A Sermon Delivered by The Rev. John D. Painter
at Centenary United Methodist Church
Metuchen, New Jersey
March 8, 2009
(The Second Sunday in Lent)

Text: Mark 8:31-38

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. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turn-ing and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my fol-lowers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gos-pel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? In-deed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” —Mark 8:31-38, NRSV

“Skedaddle.” You know what the word means: to run away quickly. As in, “When the police showed up at the raucous party, the teenagers skedaddled.” Skedaddling is nothing new. In the garden of Gethsemane, Judas led an armed posse to Jesus, and they laid hands on him and arrested him. And what did the disciples do? According to the gospel of Mark, they skedaddled.

Actually, what Mark says, in a bit more reserved fashion, is that they “deserted him and fled” (Mark 14:50). Same thing, really. They skedaddled.

But do you know where the word “skedaddle” comes from? It appeared during the Civil War and was used to describe a flight from the battlefield. It may have come from a Scottish or Northern English word meaning to spill or scatter—in particular to spill milk. The sight of blood being spilled on the battlefield probably caused Civil War soldiers to say “skedaddle” when they made a rapid retreat from the fighting.

In the eighth chapter of Mark, as you heard, Jesus predicts his suffering and death, re-bukes Peter, and challenges his followers to lose their lives for the sake of the gospel. The vo-cabulary of discipleship is not always peaceful, since it includes calls for self-sacrifice, predic-tions of suffering, and violent outbursts such as “Get behind me, Satan!” To be a follower of Je-sus is a life-and-death battle—challenging, stressful and, sometimes, painful.

Before we fall into formation behind Jesus, we need to count the cost. We don’t want to be like the original disciples…and skedaddle when the going gets tough.

Mark tells us that Jesus began to teach the disciples “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” (Mark 8:31). These words set the stage for the Lenten drama in the re-maining chapters of the gospel of Mark, right through to the death and resurrection of Jesus. The vocabulary of this verse is a violent shock to the disciples—they cannot believe their ears when Jesus says that the Son of Man must suffer.

In their eyes, Jesus is the Messiah, the Anointed One of God. They have just come to know him by the powerful titles “Son of God” and “Son of Man.” They expect that he will exer-cise authority and establish the kingdom of God on earth. They see him as their divinely chosen leader, and they are anxious for him to show his power as God’s anointed king—maybe even by overthrowing the hated Romans who rule the land.

But, instead, Jesus says that he must undergo great suffering.

This would be like the newly-inaugurated President of the United States, in his first ad-dress to the nation, proclaiming, “I must undergo great suffering and rejection, and be killed by the people of this great country.” It would be completely unexpected. Unbelievable. Unaccept-able.

“God forbid!” says Peter, the chief of the disciples. It’s just impossible to believe that this “Son of God” should be betrayed and suffer and die. Peter may think that Jesus is out of his mind—possessed by a demon, in need of exorcism. According to Mark, he took Jesus aside “and began to rebuke him.” The Greek verb Mark uses here for “rebuke,” epitimao (????????), is strong language, often used in reference to silencing demons. So Peter is hitting Jesus with some serious flak.

Jesus responds by rebuking Peter with the words, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are set-ting your mind not on divine things but on human things” (Mark 8:32-33). He wastes no time in undermining Peter, because he is convinced that Peter is charging in the completely wrong direc-tion, toward the earthly instead of the heavenly.

These are fighting words, if you will—the language of silencing demons and scolding colleagues. As violent as it sounds, it is the vocabulary of discipleship.

But what does it mean?

When he says that “the Son of Man must undergo great suffering,” he is speaking in a very matter-of-fact way about what lies ahead for him. Rejection by the elders, the chief priests and the scribes—that’s almost inevitable for someone who is willing to buck the religious estab-lishment and show people a new way to God. Even death makes sense when you are determined to march into a hostile city, upset the tables of the money-changers, and predict that the temple will be destroyed.

Jesus is willing to put his life on the line as he moves toward his destiny in Jerusalem. He is a person determined to devote body, mind and spirit to the work that God has called him to do. He’s not interested in satisfying the expectations of others, not even the dreams of his closest friends. All that concerns him is doing the will of God.

