Losing Ourselves to Gain Ourselves with Others

Text:  Mark 8.31-38 

In today’s gospel story Jesus prepares his disciples for their journey to Jerusalem and to all that will occur there.  ‘In Jerusalem,’ he tells them, ‘the Messiah must undergo torture, and be rejected by the national leaders, and be killed.  But on the third day he shall rise again.’  The disciples have a difficult time coming to terms with all this.  For hundreds of years the Jewish people had heard stories about the Messiah that are considerably less tragic than this.  These stories had conditioned the disciples to expect that Jesus would walk into Jerusalem with an army of people behind him, in the strength of a movement so large that even the Romans would not contest his claim to David’s kingdom.  Yet now Jesus is telling them that the path to new hope and resurrection must pass, instead, through torture, suffering and even death.  It is all to much for Peter to bear.  Such is the latter’s confusion that he takes Jesus aside to ‘rebuke’ him.  We can imagine his words to Jesus.  ‘Come-on Jesus.  Sure there’s a little bit of opposition to what you are saying and doing.  Spending so much time with people who are not Jews was probably not a good move.  But don’t despair, you can shake this off.  You can still gather a people’s movement large enough to take Jerusalem.’  According to the text before us, Jesus doesn’t take too kindly to Peter’s apparently reasonable words.  ‘Get behind me Satan,’ he says, ‘you aren’t thinking of God’s ways, but of human ways.’

That’s when Jesus goes on to utter perhaps his most famous words:  ‘If any of you want to become my followers, you must deny yourselves and take up your cross and follow me to Jerusalem.  For whoever wants to preserve themselves will lose themselves, but whoever is willing to lose themselves for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.’.  These words strike at the heart of any form of Christianity which promotes the Christian way of life as either easy or comfortable.  The Christian way of life is not comfortable.  It is not easy.  And the reason it is neither easy nor comfortable is because the values of God are not the same as the values of human culture and society.  While God would call us to live for others, especially the poorest and most vulnerable, most human cultures encourage us to live for ourselves or our families alone.  While human culture and society would call us to stay safely at home within the familiarity of our racial groups, our social classes or the roles assigned to us by our gender, God calls us to leave such familiar places and reach out with hospitable love to all those we would usually regard as either the exotic ‘other’ or the enemy.  God, you see, is not interested in tribalism.  His vision for the world is not one in which we are divided from one another by class, ethnicity or gender.  God’s vision is for a world in which the love of Christ enables us to transgress the walls that divide us from one another, building bridges of care, understanding and compassion.

Some of you may be wondering where all this can be found in the text before us.  ‘Where’, you may be asking, does the gospel encourage us to do such things?  Where does it say that being willing to die to yourself is the same as being willing to cross social or ethnic boundaries? ‘  Fair question.  Well, let me simply reiterate a point I have made many times in this church:  that we shall never even begin to understand this text, or any text of Scripture, unless we are willing to read that text in its literary, historical and social context.  In the case of our gospel story this morning, I would like you to note the following.  That in the previous two chapters of Mark’s gospel, Jesus has been moving through territories which the Jewish purists in Jerusalem would have regarded as polluted territory where no good rabbi should ever have gone.  He has been taking his mission of healing, preaching and exorcism amongst the cosmopolitan population of Caesarea Philippi, the centre of Roman power in Galilee.  He has been declaring God’s love and liberation to the downtrodden masses of the Decapolis, a region still populated by people descended from the indigenous Palestinians that lived in the land before the Hebrews arrived.  And finally he has been ministering to people in the region of Tyre, where much of the population was descended from the seafaring peoples of Syrophonoecia, including some from that tribe of ancient Jewish enemies known as the Philistines.  I want you to note, also, that this deliberately extra-Jewish concern of Jesus—this belief that God’s love should not be confined within the safe borders of Jewish speciallness—is exactly the kind of thing that is getting Jesus into trouble with the Jerusalem authorities.  So when he finally does arrive in Jerusalem (and we shall of course revisit that arrival in Holy Week), he is tortured and crucified not only because of his claim to be the Jewish Messiah, but also because of his claim that the Messiah is God’s liberator not only for the Jews, but for the Gentile peoples as well.  In other words, Jesus dies because of his divinely inspired love for people who do not belong to his own social class or ethnic group.  He dies because of his active, tangible love for the ‘other’ who is different from himself.

Now you and I both know that it is still difficult, even today, to cross social and ethnic boundaries.  Most of us have been raised to be suspicious of people who have a different colour skin, or a different culture, or apparently different values to our own.  Most of us are, in fact, deep down in the secret places of our hearts, racists and social snobs.  That is, we are people who—even against our own best intentions—consider that we are better than others on no other ground except that of belonging to our own native race or social class.  These things run deep in us, so deep that they are notoriously difficult to change.  But change we must, because that is what Christ has called us to.  For when Christ tells his disciples that they must be willing to let themselves die, what he is calling for (amongst other things) is a fundamental conversion and transformation, such that even our deepest and most ugly racism, sexism and snobbery is replaced with a new self, made in the image of Christ and motivated by his own divine compassion and care.  The Apostle Paul makes a similar point in Galatians when he says:

As many of you who were baptised into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.  There is no longer Jew or non-Jew, there is no slave or citizen, there is no longer male or female; for all of you have been made one in Christ Jesus.

When you were baptised, my friends, you died to the basic principles of this world: including its racism, its sexism, and its social snobbery.  When you were baptised, you were raised in the power of the Spirit to live like your Lord and friend Jesus.  So now you are called to live out your baptism:  to put aside whatever divides you from your neighbour and to live in the oneness of purpose and understanding that Christ would will for us.