Divine Things, Human Things | Rev. Parker Williams

What does it mean to follow Jesus when the path leads through suffering, sacrifice, and the cross? Jesus’ challenging call to “deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me,” invites us to consider not only what kind of Messiah Jesus is, but also what it means to become the kind of people shaped by following him.

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Weekly sermons from the traditional and contemporary worship services at Church of the Incarnation in Dallas, Texas. Rooted in Scripture and the Anglican tradition, these messages explore how the gospel speaks to our faith, our everyday lives and the world around us.

"If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves

and take up their cross and follow me." In the name of the Father, the Son, and the

Holy Spirit. Amen.

Well, we have a few strange things in our gospel this morning.

Jesus, after just praising Peter, turns and calls him Satan. Wild.

He goes a particular place this week, Jesus does, in that we won't really be able

to understand what he's doing if we don't place it in context with the Gospel

narrative from last week. This ties on to that in a very important way.

Peter, last week, got the answer exactly right.

He confessed Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of the living God.

But then, also last week, Matthew adds another strange element to that.

He says, "Then Jesus sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone

that he was the Messiah." Why? I thought that was what we're supposed to be doing,

is telling people that Jesus is the Messiah.

The disciples, likewise, were wanting to do the same thing. Why?

Because they didn't yet understand who and what the Messiah was.

They didn't really understand what it means.

So Jesus, this morning, tells them that he must undergo great suffering and be

killed, and on the third day, be raised again.

This is where Peter really had the problem.

Ultimately, Peter had a problem with the idea of the Messiah suffering

and dying. Jesus is pushing us to see that the Messiah came to suffer and

die, then he calls us to follow his lead.

If we misunderstand Christ at this point, eventually we misunderstand the

Christian life and miss the fullness of life that Christ has promised us.

Peter thinks suffering means something has gone terribly wrong.

Jesus says suffering and death are precisely where he is going.

This text is about perseverance through suffering, not because I am strong enough

in myself, but because life is only secured through participation

in the cross of Christ and following where he leads.

So the question is not simply, is Jesus the Messiah?

The question is, what kind of Messiah is he?

And first, as we see, he is not a Messiah, he is not a Christ of our own

making. Peter immediately realizes that what Jesus is proposing is a terrible

strategy. He's not wrong. From the standpoint of human ordinary power,

it makes perfect sense. No one who wants power or to be a success or to have

authority goes and immediately gets themself killed.

If you really have power, you prove it by avoiding weakness.

If you matter, you prove it by winning.

I can just hear Peter in the further conversation that surely was taking place.

"You, Jesus, must not know anything about messiah-ing. The Messiah doesn't die.

The Messiah makes the bad guys die.

A dead Messiah is a failed Messiah." If Jesus suffers and dies,

he can't be a ruling Messiah, just another failed revolutionary.

Evidently, what they wanted was a king like David, who would slay the pagans and

make Israel great again, a savior to liberate them by whatever means necessary.

And in front of this, Jesus uses the strongest words anywhere in the

Gospels. He turns to Peter, who he just said, because of his confession,

was the rock on which he would build his church, and says, "Get behind me, Satan.

You are a stumbling block to me." What? Wild. Why Satan?

Why does he call him Satan? Satan literally means adversary.

He's calling him his chief adversary because Peter is putting before

Jesus the same basic temptation Jesus had already faced in the wilderness.

Peter's vision for the Messiah represents the easy way to power and authority, just

as Satan had done in the wilderness. "You're hungry? Make these stones bread.

We all know you're going to do it in a little while anyway. Go ahead.

Why don't you throw yourself off the temple and become a big spectacle, so everyone

knows who you are? Why don't you just worship me, and then I'll give you all the

kingdoms of the world." Notice, those are all things that

Jesus would do and acquire anyway. They're central to his vocation.

But the temptation is to use the forces and the tactics of empire, force, control,

and top-down authority to achieve his goal and bypass the

road to suffering, death, and the cross.

Peter is telling Jesus to be the Messiah in the way that we, the world, knows how.

The way we know how to be powerful. He wanted a Messiah who would save by

avoiding the cross. But this would be no Messiah, just another example of a

human attempt to clamor to power. For you, Peter,

and us, we set our minds not on divine things, but on human things.

And then just as Jesus has turned and changed the way the disciples understand the

Messiah, so does he do with discipleship.

Now, if these aspects of the temptation to avoid suffering and

death were such a core and hard temptation for Jesus and the disciples, why do we

think it would be any different for us?

In this place, in this time, suffering feels like a

failed Messiah or a failed following after a Messiah.

So Jesus moves directly to that place.

He moves from having a debate with Peter to a general pronouncement about

discipleship. From Peter to all of us as disciples.

The type of Messiah you follow is the type of person you become, and

Jesus refuses to be a Messiah of human making.

