I was watching the ABC special “The Path to 9/11” a few years ago as it showed two Arab men talking in a restaurant in the U.S. They were planning the plot on the World Trade Center. One of the terrorists was telling the other that he had been in Germany and began talking about spiritual matters with a Roman Catholic priest. The terrorist said: “In Hamburg, I met a Christian priest and we spoke of religion. He told me how to make peace with God. He spoke of making peace with God and the afterlife: Accepting God’s word, turning the other cheek. As if that was enough. I told him that I do much more for my God. I wage war for him.”
There is the basic difference between Christianity and other religions of the world. The way of the cross is a scandal. For this man, and many others, it is a sign of weakness. An all-powerful God would not come and become vulnerable and die at the hands of his creation. It is unthinkable. And neither would he ask his followers to love the enemies of God, and their personal enemies as well. God would want them to be strong, not weak. He would want them to overcome their enemies, not turn the other cheek. God would want his followers to be victorious.
The people of Jesus’ day had no different expectations of God and his Messiah. It scandalized them to have someone say that God could die. They fully expected that when Messiah arrived he would crush the enemies of Israel. He would be the unquestioned King, and no one would be able to oppose him. Even if he was nailed to a cross, they would not be able to keep him there — he could walk away from it at will. That is why they taunted him at the crucifixion saying, “Come down from the cross, if you are the Son of God!” (Matthew 27:40). There were unrealistic expectations of Messiah. That is what the devil tempted Jesus with: “If you are the Son of God, turn these stones into bread. If you are the Son of God, jump off the temple, because it is written that the angels will catch you before your foot touches the ground” (Luke 4:1-12).
This is what was happening in the scripture we read together today. Peter had just made his great proclamation that Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah. But to his astonishment, Jesus began to explain that he would suffer and die at the hands of his enemies. The Scripture says, “Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” At this Peter revolted and, of all things, began to rebuke Jesus and said, “Never, Lord! This shall never happen to you!” He could not imagine such a thing happening to God’s anointed and chosen One. But Jesus said, “Get behind me, Satan! You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.”
And to make matters worse, Jesus began to explain that the way of suffering and the cross was not only the will of God for him, but for his followers as well. He said, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it.” But they wanted to be on the winning side. They hadn’t signed up for suffering. Following the Messiah was to be the way of blessing and getting victory over their enemies. What do you mean, “Take up your cross”?
So let’s look at this in a little more depth. First of all: What does it mean for God to suffer? Here is the dilemma: If God is a God of love, it means that God is vulnerable. Being vulnerable is always a part of love. There is risk involved. You risk being rejected. You risk not being loved back. You risk being hurt. That is the nature of relationships. The only way to avoid that is to avoid relationships and build a steel wall around yourself. The point is that God was not willing to do that. Love was who God was. It was an inescapable part of his being. God did not create the world to destroy it, he came to save the world in love. The Bible says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him” (John 3:16-17). Because God loved the world, he risked being rejected by the world — even killed by the world. He made himself vulnerable.
The amazing thing is that even the religious experts seemed to miss this in the Old Testament. They seemed not to remember that Isaiah had prophesied, “Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not” (Isaiah 53:1-3). A common belief of the day was that anyone who suffered was being punished by God. This is what led the disciples, when they saw a man blind from birth, to ask Jesus, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2). So when Jesus died at the hands of his enemies, it was proof to a lot of people that he had not been from God after all. But Isaiah also prophesied that there would be this misunderstanding, for he said, “Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.” Then Isaiah explained what the love of God would do, and the purpose of it all. He said, “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:4-6).
John Stott, in his book The Contemporary Christian, observed, “To the unbelieving Jew it was INCONCEIVABLE that the Messiah should die ‘on a tree’, that is, under the curse of God. To the unbelieving Gentile it was LUDICROUS to suppose that a god, one of the immortals, should die.” The people of the day quoted Deuteronomy which said, “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree,” but Paul explained that this meant that, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Deuteronomy 21:23; Galatians 3:13).
I read that one person who came out of the theater after watching Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ was laughing. He said he had to keep his hand over his mouth to keep from laughing out loud. He claimed that it was the most preposterous thing he had ever seen. We laugh at a God who dies on a cross. So we still have this problem today. We want triumphalism, not suffering and death from our God. But love made God vulnerable and appear weak. Paul proclaimed, “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.’ Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength” (1 Corinthians 1:18-25).
