Matthew 16:21-28
August 28, 2011
Crossings
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
Here we are, in the middle of that long stretch of Sundays that the tradition of the church calls “ordinary time.” It’s not called that because the Sundays get a “ho hum” reaction, although it’s certainly not as exciting—if that’s the right word for it—as Advent and Christmas, say. It’s called ordinary time because it’s not a time with lots of high holy days, so we simply number the Sundays and count them with “ordinal” numbers. Do your remember? Numbers come in two kinds, cardinals and ordinals. “One, two, three” are cardinal numbers. Ordinal numbers are “first, second, third.” Today is the 11th Sunday after Pentecost. Ordinary time.
Having said that, there is something rather nice about “ordinary” time in the other sense. It is rather nice to have nothing much going on. Our friends and relatives on the east coast are wishing that nothing much was going on. Last week it was an earthquake. This weekend it’s a hurricane. What next—a plague of locusts? Ordinary is good.
We’re home from vacations. Sure, it was good to get away, to see something new, or to see family and old friends. But it’s called “away” for a reason. Away is somewhere else, not here, not home. Now we’re home.
Kids are back to school. They are settling into routines and so are we. The routines may be demanding, but there is more predictability from week to week and month to month. Unless, of course, the school authorities decide to send everyone home because the weather is unbearably nice. They said it was because it was too hot, but come on! And how civilized. “The weather is too nice. Let’s send everyone home.” I wish I had had school authorities like that when I was in school. Instead, we suffered through boring classes yearning to be outside.
In ordinary time, news is not a good thing. It means something has changed, and it’s hardly ever because something better is coming along. People say change is good. I think we keep saying that hoping to convince ourselves that it’s true when we know in our hearts that change is at best a mixed bag.
So, anyway, hooray for ordinary time. Hooray for life going on. Hooray for ho hum. It’s something to celebrate.
And then, in the middle of ordinary time, just when we thought everything was going along nicely, we are thrown this lesson from Matthew and we are plunged without warning into Lent.
This talk of crosses and dying and denying ourselves and losing our lives is not exactly what we had in mind. They are not what we want. We want the chance to work hard and make our way in the world. We don’t necessarily want to be famous or rich or powerful. But we want to make a comfortable living for ourselves and our families. We want to be able to retire and enjoy doing things we’ve put off while we still have the health and energy to do them. We want to spend time with our families. We want to see our children grow up. We want to see them happy. We’d like to see them with families of their own, although we promise not to nag them about it. Well, at least we promise to try not to nag them about it. We want to spend time with our grandchildren and, who knows, maybe even with our great grandchildren. We want to avoid painful medical conditions and we hope to die in our sleep without having been a burden to our families.
We don’t like trouble. Well, I don’t, anyway. Actually, let me clarify that just a little. I don’t like making trouble. I’d rather study trouble, think about trouble, theorize trouble, preferably trouble that is either a long time ago or far away. When I make trouble—and I have been known to do that—it’s come at the end of a hard internal struggle against my own preferences.
Bill Cosby is known as a comedian, but I think he’s really more of a sage. Talking about his children who complain that something is “unfair,” he says, “What children do not understand is that parents are not interested in justice; what they want is quiet.”
And here comes Jesus, history’s best-known disturber of the peace, to announce an end to quiet, an end to peace, an end to the blessings of ordinariness: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”
These are hard words. And so, naturally, we want to soften them a little, but it’s like trying to fluff up a rock so we can use it as a pillow. It’s not that we haven’t tried, God knows. We try to chisel the words down into a smaller size. We say that self-denial is something like giving up chocolate for Lent or going out eat or to the movies less often. We turn self-denial into a mild asceticism undertaken for the sake of, well, for the sake of ourselves, substituting immediate gratification for meeting long-term goals. But our version of self-denial benefits the self, so that’s not so hard.
Or we say that the cross that we have to take up is some uncomfortable or even painful thing that life has thrown at us, a thing there is no way to avoid. If our parents are too strict, our children too unruly, if we hate our job, if our house is too small and we can’t afford to move, if any of a hundred things are not the way we’d like them and we don’t see how to change them, then we say, It’s my cross to bear.
But these strategies are doomed to failure. In our hearts we know that they are bad-faith efforts to get out from under Jesus’ words. We know that Jesus’ words mean something far more serious, far darker, far more threatening to our peace and quiet than we’ve made them out to be.