"If you want to be my followers, deny yourself, take up your cross,

and follow me."

Now, we've all heard that sentence many times.

We've heard that so often that the cross can sound not only religious but

respectable. Did not sound that way to Jesus' first listeners, his hearers, his

disciples. His listeners knew what the cross meant, not only suffering and death

and utter agony, nakedness, and humiliation, but also a traitor,

incompetence, weakness, shame, abandonment, deprivation of

all dignity, an affront to reason and respectability,

completely reprehensible.

The Roman orator Cicero famously described the cross as the arbor infelix, the

unlucky or shameful tree, and declared that the very word cross should be

far removed, not only from the person of a Roman citizen, but from his thoughts,

his eyes, and his ears. He's not only speaking about death on the cross, but all

that it brings. Jesus' words here about picking up your cross and

following are not to be taken as metaphor.

The cross is not respectable jewelry.

It's not a metaphor for a difficult week or, as I am now quickly discovering,

Dallas traffic, as I sometimes want to say it is.

The way of cross is still foolishness and scandalous.

But just as the Messiah is not a Messiah of our own making, so too is the cross not

a cross of our own making. The shape our cross takes is not something we get to

choose for ourselves. But we can choose to follow Jesus with

it. That does not mean that every bad thing that happens to us is our cross.

It does not mean Christians are supposed to seek pain, remain in abuse, or call

evil good. After all, Paul in Romans this morning says, "Hate what is evil, hold

fast to what is good." The cross is the cost we accept

because of our following Jesus. When fidelity to Him asks us to surrender the

instinct to secure ourselves by the world's method,

all that comes at us in life may not be called good, but it can be a tool to carve

us into Christ's image and teach us how to love.

The question goes then from how do I get out of this, to how do I

follow Jesus through this, whatever it may be.

The good news here is that what at one time by our human thinking was only

suffering and the end, something to be avoided at all costs, it has now

become, because of Jesus going before us, the very path of life.

And that's good news, because we know the one who has gone before us and promises

that He will repay everyone for what He has done.

And beneath every lesser suffering stands the one cross that none of us gets to

refuse forever, our own death, and all that it entails, the

diminishment of self.

There can finally be no greater confrontation with self-preservation than that.

Everything we spend our lives accumulating eventually encounters a boundary it

cannot cross. "For what will it profit them," Jesus says, "if they gain the whole

world but forfeit their life?"

In thinking about this, I was immediately reminded of a children's book that my

grandmother would

gather all the grandkids around and say to us in this very animated way, perhaps

you know it, "The Bear Hunt." Anybody?

We're going on a-- Don't leave me singing alone, okay?

We're going, right, remember? There we go.

And it comes to this final clause, "You can't go over it, you can't go under it,

we've got to go through it." Right? This is what Jesus is telling us.

The suffering of the cross, that we don't necessarily get to choose, we can choose

to associate that with Jesus, by which he encourages us to follow him with

it and through it. This cross is where our compulsion to save

ourselves is put to death. Which means the cross will expose places where we are

still trying desperately to secure safety or significance for ourselves, setting

our minds not on divine things, but on human things.

Perhaps part of Christian discipleship is learning, in a thousand smaller deaths

beforehand, that our life is already held by God, that we have what we

need, that we're safe and secure and belong.

The death of always needing to be right.

The death of always needing to be admired, of getting the last word, of controlling

how the story turns out. The death of the fantasy that enough achievement, money,

influence, competence, or approval can finally make us secure.

What does save yourself look like when no one is threatening to kill you?

Where do you attempt to hold onto control?

It's not just losing your life. It's not a cross alone.

But it's following this Messiah with whatever shape your cross happens to take.

So Jesus is not simply saying, "Take up a cross." You likely already have

one. He says, "Deny yourself, carry the cross, and follow

me."

What does that look like for you? Perhaps it looks like taking that first step in

baptism where, in baptism, we associate with Jesus's death.

We die with him in baptism, so to be raised with him in fullness of life.

In fullness of life.

Jesus, through being baptized in death and suffering, and

raising again, has given us a path to follow.

But what does it look like after that?

Listen to Paul's description of a people shaped by a crucified Messiah.

"Let love be genuine. Outdo one another in showing honor. Be patient in suffering.

Persevere in prayer. Bless those who persecute you. Bless and do not curse them.

Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Never avenge yourselves.

If your enemies are hungry, feed them.

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." This is what the

cross looks like when it becomes a way of life.

Peter wanted a Messiah who would save by avoiding the cross.

Jesus reveals a Messiah who saves by going straight through it, through suffering,

through apparent defeat, through death, and into resurrection, and then says,

"Follow me." Because the life we are so afraid of losing is the very life that,

in Christ, we finally find. So take up your cross, but

take it up and follow Jesus. Amen.