Mark 8 27-35 2006
Pentecost 17
Mark 8:27-35
October 1, 2006
“His Cross is Ours”
Shortly after Jesus fed the five thousand with seven loaves of bread and a few fish, He was alone with His disciples and he began to talk to them on very personal terms about what he came to do and what it meant to be one of His followers. He tells them what His future will hold and what that will mean for their lives. Right after Peter’s confession that Jesus is indeed the Christ, that is the Messiah or Savior, Jesus tells them how he will accomplish the salvation of not only the Jesus people but all people. Jesus says, “that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again. And he said this plainly. He announces to them that he will be killed, but on the third day, he will be raised from the dead. His disciples were not ready in any shape, form, or fashion for such an announcement.
This idea of a suffering and dying servant and Savior was more than Simon Peter could take. "What's he saying?" Peter asks himself. "That he's going to lay down his life? That he's going to be the sacrifice? It was absurd. What kind of God would do such a thing?"
And that's the point, isn't it? That's the truth that sets us apart from every other religion on this planet. We serve a God who does not ask for a sacrifice, but who is the sacrifice.
A few years ago, a man spoke with Mrs. Anwar Sadat, the widow of the former Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat. She said, “In the beginning of Sadat's presidency, he had championed war against Israel. He was part of the destructive cycle of hatred and bloodshed that has stalked the Middle East for decades. But then one day, Sadat determined to become a peacemaker. He wanted to break down the walls of violence and misunderstanding between the Egyptians and Israelis. He knew that members of his own political party would try to kill him to stop the peace process.
Mrs. Sadat recalled the day that Anwar told her he was going to Jerusalem to negotiate a peace settlement. She protested that his enemies would kill him. He replied, "Then I would have died for peace." He did. His friends of war became his enemies of peace. They assassinated him.
The work of reconciliation requires sacrifice. That is true when we are speaking of reconciliation between nations; that is true when we speak of reconciliation between humanity and God. A sacrifice must be made, and it is God who made the sacrifice. If we do not understand this, we do not grasp the heart of Christian faith. Without the cross, Christianity is just another pleasant philosophy urging people to be nicer to one another. But the Lord has given us these words, “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son . . .”In these words we find both the law and the gospel. We find the words of love and sacrifice. The gospel is that God so loved the world. The Law is that He gave, that is sacrificed His only Son for this world. Here we find that true love embraces sacrifice. At the cross there is the dividing line between a wishy-washy Christianity that motivates no real devotion, and a life-changing Christianity that causes people to give their lives to follow Jesus wherever he leads. Christ laid down his life in our behalf.
Peter took Jesus aside and began to rebuke him for saying this. "But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. “Get behind me, Satan!' he said. 'You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.” These are pretty strong words, then Jesus boldly told Peter and the crowd following Him that just as the Christ, the Son of God will sacrifice His life so will those people that believe in Him and call themselves His disciples.
Hear Jesus word to His would be followers, "Then [Jesus] called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: 'If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? For what can a man give in return for his life?” These are hard words indeed. Jesus is telling Peter that there is a difference between cheap grace and God’s sacrificial love for us. For those people that believe in Jesus, His death has a radical effect and changes the very perspective of life. Through His death on the cross we are not only forgiven ,we are called to follow. This is because. Christ’s cross is also our cross.
These words of Jesus are not to be taken lightly. One man, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was not always faithful in his Christian witness, wrote about the difficulty of these words of our Lord as he opposed Adolph Hitler and eventually was killed by him. He wrote a book that is worth reading called, The Cost of Discipleship. In it he talks about what he called, "Cheap grace." "Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church," he wrote. "We are fighting today for costly grace . . . Cheap grace is the grace we bestow upon ourselves . . . Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline . . . Cheap grace is a grace without discipleship, grace without the cross…it is the call of Jesus Christ not only to talk the talk but to also walk the walk. Cheap grace is all talk; it is lip service to God. Costly grace is faith in action, to willing sacrifice all to follow Jesus. Just as Luther wrote in, “A Mighty Fortress” – And take they our life, goods, fame, child and wife, let these all be gone, They yet have nothing won, the Kingdom ours remaintheth. This is what it meant for Luther “to take up ones cross.”
What does it mean to us when we say we too must take up our crosses? What does it mean for a person to lose his life so that he may gain it? All too often we have watered down the meaning of our Lord’s Word to take up the cross. We want to appear to fit into the call of Christ so that we say, more often then not, that the adverse situations that we find in our life are crosses that we must bear. I’m sick, I am bearing the cross. I’m in pain, this is my cross. My children are not obedient, this is my cross. I am frustrated by life, don’t have enough money, don’t have any friends, nobody understands me…these are my crosses. While there may be an aspect of truth to all of these things, they, properly understood, according to Christ’s Word, are not crosses. Rather, as Luther says they are “afflictions,” that accompany us through this life because we live in a fallen world. Rather, the true bearing of the cross is understood as this, Martin Luther wrote, “Suffering is called a cross when Christians come by it as Simon here does (Luther is talking about Simon of Cyrene that was compelled to carry the cross of Jesus Christ when Jesus was crucified) The Christian does not carry his own cross, but the Lord Christ’s. He must suffer for the Lord’s sake…the suffering and cross of Christians should be of such a nature, too, that, as Peter says, they suffer not as thieves and murderers but as Christians. That is, for the sake of the Lord Christ, for the sake of His word and confession. And, “Whoever professes that he is baptized and is glad to be called by the name of Christ should be convinced that he is no better than Christ, his Lord. For such a person must be conformed to the image of the Son of God. If Christ wore a crown of thorns, we should not expect people to place wreathes and roses on our head(s). Bearing ones cross means to suffer for the sake of the gospel, for the sake of Jesus. It means following Him, pointing to Him and saying He is the one in whom I believe. It is His word that I follow. In this, we Christians cannot not help but to be ridiculed, belittled and scorned.
