Sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent

The Second Sunday in Lent (Year B)
Saint Swithin's Church
12 March 2006

I speak to you in the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Just before the Gospel read today, Peter says to Jesus, "You are the Messiah." That declaration is so important that it gets its own feast day, The Feast of the Confession of Saint Peter. Today is, unofficially, The Feast of the Comeuppance of Saint Peter. We move from "You are the Messiah" to "Get behind me, Satan" in just four verses. Mark paints a vivid picture here. It contains a stinging rebuke to Peter, but it also implies a stinking rebuke to us. This is not a comfortable passage, and you may not care for this sermon.

After Peter has made his great acknowledgment that Jesus is the Messiah – that is, the one anointed by God, or in Greek, the Christ – Jesus explain what that really means. "He began to explain that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering." Notice that he shifts from Peter’s title, "Messiah," to the more mysterious title, "Son of Man." Even that small detail is packed with meaning. "Messiah" is a recognized title, with a theology and an ideology already built up around it, and when Peter uses it, he means something quite specific. But all the evidence is that "Son of Man" was not a recognized title, so it was available for Jesus to use it of himself and invest it with a meaning of his own shaping. In the Gospels it is always Jesus himself who gives himself this title. It alludes to Daniel 7: "I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of Days, and they brought him near before him. And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed." A Son of Man is a human being, but a human being given divine authority and lordship.

Jesus does not disclaim the title "Messiah," for he is indeed the Anointed One of God – just not the warrior king of the contemporary imagination. But he prefers to call himself "the Son of Man," so that the true nature of his kingdom and of his divine authority is clear. Now up to this point, both times the title "Son of Man" has appeared in Mark, it has been associated with lordship and authority. The Son of Man has power to forgive sins (2:10), and the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath (2:28). So it is jarring when Jesus begins "to explain that the Son of Man must undergo suffering." He continues by saying that the Son of Man "will be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes." The word translated ‘rejected’ (apodokimasthenai) is interesting. It means that authorities will subject him to scrutiny, will examine his credentials, and find them insufficient. It’s the word you would use for a job applicant who gets turned down for lack of experience. Jesus will put in for the Messiahship, and his application will be tossed. As a result the Son of Man will be killed, though after three days he will rise again.

At this point Peter has had enough. He takes Jesus aside to chew him out. As one commentator puts it, "Peter for the moment stops being a disciple; for disciples follow behind their teacher at a little distance." Jesus turns around and sees the rest of the disciples – who are in their proper place, following him – and rebukes Peter in the sharpest possible words: "Get behind me, Satan." "Get behind me": go back to your proper place as my disciple, following me, not presuming to instruct me or rebuke me, but accepting my instruction and my rebuke, however hard they might be for you to take. "Satan": you have undertaken the devil’s work, attempting to thwart what God must do in order to assert your own ego, your own agenda, your own mistaken sense of the way things ought to be.

And here I’m not happy with the translation. What the Greek really says is this: "You are not thinking the things of God, but the things of human beings." What are "the things of God"? In the context, they have to be the divinely appointed suffering, rejection, death, and resurrection of Christ. And the things of human beings are a view of God’s activity that leaves no room for the passion and resurrection. The things of human beings are safe, plausible, and comforting. They offer no scandal, no hard sayings, nothing that would outrage the sensibilities of good-hearted secularists, nothing that would get us laughed at on Oscar night or looked askance at by editorial writers at The New York Times. The things of God are an offense and a stumbling-block. "We preach Christ crucified," Saint Paul says, "a stumbling-block to Jews and folly to Gentiles."

Except, too often, we don’t. We make the sign of the cross on ourselves, we decorate our churches with crosses, we embroider crosses on purificators and stamp them on the tasteless wafers that sometimes pass for bread, but how often do we really preach Christ crucified? "In the cross of Christ I glory," we sometimes sing – but do we really glory in the cross of Christ? I get the impression that we’re embarrassed by it. I remember the hoohah over Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, and how quick many of us Episcopalians were to dismiss it. Now I didn’t see it myself – I don’t really care for bloody movies, and bloody movies with subtitles are a double abomination – but the contempt and hostility with which that movie was greeted in certain circles seemed strangely excessive to me. A friend of mine from another parish explained to me dismissively that the movie was based on the visions of some Roman Catholic mystic rather than strictly on Scripture. Now I’m sorry, no one loves Anglicans and Anglicanism more than I do, but when a progressive Episcopalian pretends to reject something because it’s not Scriptural enough, you know something very odd has happened.

We act as though we’re ashamed of it. We’re embarrassed by the whole idea of the Cross, of Atonement and sacrifice, of blood shed, not as a tragic miscarriage of human justice, but for our sake. We shrink from the mystery of our redemption, preferring to take easy refuge in cliches about God’s love and refusing to face up to the scandalous claim that "Christ suffered for sins, once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God." But we dare not be ashamed, for Jesus says, "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." Again, when Jesus speaks of "those who are ashamed of me," he means those who are ashamed of the Cross, those who, like Peter, prefer a plausible, culturally acceptable Jesus, a Jesus whose words and actions cause no scandal to good-hearted secularists and right-thinking, reasonable, modern people.

Right-thinking, reasonable, modern people, I sometimes hear, can’t believe in these archaic notions of Atonement and sacrifice, of blood poured out for the redemption of the human race. So, the argument goes, we shouldn’t teach such things any more. But this is a pathetic argument. The scandal of the Cross is nothing new. It has always been a rebuke to right-thinking, reasonable, modern people, whether ‘modern’ is the first century or the twenty-first. Let me quote Saint Paul again: "We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and folly to Gentiles." Already, in the first generation of the Church, Paul recognizes that the preaching of the Cross is at cross-purposes with the prevailing thought of Jews and Gentiles alike – in other words, everybody. Yet he says, "the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God."

So are we ashamed of the Cross? Do we neuter it, eviscerate it, by making it a decoration and an emblem but turning away from its harsh reality, from the demands it makes on our thinking, from the jeers and contempt of right-thinking, reasonable, modern people?

Am I ashamed of the Cross? I say I believe all this stuff, and I think I do. But do I really? Do I like Rite One because of its uncompromising portrayal of the truth that "Christ suffered for sins, once for all," or do I just like old stuff? Do I really believe that the cost of my redemption was so great? Do I really believe that my sins demanded so brutal a remedy?

"Lord, I believe. Help thou mine unbelief."

Today’s Gospel is full of Uncomfortable Words. If we wish to be disciples of Jesus, we must get behind him. We must think the things of God, when it is easier and more satisfying to think the things of human beings. We must, in other words, take up the Cross. We must preach Christ crucified, though that means subjecting ourselves to the jeers and contempt of right-thinking, reasonable, modern people – indeed, the jeers and contempt that will come from our own half-converted minds.

Yet the Scriptures do not speak a word of judgment without also speaking a word of grace, and neither will I. This daunting Gospel is followed by the story of the Transfiguration. Jesus crucified is Jesus exalted, and those who take up their cross will have their share not only in the shame but also in the glory of the one who, by his holy cross, has redeemed the world.

To him, with the co-eternal Father and Holy Spirit, be ascribed, as is most justly due, all might, dominion, majesty, and power, world without end. Amen.