Lent, as the course of events will take Jesus to his cross, death, resurrection, and ascension. The Jesus-as-Messiah ID takes place both towards the end of the long teaching part of Jesus' mission and as part of the Passion and Easter proclamation. Today, then, we are alerted both to the ending of the travel/mission part of the Church year, but also a preview of the Passion. This latter realization sets us not into Lent and Easter, but rather to the drawing down of the church year. We are heading towards Advent and our decision to choose to participate in another church cycle. Jesus' agreeing with the identification of himself as Messiah, then is important in its content, in its part as a culmination of the teaching cycle, and as an alert to the glory ahead of Jesus in the triumph over the cross, as this cycle reaches its high point and its merging into the new cycle of the life of Jesus, the birth/life/death/Easter cycle.
Now we are alerted of the texts to come, preparing the way for the new cycle of Advent readings. As Lent prepares us for Easter, so we are now beginning those readings that will prepare us for Advent, as surely as do the shorter days. We hear all three of those layers of understanding in this identification of Jesus as Messiah. This text is one that alerts us to the season, our location in the church's wheel of time heading to its new beginning at Advent.
We hear Jesus telling us if we want to follow him, we are to take up a cross as part of that heading into Advent, part of the cycle of readings that lead to the cross and so to Easter. However, there is something that doesn't resonate with us as wholesome in a search to take up a cross as the only way to follow a path or holiness and service to transform the world into the reign of God. There must be a way of joy and thanksgiving that would also provide us a road and way to bring about God's reign on earth.
There is something, similarly, to the thought that one cannot celebrate life fully without acknowledging the reality, terror, and inevitability of death. There are people who move through life either always in the shadow of death and seeing only the snares, risks, and fiends around, and there are those who skate along an uninformed surface of ease and ignorance. Neither simple life is one of work, participation, and engagement in transforming the world into a better, more compassionate, more vital and humane, more just, green pasture for all. Living in death mode never allows for the reality and omnipresence of God's glory and generosity. Living in happy mode ignores the pain of the world and our need to pitch in and help, as we are and as we can.
When Jesus says to us "Those who would be my followers, you must deny yourselves, take up your cross and follow me" cannot live in either simple death or life mode. The path of persistent and constant self-denial does not allow us to develop into the best self each of us is called to be as individuals. Without that claiming of an adult, developed self, we cannot realize our own promised potential as humans or as servants of a living creative God. Hair shirts, one tunic, and one pair of sandals, aspiring to poverty and being the meek of the earth deny God's gifts of creativity, intellect, and sustained efforts as additional ways to bring about revolutionary changes to better the earth. Maybe working at Pine Street is your way, or maybe it's working for fair pay for fair work for all. Playing the viola or making books available to those who crave their contents may be the service you do. It simply isn't possible to deny yourself fully without finding and developing a self first. It's hard to live a life of repentance without living any sort of life. Living with more, living with less, inform each other.
At the Brigham this afternoon, there is a service of remembrance for families of those who've been sick and died in one of the departments and its ICU. It strikes me that it is a celebration, neither of life nor of death. Rather it is a recognition of the strength of those who work together to alleviate suffering and transform the woe of illness into the triumph of human spirit, the patients, their families, their care givers, and the staff that supports that whole enterprise. To ignore the sadness of the illness, suffering and death would be an absence of reality and the hard times such illnesses create. To ignore the collaborative and miraculous medical work of body and soul for patients, families and the whole medical enterprise is an equal form of denial and simplistic thinking. The real situation is more complex and wondrous than either. People get sick with terrible illnesses, and some work with their families, caregivers, scientists, nurses, doctors, researchers, floor washers, kitchen aides, techs, staff, and an imaginative group of people who work both against illness and for people. Do patients deny themselves by denying their illness or by denying any work for cure? To be fully human requires an honest wrestling with mortality, with a full dose of joining with the God of creation, to be all that we can be. Each of us is called to be as much like Jesus in the world to provide God's hands and feet for the world. If each of us is fully occupied just lugging a cross around with both hands, whose hands will do the surgery, put in the IV, cook the food, clean up the trays, make the beds, invent the medicines, develop better and better responses to illness, and hold the hands of the dying and the newly bereft hands of the living. It is both too simple and too hard only to carry a cross.
It's the juxtaposition of Jesus as Messiah and Jesus as cross-endurer that bring both realities into focus. Jesus as Messiah, as Saviour, will go as far as it takes, not to do magic tricks, but to support, heal, and forgive all people whatever we've done. Jesus, as cross-bearer keeps on keeping on, not to suffer, but to be with us, no matter what, and there seems no easy way out, no happy walk, just an ultimate confrontation with the forces of evil and death, and then with God's presence triumphs even over those. It's the same necessary juxtaposition of needing an appreciation of death to understand and enjoy life fully, and needing to understand and appreciate life, to understand, fear, and reckon with death. Celebrations of life, after people have died, without mentioning death, are as futile and as naïve, maybe as joyful celebrations-weddings, baptisms, birthday parties-without remembering those who've died and aren't present at those. People tell stories at sad and glad occasions to bind up the inevitable link of life with death and death with life Binding Messiahship to the death of the cross and that death with Messiahship is the Gospel's way of saying "no pain no gain;" "no gain, no pain."
The writer of Proverbs exhorted his listeners to wisdom, and the Psalmist observes that God's law is perfect. The James reading understands the difficulty for people in juggling all wisdom and tasks. We live in the moment between total self-denial and the total freedom to be our best selves. Again, had the doctors and nurses, scientists and caregivers taken up some simpler cross of service, there would have been no medical care for the sick, and no way to improve the patients' lot. Carrying a cross is not the opt-out simplest route. It's doing the work for the benefit of the other, before all considerations of one's own life are reckoned, that is taking up a cross, but it is engaging in the work of saving some aspect of the world that is our joining Jesus' Messiahship. Small wonder then, that we need and so pray for the Holy One, in this morning's collect, to direct and rule our hearts. With God's help we can work to balance both our gifts of self and service, to nurture our strengths of heart and mind, to find the cross we can carry to serve others with the fullest measure of the creative energy that God calls out of each of us. In understanding Jesus as Messiah and Savior, we can strive to find our way of sharing in the work for the world. Jesus leads us as exemplar and guide, comforter and companion. Jesus Emmanuel, Jesus with us at all times, guarantees we'll work at is as well as we can, and continue that work and walk with him forever. That's Jesus' goad, guide, and goal, but it's always Good News.
© Katharine C. Black, September 2009