What does it mean, in a practical way, for us to bear this cross of being a Christian? It means to identify with Jesus Christ. It means different things to each of us because we bear the cross of Jesus in many and various ways. One thing we know, by Christ’s example, is that it means sacrifice, denial of ones self and service and love towards all people. It means giving up our hope of the best life possible here on earth and focusing our hope in the better life of eternity, not just for ourselves but for other people. One thing is for sure. We cannot look at each other and say, “Are you bearing the cross of Jesus Christ. It is a question each one of must ask themselves personally. It is a very personal matter. For one young man it meant a time when he was in high school. Though he was a Christian he never made a point of making it known around the school or even to his close friends. There was, however a group of kids at his school that carried their Bibles around, they met with each other, they studied the Bible together and they prayed together. The young man knew who they were but never let them know that he was one of them. That was because, he didn’t want to be known as “one of them” you know, the Bible thumpers, those strange Christians. Then one day when after studying his own Bible, after understanding what Jesus had done for him, he decided to do something. The next day he went to school wearing a t-shirt that said, “Jesus is the Answer.” His heart pounded, his palms were sweaty, his legs were weak, but he marched on with that identifying mark on his chest.. He knew that it was the right thing, to boldly say to the world, “I am one of them”, I am a Christian, “Jesus is my Savior.”
It is not easy to do. I guess that is why it is called bearing the cross. We all now have an opportunity, as individuals and together to boldly say who we are and who we follow, even if means going to the cross of shame, like our Lord did. Our society…Abortion, homosexuality, stem cell research, sexuality and living together, even to call ourselves Lutheran (sacraments) and finally even to be entirely politically incorrect and to boldly state that there is a heaven and hell, that all religions do not lead to eternal life or God or heaven, that there is only one way to heaven and that is through Jesus Christ. Trust me, if you speak the truth about all these things, your acquaintances, friends and even family members will look at you with the eyes of shame and disgrace. You will appear uniformed, unenlightened and even stupid. And your friends may say, “Oh, you are one of them, why don’t you be like one of us?” No, we must cling to our Savior and His word. This is the cross that we must bear
We do not know who it was who had this dream, but it was quoted in a Christian publication. The person said, “I saw in a dream that I was in the Celestial City—though when and how I got there I could not tell. I was one of a great multitude which no man could number, from all countries and peoples and times and ages. Somehow I found that the saint who stood next to me had been in Heaven more than 1,860 years. “Who are you?” I said to him. “I,” said he, “was a Roman Christian; I lived in the days of the Apostle Paul, I was one of those who died in Nero’s persecutions. I was covered with tar and fastened to a stake and set on fire to light up Nero’s gardens.” “How awful!” I exclaimed. “No,” he said, “I was glad to do something for Jesus. He died on the cross for me.” The man on the other side then spoke: “I have been in Heaven only a few hundred years. I came from an island in the South Seas. A missionary, came and told me about Jesus, and I too learned to love Him. My fellow-countrymen killed the missionary, and they caught and bound me. I was beaten until I fainted and they thought I was dead, but I revived. Then next day they knocked me on the head, cooked and ate me.” “How terrible!” I said. “No,” he answered, “I was glad to die as a Christian. You see the missionaries had told me that Jesus was scourged and crowned with thorns for me.”
Then they both turned to me and said, “What did you suffer for Him? Did you sell what you had for the money which sent men like John Williams to tell the heathen about Jesus?” Were you persecuted and ridiculed by the people of your time because you followed Jesus. And I was speechless. And while they both were looking at me with sorrowful eyes, I awoke, and it was a dream! But I lay on my soft bed awake for hours, thinking of the money I had wasted on my own pleasures; or my extra clothing, and costly car, and many luxuries; and I realized that I did not know what the words of Jesus meant: “If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me” (Mark 8:34).
This doesn’t sound like a dream to me, rather, it sounds like a night mare. It is the night mare of not knowing whether I have born the cross enough or even at all. It is the nightmare of knowing that I have failed my Lord and not followed him as I should. It is the nightmare of knowing that I have not followed Jesus the way I should even the way I want to. It is a nightmare from which I I desperately want to wake, to find comfort of any kind. As a Christian I know where that comfort is to be found. It is to be found in the arms of my precious Savior who asks me not to look at my own crosses or even my failure to bear them but to come to him and lay hold of the cross that he bore for me. Comfort is found in that He has called me, and at His will I will follow him. Comfort is found knowing that I need not seek out the crosses that I will bear, if I am faithful to my Savior they will find me. And comfort is found knowing that He will sustain me, bear me up, and His strength will carry me on. He gives me the salvation of my soul, not based on anything that I have done but solely on what Jesus has done for me. I find comfort knowing that God is recreating me anew in the image of His Son, and in this fallen world that image must be crucified. But like my Lord, I will be raised from the dead and I will share His glory, not my own, not now, but very, very soon. This is my hope, my life, my all…Jesus. Jesus!