But this is only part of the scandal. We now have to ask a second question: What does it mean for us to suffer ? To take up our cross and follow Christ means that we can’t be like everybody else. It means that we have to die to our own self-interest and come alive to God. It means that God’s will becomes primary and our will becomes secondary. It means that when everyone else believes the lie, we must stand for the truth. It means that we choose obedience over satisfying our own desires and doing what we want to do. It means our morals, values and thoughts are different. It is the scandal of forgiving our enemies, blessing those who curse us and doing good to those who persecute and despitefully use us. Jesus said, “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Mark 8:35-37).
We would like to blend into the scenery around us and not stand out as a Christian. Many people today are clandestine Christians. They keep their faith a secret and pretend to be like everyone else. Taking up your cross means that you may have to come out of the closet. It may mean that you are not understood and accepted by some people. But you take your stand with the rejected Christ. As he takes up his cross, you take up yours.
In his book on St. Thomas Aquinas, G. K. Chesterton describes the early life of this brilliant medieval theologian. Aquinas was born into a wealthy, aristocratic family, who were part of the central governing class of Europe. His father, Count Landulf of Aquino, raised Thomas and his seven brothers in Dry Rock Castle in the Italian mountains. But Thomas didn’t fit the family’s political and military ambitions. He was quiet, and a student at heart. He hardly spoke in class, but one day blurted out to his schoolmaster: “What is God?” He eventually entered the monastery of Monte Cassino. Chesterton writes, “. . .the young Thomas Aquinas walked into his father’s castle one day and calmly announced that he had become one of the Begging Friars, a poor Dominican. This hit the wealthy family with a shock as great as if Thomas had announced he had “married a gypsy.” Chesterton reported, “His family flew at him like wild beasts.” His brothers hated him and chased him down the road and half tore his friar’s cloak off his body. They finally caught him and locked him in the castle tower, as if he were a lunatic. But living alone in silence and austerity did not bother one who had been living in a monastery, so his brothers thought up another plan. They placed a beautiful prostitute in his room. They were certain that he would not be able to resist her charms, and they knew it would ruin his plans for a career in the church. But Chesteron says, “He sprang from his seat and snatched a branch out of the fire, and stood brandishing it like a flaming sword. The woman ...shrieked and fled, which was all that he wanted.” Thomas ran to the door she had left open and barred it behind her, “and then,...he rammed the burning brand into the door, blackening and blistering it with one big black sign of the cross.” The family finally gave up on him as hopeless, and he went on to become a poor, begging friar — and one of the greatest theologians in history.”
It’s frightening to think about what it could mean to give up all for Jesus’ sake. It is terrifying to think about what it means to take up your cross, deny yourself and follow Christ. You might be seen as unusual. You may have to sacrifice and give up something you want to do. But that’s what living a life of love for God does. It is risky. It makes us vulnerable — just as he was vulnerable. We wonder what would be left if we died to ourselves. Would our personality change? Would there be anything of us left? It seems too costly. But there are also rewards. Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age (homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields — and with them, persecutions) and in the age to come, eternal life” (Mark 10:29-30).
So the scandal of the cross is that we are faced with a choice: Making sacrifices in this life and facing persecution, but in the end receiving eternal life, or avoiding vulnerability and suffering in this life and missing eternal life. God is calling us to be like himself — to take up our cross as he took up his; to risk, to dare, to dream, to die in order to live. The Bible says, “And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again” (2 Corinthians 5:15).
In John Bunyan’s Christian classic entitled Pilgrim’s Progress, the lead character named Christian gets ready to embark on his journey to find the Kingdom of God. So he prepares for the journey and begins to run. His neighbors taunt him, and running after him, try to stall and discourage him. They mock him and threaten him. They even tried to force him to return. His family called out to him, but he put his hands over his ears crying out as he ran, “Life! Life! Eternal Life!” That is the cry of every Christian as they run toward the cross.
Rodney J. Buchanan
March 4, 2012
Amity United Methodist Church
rodbuchanan2000@yahoo.com
