When I was a child, we played a Bible game where the person one who could quote the most verses. You go in a circle and each person says a verse. What is the all time favorite? Jesus wept. Once someone has used the verse, it cannot be reused. Pray without ceasing, Let a woman learn in silence with all submission, honor the widows, do your utmost to come before winter. If you had to explain your faith in one sentence, what would you say?
Many Christians make a recipe for life and mix a series of assorted statements about God: God has great power, Jesus healed many during His ministry, God has an abundance of riches, God is loving, etc. Mixing those ingredients together, they come out with a “best life now” scenario that sounds more like a Ben Franklin proverb (healthy, wealthy, and wise).
In the gospel of Mark, the first eight chapters speak of Jesus’ identity as King. And then in the middle of the book, Jesus asks the disciples Who Am I? They still identify him as a teacher or prophet. Only Peter understands that Jesus is the Messiah, David returned in even greater glory. Then Jesus says, I came to die. And Peter looks at all his verses and can’t figure out what it all means.
I have been on Facebook for about 6 months. I am trying to learn more about social networking because it just surpassed email in popularity. But my Facebook account languished for a while. Recently, some high school acquaintances found me and I’m suddenly connected to a group of people I haven’t seen for 40 years. And it’s a shock. We all look a little different from those pictures I remember. There comes some point in life when we all think about mortality. I suppose Peter and the disciples had done so. They were following a revolutionary. They had already been chased from some villages and persecuted by Pharisees.
What they were not ready for was the prediction of their leader that he had come to die. Their reaction was immediately hostile. Its like pinning all your hopes on your retirement fund and waking up one day to find that rich people have stolen it. Peter rebukes him. That’s polite. I think Peter lost it and shouted. Sometimes we don’t read the Bible the way it was written. This is not a theological point they are debating. Its not Jesus’ life we are shouting about, its Peter’s. If Jesus is dead, where do the 12 go?
This passage with the disciples is almost carbon copied in chapter 14 in Mark in the trial before the Sanhedrin. Peter refuses to believe that any answer comes through the valley of the shadow of death and the Sanhedrin is certain that it can force Jesus to fail by taking that road. The parallelism is remarkable and one of the reasons that Mark is probably my favorite book of the Bible. No matter how many times you return to it, the elegant structure has one more truth to discover.
Why follow a crucified Christ? Because only a crucified messiah reveals God as the one who accepts the violence and destruction of sin and pulls us to God in spite of it. God does not save by wiping out our histories. Jesus accepts your bitterness, your lies, your lust, your deeds unjust. Jesus accepts the sins done to you by others. Jesus accepts the sickness and suffering fallen on the world because of rebellion. Jesus keeps our history, respects our dignity as persons and still has the way to bring us back to the Father. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds us, "Only the suffering God can help."
This image of God is as objectionable to us as it was to Peter. We want an invincible God who shields us from our own vulnerability. That is the God we imitate and worship -- invincible, self-sufficient, controlling, an all-powerful God who shares divine power with us. "Immortal, invincible, God only wise" is the God we consider worthy of worship and emulation. Strength in weakness, gaining by losing, the power of the cross -- that still seems foolish to those who measure strength by gross national product and megaton bombs, those devoted to finishing first, those who thrive on power as prominence.
The message is profound: God has claimed our weakness as a resource for divine power. God has claimed our wounds as potential means of healing. By following a crucified Christ, we can face our own vulnerability. We no longer have to hide behind a mask of stoic control nor wear the protective armor of invulnerability. We can confront our weaknesses, and even affirm with Paul that "when I am weak then I am strong" (2 Cor. 12:10). We can take up a cross with the full assurance that Christ has gone before us and now shares its weight and pain.
Through that victory, the church believes, a strange vitality has been released into the world, a spirit of hope that still erupts in arenas of weakness, suffering and death.
What is your faith? It seems to me that Christians answer that in three ways. Group B says be strong, be smart, look to God as a source of honor and strength. Ben Franklin and Boy Scouts all the way. Group B is focused on human strength with a heavenly reward. Group B is Peter rebuking Jesus, because Peter cannot imagine a solution that doesn’t depend on intelligence, strength and miracles. Peter was a young man.
Group C is when you get older and illness trips your steps. It’s the group that just lost a lot in the crash and maybe not even time enough left to recover. Group C says, OK I accept that Jesus is my bridge over suffering with the bright hope for tomorrow. Group C is not large, because it usually is for people who are older and discovered that there is something seriously wrong and then they turn to God. Not too many people do that. Most people have settled on their faith commitment by age 30. That’s why so much evangelism focuses on youth.
Group A is the union of B and C. Group A is Paul saying in Philippians 4:12 I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.
When you are a Group A person then all the histories of your life converge towards hope and victory. Are you at the top of your game. Great. Then God is using that for God’s greater glory. Did you just fail? God has accepted your failures through Christ and your chance of victory is still 100%. When you are in Group A, you are hard to threaten because you start to see all the events of your life as a tapestry that is leading to heaven. The successes are training you for your heavenly career. The skills you learn here will have application there. While that statement is a little naive since we don’t know much about heaven, I can tell you one thing. Jesus does not wipe away your history. Jesus redeems it. All the good things you have known will be retained.
When you are in Group A and suffering through hard times, the hope shines like a candle in the darkness. You are not going to lose. There is a strength that comes from our willingness to even walk freely the road of death or life, a strength that triumphs even over the powers that threaten death. Death, the last enemy, has already been defeated by Jesus’ rising from the dead. That is his victory, that is how he wins the final, apocalyptic battle over the power of Satan. And that event means that death will not be allowed to speak the last word over you either -- thanks be to God!
