FOLLOW THE “WHYS” TO THE CROSS

Mark 8:27-38

 

Sunday, March 12, 2006

 

 

                It may well be that one of the first words children learn to speak is, “NO.”  Right behind it, though, they learn how to ask “why?”  Incessantly.  Why is the sky blue?  Why is the grass green?  Why can’t we see air?  On and on they ask, tearing down your patience until you either answer with a sweeping, “Because!” or surrender and answer, “I don’t know.”  Of course, that response engender a whole new line of questioning, “Why don’t you know?”

                We probably never grow out of the need to ask, “Why?”  Our questions just get more sophisticated.  Why did this happen?  Why is this happening to me?  Why does my life look like this?  Why does God seem distant?  Why?

                I remember asking my supervisor on my vicarage—internship—if maybe asking too many questions was not a good thing.  He answered that I should never stop asking questions—even if they were uncomfortable questions.  But neither should I take just any answer—I should keep asking questions until I found myself at the foot of the cross, looking into Jesus’ face.  There would be the answer that would finally satisfy.

                The story Mark tells today about Jesus’ ministry is all about questions.  Don’t you suppose that Jesus’ disciples had a lot of questions?  We aren’t that far in the story from that day at the shore of the Sea of Galilee when Jesus called Simon and Andrew, James and John to follow Him.  They’d seen lepers cleansed, paralytics walk, the blind made to see and demons exorcised by Jesus.  Don’t you suppose they had a lot of questions?

                Jesus knew they did, so He lets them—and us—know that He’s in charge of the questions.  “Who do people say that I am?” Jesus asks.  What’s the buzz out there?  So they answer that the buzz isn’t clear:  some say John the Baptist, some say Elijah or one of the prophets of old—some even think Scripture might be fulfilled in that Jesus might be the Prophet the Lord promised Moses.  So Jesus pushes to the heart of the matter—as He always does.

                “What about you?” He asks, “Who do you say that I am?”  Peter speaks up.  Don’t you love Peter?  He speaks up when you or I might—we know the answer!  Call on me!  Peter says, “You are the Christ!”  As Jesus goes on, He assumes a question:  what does it mean that He is the Christ, the Messiah?  He explains that it means that He will be betrayed into the hands of the rulers of the people—the hands of sinful men—and he will suffer and be killed.  He goes on to explain that anyone who would follow Him will find their lives shaped by the same cross.

                Did you like that answer?  Peter didn’t.  Did you really?  We know that the easy answer—the expected answer—is, “Yes.”  But is that the answer you mean?  Peter had expectations he wanted Jesus to meet.  To him, the Messiah was One who would restore the kingdom of David to Israel.  He and the other disciples were already arguing over their places in the throne room, sitting around Jesus the Messiah.  So when Jesus speaks of His betrayal and suffering and even death, which answer not only crushes Peter’s expectation, it crushes Peter.

                How about you?  How about me?  Don’t we have expectations of what it means to follow Jesus.  Don’t we hope of heaven and dream of life there—and seek that life here on this side of heaven?  Jesus says, “Carry your cross.”  Is that what you really want to hear from Jesus?  We much more expect words of love and encouragement, words of hope and a future glory.  And Jesus speaks of the cross.

                Jesus’ answer means that we strive to be like Him.  To follow Him—to be like Him—is set aside all that we would prefer and empty ourselves.  This is the One who set aside His power and His dominion—He could have asked and armies of angels would have kept Him from the cross.  The is the One who did not claim His equality with God but took on the form of a servant.  He emptied Himself—to follow Him is to empty yourself and mine.

                Yet, there’s something deep within you and me that resists that self-emptying.  Something in us that we’d like to bring before God and think He loves us because of that.  Something in us that wants to justify ourselves or excuse our behavior rather than confess it 

                When we face that questioning toddler there are two answers we come down to.  How many of prefer to say, “I don’t know.”  How many more prefer to fall back on the “Because” answer—because I’m the parent; because I say so.  The “Because” answer might work with little children, but it doesn’t work with God.

                Peter wants a different answer.  Peter wants a different way for Jesus to be the Christ—then, there’s a different way for Peter to follow Him.  But there is no other way for Jesus to be the Messiah.  You and I can not be saved unless Jesus empties Himself.  Jesus pours Himself out on the cross as a sacrifice for sin—to appease His Father’s wrath upon our sin.  He becomes the answer to God’s demand for our deaths.  In His dying, you and I have life.

                Jesus empties Himself in another way, too.  He sets aside His will to follow His Father’s will.  He goes to the cross not only to pay our ransom and debt, but also to be obedient to His Father for us.  Jesus becomes the answer for God’s demand for our obedience, for our lives.  In His living, you and I have new life—His resurrection seals that new life as the way the Father wants us to be.

                So there’s no other way for Jesus to be the Christ than the way He chose.  There’s no other way for you and me to follow Him other than the way He directs.  We empty ourselves of all of the “becauses” we’ve come up with over the years of our living.  We empty ourselves of our excuses, our self-justifications—all of our reasons, all of the answers with which we’ve been satisfied that don’t leave us looking into Jesus’ eyes.

                As we look into the eyes on the cross we see our Savior.  The One who fills our emptiness with His forgiveness.  You and I are forgiven for all of those answers we’ve accepted and those explanations we’ve offered that didn’t go all the way to the cross.

                We look into the eyes of the One standing in the door of the open tomb and see our Savior.  The One who not only has  filled us with His forgiveness and love, but now leads us into this new life with Him.  To let go and let your God lead is to trust.  In faith we follow Him; in faith we trust Him with our lives.  We let Him lead.  How hard that is—for us as dancing couples or in teams at work or in groups at school, to let someone else lead.  Why would anyone do that?  We live in a world that can’t believe anyone would simply do that.

                Jesus gives a promise as He describes this life with Him.  He promises that those who lose their lives in Him will find them.  Certainly, these words were a promise to those First Century Christians who were losing their lives in the arena and at the hands of the soldiers—assuring them that what they were seeing wasn’t the final answer.  There is the promise of heaven and a promise with Jesus.

                Mark includes these words of Jesus as more than an encouragement to those First Century Christians.  They are words meant to encourage you and me, too:  to lose your life—to empty yourself, to let go and let God, to trust—into Jesus’ hands is find it.  Find life in Him forever—the same promise of heaven.

                Find life in Him now.  As we live in trust, we do finally say, “I don’t know, but I trust that my God does.  I trust that Jesus does.”  We don’t know what that life looks like—any more than those disciples who first heard these words spoken by Jesus or those people to whom Mark first wrote them—but Jesus does.  He pours out His Holy Spirit so that faith can be strengthened to see past the circumstances, past the paradoxes, into the eyes of Jesus.

                As we stand, looking into those eyes, we trust.  To so live in trust is to live in hope.  Hope that sees past the questions that need to know “Why?”, past the emptying and past the dying, all the way to heaven—all the way to Jesus.