There’s a message for us here, especially as we struggle to find our focus as Christians. In our multi-tasking world, we have a hard time sorting out the competing demands of family, work, community, friends and church, and our endless activity can leave us feeling scattered and even shattered. With remarkable clarity, Jesus gives us a new vocabulary for discipleship.

Set your mind on divine things, he says. Not on human things. And be willing to suffer.

Willing to…suffer? Yes, suffer.

“The Son of Man must undergo great suffering,” says Jesus. And so must those who fol-low him.

The large church had just gone through an expensive renovation of its historic sanctuary and had installed an impressive new pipe organ in the front of the sanctuary. The visiting pastor couldn’t help but admire the beauty of the room. Still, something seemed to be missing.

“You probably notice that we don’t have a cross in the front, in the chancel,” said the host pastor.

The visitor had to confess that he had not noticed.

“Frankly, once we got the new organ installed, dominating the front of the church, there just wasn’t room for the cross,” explained the pastor.

Take this as a sort of parable of the dilemma of many of our churches today. Amid all of our busyness and programs and service and beauty, there’s just no room for the cross.

Now, I know that all this talk about self-denial and cross-bearing seems stringent, de-manding, and difficult. Jesus is laying on us some tough, difficult teaching to be sure, teaching that goes against so much that our culture expects of its “religion.” It seems to me that in our cul-ture today there are far too many churches where this particular passage from the Gospel of Mark will never be read, let alone serve as the text for a sermon. Many are the preachers who would rather emphasize the blessings and the benefits and comfort of faith in Jesus Christ—and you have heard me do that on any number of occasions. But they are often the same preachers who will lift up little about the real demands and challenges of the gospel, and of the expectations of Jesus the Christ of those who would seek to faithfully follow him. That balance is sorely needed.

Here is the bad news, in one sense: that you can’t walk with Jesus unless you are willing to take up your cross and walk the cruciform way that he is walking.

Yet from another perspective, this is the good news. Here Jesus speaks of self-denial, of death and suffering, of not being ashamed to walk his way, and he speaks it to this rag-tag bunch of very ordinary, often utterly misunderstanding disciples. And they are us.

At the end of Jesus’ “cross-talk,” you might expect Mark to say, “After this teaching, most of his disciples left him, muttering to themselves, ‘I had no idea that Jesus was walking in this direction. I’m out of here.’” You might expect that most everyone would have skedaddled.

But if any of the disciples left, Mark, at least, says nothing about it. They keep walking with Jesus, even though he has been explicit about the difficulty of the way he is walking. They walk with Jesus, even though he has promised them a cross. It’s rather amazing—when one con-siders how dumb and disappointing the disciples can appear at times in the Gospel of Mark—that Jesus would enlist people like them to walk a way like his. But he does. And they do; they fol-low. These ordinary people are called to walk with him, to do the same things he does, to bear the same cross that he bears.

So the good news in this challenging teaching is this: Jesus believes that we are able to bear the cross. Jesus says elsewhere in the Gospels, “You are the light of the world”—that is, you are bearers of light. Today Jesus teaches something that is even more challenging, “You are bearers of the cross.”

So here we are, being taught by Jesus. But as Jesus implies, the point of this faith is not simply to sit here and listen to Jesus’ teaching, but to get out of here and to live his teaching, to be cross bearers in the world.

So here we are, being called by Jesus. Thus will the world know that we are following Je-sus—when they see the cross on our backs, the same as it is placed on his back. When we are at our most faithful, we are cross bearers.

PRAYER
Lord Jesus, you came among us as our Savior—as our Messiah—and we responded to you with rejection, hostility, and a cross. We still find it hard to believe that our Savior should suffer, be rejected, and die. It’s not what we expected.
Lord Jesus, on top of that, you came to us promising that we should also be crucified, if we followed you; that we should also suffer, be rejected, and die. That’s definitely not what we expected.
Lord Jesus, keep defeating our expectations; keep luring us to walk down your narrow way; keep calling us to follow you, despite the cost; keep believing in us, as we keep trying to believe in you. Amen.
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