Mark 8: 31-38
Lent 2 / Year B
Jesus said, “If you want to become
my follower, you must learn how to deny yourself, take up your cross, and
follow me.” Jesus then said, “If you
want to save your life you will lose it, and if you want to lose your life for
my sake and for sake of the gospel you will find it.”
These two statements comprise what
for Jesus is the fundamental key to a life of fulfillment, purpose, and
joy. For him, nothing short of this
vision will satisfy, nothing less will endure.
But the teachings themselves are not self-evident. To use a buzz-phrase (which I don’t like to
do) each needs to be ‘unpacked’ in order to understand better what Jesus is
saying.
Let’s start with “If you want to
save your life you will lose it.” Human
beings do not come into this world ready to hit the ground running. We are classified as an altricial species. Unlike precocial and superprecocial species, we require care and nurture for some time
after our birth, unlike say, the blue wildebeest which can stand within six
minutes of being born, walk within thirty minutes, and can outrun a hyena by
day two. We are born less mature than
this, and, as a result, in our very early years finely hone our skills at being
self-centered and selfish. We learn to
demand food, comfort, and attention from others in order to survive. It serves us well in our early years, but
according to Jesus we will spend a lifetime learning how to turn this off and
turn it around. Once we are able to do
for ourselves, left unchecked, neediness morphs into greediness. “If you live for yourself alone you will lose
your life.”
Nothing does in self-centeredness faster
than having a baby. I have known only a
few parents who were able to bend an infant to their will. The rest of us succumb and the majority of us
do so quite willingly. We learn deep in
our hearts there are other people who matter to us more than we matter to
ourselves. And we learn the more we
focus on others, the more we give, and the more we sacrifice, the larger our heart
becomes; the larger our world becomes.
It is one of life’s great paradoxes: the more you let go, the more you
receive; the more you focus on loving others the more love will come your way;
the more you die to self the more alive you will be.
Bill Gates has a new book out, and
thus is making the rounds of TV talk shows.
This past week Stephen Colbert asked him about what it is like to be so
wealthy. Gates replied, “Well, there is a responsibility to give that money
back in a smart way.” “Not everybody
feels that way,” Colbert responded.
Gates said, “It is gratifying that the dream of software I had basically
came true. And now I get to give it
away.” Colbert pressed him about what it
is like to be one of the richest people in the world. Gates noted, “Someday I will give enough money
away so I won’t be on that list.”
Colbert then offered to help Gates with this project. Bill Gates gets it. You can have all the money in the world
(living for self) and yet be impoverished or you can live for others and
discover incredible riches not earnable in the marketplace.
Think about the famous people who learned
how to live for something bigger than themselves: Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln,
Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa. Each
person heroically changed the world by letting go of self and living for
others. You and I may not be called or
positioned to do what they did, but our willingness to undertake this
transformation (to be born again for the service of others) is just as critical
to the people in our lives.
If any of our children are
listening, I want to say something to you I wish I had known when I was your
age. If you have brothers or sisters (as
I did growing up), family life can become very competitive. You want your way. Your siblings each want their ways. Your parents have things they want to do or
have to get done. Living for yourself
alone looks like insisting on your getting your own way… all the time. This may not make sense, but it is true… the
more you fight for your own way and the more you win, the smaller and less
rewarding your life will become. The
more you let go of what you want so that your brothers, sisters, and parents
have a chance to get what they want, the bigger your world will become.
Before going off to do what you
want to do, what would it happen if you said to your mom, “Is there anything I
can do for you?” If you are the oldest,
it can be especially powerful to say to a younger sib, “What is something you
would like us to do together?” When you
really want to go to Chick-fil-a and your brother really, really wants to go to
Cookout, you can say, “It’s OK with me if my brother gets what he wants. I’ll find something on the menu I like.” And if you are the brother you can say,
“Thank you for agreeing to go to Cookout.
Next time you get to choose.”
You see, the thing about love in a
family is this: it is not a fixed amount.
It is not like you have to fight for every single scrape you can find
because there is only so much and there won’t be anymore. In fact, if you look at family life like
this, the love available for all actually shrinks. This is what happens when you live selfishly. There will be less love for everyone in your
family, including you. But when you
begin to care about the other people in your family, the amount of love within your
family grows and grows. The more you
live for others, the more love will be available for everyone… including you. The same is true of your friendship circles
and your classroom.
So what does Jesus mean when he
says, “Pick up your cross and follow me?”
The imagery of a person carrying a cross is obscure in our own time,
limited perhaps just to the Passion Story.
But in Jesus’ day it was a common experience. The Romans executed hundreds if not thousands
of people each year; crucifixion being their most prevalent method. Like Jesus, most people who were crucified
were tortured first and then forced to carry the crossbeam to a site where a
fixed, vertical post was waiting. To be
reared in Jesus’ Palestine was to grow up seeing people carrying their cross to
their death.
Today, typically, when we speak
about “carrying your cross”, we are referring to some kind of burden in life we
have to bear. But when Jesus uses this
expression he is thinking more about the course of one’s life. When a person in his day was forced to carry
his cross, it meant he carried it all the way to the end of his life; a moment
which was imminent. So, pairing his
instruction to pick up your cross with lose your life in order to find it,
Jesus is saying this is to be who you are and who you are becoming from here on
moving forward in life… all the way to the end.
Michael Curry, our Presiding
Bishop, is fond of noting the opposite of love is not hate, but rather it is
selfishness. Today Jesus invites us to
lay aside our selfish desires, to live for others, and to make this be the
pattern of our lives moving forward.
Even though we may never become one of the great figures in history if
we do this, it will have a dramatic impact on how we experience the world. The choice is ours. Either we can clutch fearfully and anxiously
to our selfish desires, or we can let go and allow God’s love to live in us as
we learn how to live for others.
