Staff conversations around here these days often sound something like this: “What are people saying about the fall program?” “Has anyone signed on for the scavenger hunt yet – I mean, actually signed up?” (hint hint). “How are people doing with all the changes in Neighborhood House?”
We’re always taking the pulse. Which is basically the kind of place the Gospel reading just started out, a normal disciple/staff conversation. Jesus says, “How’s it going out there? What’s the buzz, man?”
And they tell him, but then, as Jesus will do, he doesn’t let them stay outside of the question. They have to look in the mirror, too. “How’s it going in you?” he essentially asks.
And Peter says “You’re the Messiah” and he hits the dinger. So Jesus goes on to teach them what it means to be the Messiah. This isn’t just staff conversation anymore, he’s taking them somewhere else now. And what he’s saying is pretty hard stuff. This is the first of three times, here in the heart of the Gospel of Mark, that Jesus teaches – teaches, which is different from just telling them – he teaches what has to happen to him as the Messiah. And what’s interesting is that we might think it’s going to be about a list of tasks or self-righteous suffering or stuff people often think of with religion. But it’s not.
Jesus is talking globally, in a way that goes beyond time, about a whole cycle of suffering and death and then new life, which is really about self-giving and transformation. And as much as we all want to say we’re on board with that, the scope of what Jesus is saying is really big. It’s much easier for us to see human-scale Messiahs, which Peter, as Peter will do, gives voice to. Like most of us, he goes from getting it totally right to getting it totally wrong.
“Oh no,” Peter says, “a Messiah doesn’t act that way. No no no. Not to dis you, Jesus, but I can see you didn’t finishing reading the Messiah manual, did you? Messiahs don’t suffer, they succeed. Duh!”
And Peter gets through his rebuke, but then Jesus rebukes him – there’s lots of rebuking going on, lest we idealize life with Jesus. “No,” Jesus says, “there is no manual, there’s only God’s heart. It’s not human, it’s divine.”
And then he goes on to make it more clear than ever, and he calls the whole crowd together. “There’s no easy way here,” he suggests. “Let’s make sure no one else is under the same illusion our friend Peter is. Let’s all get on the same page.”
“There’s death on this road. Now, it’s not like what I was just saying about myself. Being killed can be different from death. This is about taking up a cross, following me, and letting go of what you think life is supposed to be about. Because you’ll find that when you release that stuff, when your hands are finally loose and open, you’re free. But if you keep gripping the stuff that the world gives to you, you’ll lose more than you can understand.”
Ok, there’s something Jesus is getting at, and I’m not going to pretend it’s real clear. What I think he’s not saying is, “This cross is going to happen to you.” Too often Christian traditions have garbled this to mean “the cross” is just any suffering that happens to you, like “such-and-such is just my cross to bear.” Baloney. Jesus is real clear here, he’s not talking about something that falls on us from out of the sky. He’s talking about something someone chooses to do. “Take up your cross” is imperative. Not “wait till a cross falls on you.” And neither is it “grab a cross, any cross, and hit other people over the head with it.” He’s not talking about being self-righteous about our crosses or using them to get in the spotlight.
And bear in mind, while we think of talk about the cross as just routine, remember that here, Jesus hadn’t died yet. There had been no Last Supper, no trial, no cross, and certainly no resurrection. But they all knew what a cross meant. It was a common, public, humiliating way the Romans used to torture and kill political insurgents at a crossroads on the way into Jerusalem. They knew, they had seen the corpses hanging there. And it must have sent a shudder down their spines to suddenly hear that that might have something to do with them.
So - we started way back with what seemed like a staff check-in on the buzz. And we end up with Jesus saying, “This journey means you as well as me, and it means all of each one of you. And you’re gonna have to be the one who figures out what that really means in your own life.”
Yep. Not real clear. But at the same time, what I think what this is about here may not be hard in the way people want to make it. What Jesus is talking about may be quieter, and gentler, less theatrical, but maybe something we can trust a little more. Because he’s basically asking us to listen to our lives, and to listen from a place of openness and trust.
Which is exactly what Isaiah is talking about – and talking about it in a way that helps us know how to do it. You want a manual? – maybe we’ve got it!
This passage is fantastic, for a couple of reasons. And remember, this is the part of the book of Isaiah written for the Jews when they were in exile in Babylon – so, for people who were lost and in pain.
