What is the measure of a life? How might you sum up 30, 50, 90 years of living? You’ve probably grappled with that question if you’ve ever been asked to give a eulogy or write a memoriam or even tried to compose an obituary. What is the measure of a life? What description, what qualities, what achievements define someone’s existence.
I face this all the time in doing funeral sermons. Of course there is only one thing I need to say about a person at a funeral, “baptized child of God you lived and died and live still in the grace of God.” But of course if that was all I said the families and friends would be disappointed and as indeed a funeral is thanksgiving for a person’s existence I struggle to determine the measure of a life. What was important to this person, how would they define themselves? How does their story fit into God’s story? It is never easy. Never. Certainly it’s easier if the person is someone I knew well but if I have to depend upon what I glean from family, friends and co workers it’s a lot more challenging. Most of the time I can manage to satisfy people that what I have said is accurate and honest but occasionally I have failed miserably and people have said “that’s not the person I knew.” But of course the person the family told me about may not be the person they knew. What is the measure of a life? How is existence summed up?
Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” Now you must understand that for eight chapters of the gospel we’ve been seeing Jesus healing people, performing miracles, teaching people and the disciples have been along for the ride. Why, just recently, they saw Jesus feed 4,000 people and heal a blind man. So Jesus wants to know, what are you hearing, what are people saying about me? And they answer him. “Some say John the Baptist” that is you’re a rabble-rouser, an attention getting troublemaker. “Some say Elijah”, a spiritual miracle worker, “Some say a prophet” bringing a word of God to set the world straight and get us back on the right track. And Jesus says “and who do you say that I am?” This is a crucial moment. It’s the final answer, everything is on the line here. Everything that these disciples have seen and heard is in question here. We all hold our breath and wait. Peter answers “You are the Messiah.” You are God’s anointed, the one we’ve all been waiting for. You are it! And we all breathe a sigh of relief. He got it. He nailed it! Maybe these months haven’t been in vain, maybe these disciples aren’t so dense after all. Whew that was a close one.
So now Jesus can tell them a bit more. He can tell them that he will face suffering, rejection and death and that after three days he will rise again. And Peter, now that he’s the star pupil, takes Jesus aside and says, “Don’t talk like that Jesus, that’s not how it’s going to come down, that’s just crazy talk.” Jesus doesn’t much like being challenged by Peter because that is the way it’s going to come down, that is exactly what will happen. There will be suffering, rejection and death. “Get behind me Satan.”
And now isn’t Peter surprised. But the surprises keep coming. He calls the crowd, with the disciples and tells them that they also must bear a cross because they are his followers.
Now before we go any further we need to say two things about cross bearing. First of all, Jesus is not merely telling us to put up with the ordinary burdens of life. For instance we might be tempted to say, “Oh my big toe hurts I guess that’s a cross I have to bear.” Or “My paper boy keeps throwing my Daily Heralds under the bushes, I guess that’s a cross I have to bear. The ordinary problems and annoyances of life are not what Jesus means when he speaks about crosses that he wants us to bear.
Secondly when Jesus tells is to take up our cross, he’s not telling us to be willing to put up with abuse just for the sake of being abused. In our county, a woman is beaten every 18 seconds, totaling about -4 million battered women a year. About 1 out of 3 women that goes to a hospital emergency room is there because of injuries from domestic violence. And the sad fact is that when some of those battered women go to their ministers they are quoted this part of the Bible and advised to just accept the cross they have to bear.
When Jesus tells us to take up the cross, he’s not telling us to just put up with the minor annoyances that come into our lives each day. And he is most certainly not telling us to put up with abuse. No, when Jesus tells us to take up our cross, he has a different point in mind. Namely that, when we come to the point where God’s love truly fills our heart, we will do whatever God wants us to do, even to the point of giving our very lives. After all isn’t that what Jesus did?
Now I know that all this talk about self denial and cross bearing can seem stringent and demanding and difficult. Jesus is laying on us some tough teaching, something that goes against so much that our culture expects of its “religion”. Here is the bad news that you can’t walk with Jesus unless you are willing to take up you cross and walk the cruciform way that he is walking.
Yet from another perspective this is good news. Here Jesus speaks of self denial, of death and suffering, of not being ashamed to walk his way and he speaks it to this rag tag bunch of very ordinary, often utterly misunderstanding disciples. US.
At the end of Jesus lecture, you might expect Mark to tell us that most of the disciples left him muttering to themselves, “I had no idea that Jesus was walking this direction. I’m out of here.”
But if any of the disciples left, Mark says nothing about it. They keep with Jesus, even though he has promised them a cross. It’s rather amazing, when one considers how dumb and disappointing the disciples are in the Gospel of Mark, that Jesus would enlist people like this to walk away like his. But he does. And they do; they follow. These ordinary people are called to walk with him, to do the same things he does, to bear the same cross he bears.
So the good news in this challenging teaching is this: Jesus believes you are able to bear the cross.
A lot of people have suggested that the problem with our churches is not that we expect too much of people but that we expect too little. Oh we offer programs that make for better living. We try to be convenient and fit in to the busy schedules and demands that people fill their lives with. We try to make it easy when perhaps we should be allowing that following Jesus isn’t necessarily easy. Maybe we should be teaching as Jesus did that we are part of something bigger than ourselves—that we need to loose ourselves in a bigger vision, a more pressing agenda, God’s task and ours.
So what is the measure of a life? What might be the best thing that could be said in our eulogy, our epitaph. Could it be “she followed Jesus, wherever he led, even if it was to the cross.”
Resources used for this sermon included:
Pulpit Resource Vol. 37
Lectionary homiletics Vol. XIV 2003
Amen