Jesus is going to Jerusalem. He “had to go” to Jerusalem. Why is that? Because Jesus cares less for quiet than he does for justice. He has declared God’s passionate commitment to justice in Galilee. He has preached and demonstrated a gospel of justice for the poor, for the sick, for the outcast, for the discarded lives that barely subsist at the margins of society. He has done it in Galilee, but he must also do it at the center of power. Jerusalem is where the elites are, who collaborate with the Empire in oppressing their fellow compatriots and co-religionists. From Jerusalem they govern the province. In Jerusalem they control the Temple, the center of symbolic power. They use it to make it appear that anyone who is against the Empire is against God.
Jesus goes to Jerusalem to lay bare the schemes of the elite. Jesus goes to make it clear that it’s not the elites and God against the boat rockers. Jesus goes to make it clear that it’s the poor and God against the elites and the Empire. Jesus goes to pick a fight.
The elites won’t love him for rocking the boat. The nobles and chief priests won’t be grateful that he’s exposed their tidy arrangements. The bureaucrats that administer the apparatus of imperial and religious law won’t appreciate what Jesus will try to do. They will do what the Empire always does when it is confronted with the truth it tries to hide, when it is confronted with the demand for justice. Casually, without much thought and with no misgivings, the Empire will kill him. The elites imagine that that will be end of the matter.
Of course, says Jesus, the elites imagine wrong. That will not be the end of the matter. The elites imagine that God will stay out it, that God is on their side, even that they are doing God’s work, but they are wrong. The Empire does not have the last word. God has the last word. Death is not the end of the matter. Life is the end of the matter: Jesus will be raised from the dead.
Jesus goes to Jerusalem with his eyes open. He knows what sort of opposition his message will provoke. He knows what happens to people who tell the truth to Rome and to Rome’s minions. He knows how the elites will react when he demands justice for the poor in God’s name. And in spite of this he goes to pick a fight.
And this, Jesus says, is the pattern of discipleship. Anyone who wants to be a follower of Jesus will live in the same way, in the same way they will have to renounce themselves so that they will be able to demand the same justice, they will stir up the same rage, and they will call forth the same reaction.
There really isn’t any way to soften these words. We can’t blunt the demand that they make. So we do the sensible thing: we ignore Jesus. Can you imagine if we didn’t? Can you imagine a church that didn’t? Can you imagine what their mission statement would be? Wouldn’t it sound something like this:
“We will follow Jesus in laying bare the lies of injustice and oppression and in demanding justice and freedom. We will know that we have been successful when the Empire strikes back.”
Can you imagine what their charge conference would be like? Can you hear the district superintendent asking, “Well, now, tell me what this church is about.” And the members reply, “We pick fights.”
“Say what?”
“We pick fights. Oh, we try to pick them carefully. We try to make sure they are the right fights. But, yeah, that’s what we do. We pick fights.”
It would be hard to say that they weren’t “making disciples for the transformation of the world,” but I’m not sure that this is what the General Conference had in mind when it adopted this as our purpose. And I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have to chase away prospective members with a stick, either. “We pick fights.” Sheesh!
It’s not that there haven’t been Christians willing to be Jesus’ followers. Oscar Romero, the bishop of San Salvador during the late 1970s, comes to mind. Like me, he was a bookish sort of fellow who preferred to avoid conflict. But by a strange and difficult path he became someone who laid bare the lies of his government (and of his church). He demanded justice. He was shot for his troubles. The death squads took care of him. While he was celebrating a mass. How’s that for irony. They thought that would be the end of the matter.
It’s a funny thing. In an interview two weeks before his death, Romero said these words:
“I have frequently been threatened with death. I must say that, as a Christian, I do not believe in death but in the resurrection. If they kill me, I shall be resurrected in the Salvadoran people.”1
As skeptical as I am about the sort of divine intervention in history that Jesus talks about, I have to say, I’ve seen the truth of Romero’s words. He is very much alive in the people of El Salvador. I would even say that from a strictly pragmatic point of view, killing Romero was about the stupidest thing the death squads ever did. He is more powerful now and his voice is more widely heard than it ever was during his lifetime. The Empire did not have the last word, nor did death.
So this peaceful, scholarly man, conservative by temperament as well by conviction, came to see that following Jesus meant picking a fight for the sake of justice.
I hate picking fights. I’d rather go along and get along. I’d rather compromise. I’d rather avoid conflict. I hate picking fights. But I love Jesus. And I know that he’s right. So, really, what choice do I have?
©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.
1Interview in March, 1980, given to Excelsior, a Mexican newspaper.
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