Mark 8 and Genesis 17
As you might have imagined, preparing my sermon for this Sunday carried unique challenges as our primary focus as a community was with Erin Leis’s family. I guess I’d like to call what I’ve prepared this morning, a few thoughts – a few thoughts about our texts for the 2nd Sunday in Lent. I was graced this week, by the fact that John, my husband, was learning these texts to share with the Danforth congregation this morning, so in order to ponder them, I had only to make myself available when he was going over them.
The thoughts that I will share with you are based on what I heard. In both texts, the Genesis text – Genesis 17 and the gospel text from Mark 8 – it struck me as I listened, that God is speaking. Almost the entire text in Genesis, God in the first person, tells Abraham, everything that God is going to do.
God says,
I…… will bless you
and I….. will make you a great nation
and I….. will also bless Sarah
God continues,
I will…. change your names from Abram to Abraham
and from Sarai to Sarah.
I will make and keep my covenant with you and your descendents after you. God repeats this promise several times.
That’s a lot of “I” language.
That’s a lot of effort God is going to with Abraham and Sarah to make God’s desires known.
What if we hear the Mark text in a similar way?
The Mark text is a story told in the third person, but Jesus does a lot of the speaking too. If Jesus is speaking as God incarnate, I wondered, what is God doing in this text?
The difficulty with the Mark text is precisely how to hear it in a new way. It is such a familiar text. “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my works in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the gory of his Father with the holy Angels.
As I read this text again for us, I wonder, at what point did your mind begin to wander? If your mind did not wander, great, maybe it’s only a problem for me – but my mind wanders sometimes when I hear really familiar texts.
Another problem that I have with the text is that in my Mennonite, “Martyrs Mirror related” upbringing, (for those who aren’t familiar with the Martyr’s Mirror, it is a book of the compiled stories of those who were martyred or who suffered and died or more precisely were killed for their faith) In my “Martyr’s Mirror related” upbringing, this text in Mark is key – because it has been expected that we will suffer for the sake of the gospel and if we don’t suffer for the sake of the gospel we must be failing at our attempts to truly follow Jesus – we obviously don’t have what it takes. I’m sure you understand where I’m going with this line of thinking. Read or heard in this way – this particular text has the potential to produce significant amounts of guilt and shame.
But something shifted for me in a beautiful way when I heard John read it or practice the text this week from the perspective of Jesus. I wish I could imitate him, but because I can’t, I’ll just tell you what I heard.
I heard a God though Jesus so full of compassion for himself and others, that when he got to the part where he says,
If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” The word that stood out for me was “take up their cross and follow me.” This isn’t some “new” cross; this isn’t some “go out and find it” cross; this isn’t “if you haven’t sought out suffering and suffered really hard – you can’t be my followers,” kind of cross; this cross is the one that is already theirs to bear – and unfortunate as it may seem at times – we all have a cross that is already ours. It seems odd to me now that I thought it meant I needed to go out and seek more suffering.
The path of seeking suffering for suffering sake – now as I think about it – smacks of self-righteousness.
Recently, in a critique about the Martyr’s Mirror, Julia Spicher Kasdorf, unearthed several artistic and literary responses to the wood-cut of Dirk Willems rescuing his pursuer out of a frozen lake. She called him the “patron Saint of the helping hand and the morally superior attitude.”
Out of respect for this picture and what it has meant to so many – seeing it as an example of loving one’s enemy – there is no picture more poignant or formative. And if this was Dirk’s cross to bear in the act of following Jesus – so be it – and may we all continue to be inspired by it. But if we think we need to go out and find our own lake to drown in, in order to follow Jesus, we have become confused.
The problem with hearing the text in Mark – as something more we need to do – so that we can either feel good about all that we have suffered, or feel bad when we fail is that we have the whole thing backwards – it leads us to think that it’s somehow about us.
Well it is about us, but not so much about what we do but about the direction that we are heading as we do the things we must do and about what God has done, is doing and will do.
That’s the message that is clearest to me when I hear these passages side-by-side, the one in Genesis and the one in Mark. When I heard the texts recited back-to-back in fact that’s all I could hear.
God says, “I will make a covenant between you and me and all your descendants after you.”
In Mark, Jesus says about himself, “the son of man,” must suffer and be rejected by the religious establishment and be killed and on the third day be raised.
God established a covenant with Sarah, Abraham and their descendents and gave God’s self to us in Jesus who suffered and died and was raised.
I’m in awe of the lengths that God has gone to and will continue to go to reconcile and gather all of us into God’s self.
In that light, what can we make of the injunction to deny ourselves and take up our crosses and follow Jesus? I’ve lived long enough to know that we all have a cross to bear – maybe even more than one – and we’re bound to drag them with us somewhere. If we pick them up and follow Jesus, according to God’s promise, we may someday be fully redeemed. If we drag them in any other direction we may end up losing the very life we had hoped to save – our own. And we certainly don’t need to go looking for more crosses to carry to ensure our moral superiority.
In the end it is and always will be not our own actions but an “Act of God” that saves us.