First, keep this opening in mind – write it down somewhere near your desk or nightstand or whatever. Because it’s a great reminder of how deeply God is working with us, day by day. “God has given me the tongue of a teacher, so that I can sustain the weary. God wakes up my ear every morning” – Isaiah knows how hard it is to wake up each and every day! – “God wakes my ear up each morning to listen.”
The word means “to stir me, to rouse me.” And not just to listen to get the morning stock report from Europe, which is depressing enough, but rouses me to listen as one who is being taught.
That’s the next step of it: “As one who is being taught.” See, we’re all both a teacher and a learner, and there’s an amazing circle in that. Think of the deep ways we learn in our lives, often painfully – unfortunately – but also with joy. The only reason we can experience pain is if we’ve already experienced joy.
And Isaiah is saying that God rouses us each morning – or maybe at the dawning of a whole phase of our lives, who knows? – to enter this circle of life and people and the effect we all have on each other. Because when we listen to the stories of our own lives – hence the value of something like the fall program or discussions in the Sages or Bridge or parents – when we listen to our own stories and hear what we have come to comprehend with insight and compassion and wisdom – it automatically becomes something that we then embody for someone else.
Inevitably and unstoppably. We’re just not people off in space suits on the moon. We’re connected with each other, and as each one of us takes in an insight about our own lives, possibly over a long period of time – I don’t mean that this stuff comes easy or comes quick – it will affect those around us.
God wakes up our ears each morning to hear deep inside of life the very things other people may need us to turn around and say. God has opened our ears, and, just like Tim was talking about last week with the opening of the ears of the deaf man, this “open” in Hebrew means the same thing – not just to open, but to loosen our hearing, to free it up. So, to wake up to your own life means that “you have been given the tongue of a teacher.” I see this amazing cycle so many times in people’s lives. Sadly, I’ve also seen people stop the cycle and turn away from both the gift and the challenge of it.
That’s the first thing about this Isaiah passage. But then comes the other whopper, which lets us know this isn’t rose-colored-glasses piety. The speaker says, “It doesn’t always work out so well, and at this particular moment, I’m feeling pretty misunderstood and mistreated.”
“But…. but,” the speaker goes on to say. “But I’m not alone in this. I dare to hope for a God who is in it with me and who wants my greater good. I dare to hope for it – and I dare to claim that!”
There is no greater vote of confidence in God – and therefore no greater vote of confidence in ourselves. Because when we say our greatest hopes out loud – which can be really hard to do – it is good for us. So many of us can bury our hopes so deeply under reasons why we know they cannot be, that we can go ahead and take on the voices that say, “It’s too much” or “You’re not worth it” or whatever your voices say. We can let those get the best of us, get the best of our God-given right to hope.
And here, Isaiah is saying, You go right on out on that limb and hope, because it’s worth it.
It’s worth it because hopes like this – I don’t mean a hope for more money, or a hope for good weather, or for a sweater to go on sale – but our deepest hopes for life itself aren’t like a yes-or-no answer. Too often, hope is treated that way, like something either happens or it doesn’t, and I don’t think that’s what hope is about. It may be what optimism is about, but not hope.
Hope is something that changes us just because we claim it. And if the hope doesn’t work out the way we wanted, it doesn’t mean that that hope didn’t take us somewhere new and real and good anyway. So maybe going ahead and declaring our hopes – for a fullness of ourselves and those we love, hope for a God who believes in us – as simple as that sounds, I’ll bet those hopes are deeper in most of us than we might think, and to dare to let them speak will change our journey for the better.
It changes us for a real simple reason: when we speak from our own deep truth, it lets each one of us be more ourselves, more authentic – a common term, but perfectly good in that it means our insides match our outsides a little more. And when that happens, that’s what leads the way. And that’s a good thing, no matter what.
When we find the real places where that match-up happens in our lives – the real, painful, joyful, wise places in our lives where we have to engage cycle of living and listening and learning and teaching and listening again –
Is that…. Could that be…..? Could that be that that’s where we take up a cross?
Could that be anything like what Jesus was talking about?
I’m not sure. But it feels possible.
So may God truly rouse us, in a way that invites us into the cycle of openness and learning and giving and then receiving.
A cycle that someone long before Jesus described in a way that’s edgy but probably pretty accurate, and here I’ll tweak a bit into our own lingo:
“In our sleep, the pain that cannot forget what it knows falls drop by drop onto our hearts. And whether we want it or not, wisdom comes to us through the awful – meaning, truly awesome – grace of God.”