Death Therapy.

Mark 8:31-38

February 25, 2018

I.

The spiritual life is not easy.  Nothing worth doing ever is.  That’s because anything worth doing is an aspect of the spiritual life.  Anything worth doing is a matter of growth, whether it be learning a skill, a language, a musical instrument….  If we haven’t grown in a given day, if we haven’t learned anything or gotten better at something…. If we haven’t become more open to wonder and compassion and joy….  Even while driving a car, even in just the mundane conversations we have at work or at home, even sleeping… if we haven’t used the time we have as an opportunity to learn and grow in gratitude and awareness, then that time was wasted.  To have value, everything we think, say, and do has to be an aspect of the spiritual life, which is to say, it has to be a part of our growing into who we truly are, and a letting go of the false self we only think we are.

That is the only journey that is important or significant in life.  That is why we are here on the earth; indeed it is why the earth itself is here.  It is that we may grow together in love, and in joy, peace, justice, and goodness, and see the unity of all things in God who made them and us.  It is to break down the barriers, screens, walls, curtains, and fences — in our hearts and minds, and then in our world —  that separate us from our true nature, that keep us from being the blessed and good beings God creates us to be. 

What we call the spiritual life is the process of becoming who we really are, which necessarily involves the death of who we just think we are.  Who we think we are is an illusion we maintain by a huge investment of our energy.  If we cut off the flow of that energy and let who we think we are go — indeed, die — then who we really are may emerge.

Faith starts with this vague and often irrational suspicion that there is something wrong.  Something isn’t right.  Something is off.  Something isn’t working.  The traditional language and story about this talks about the Fall and human sinfulness, right?  The world we know is not the world as God made it because something terrible happened that messed everything up.  We are born into existence only knowing the messed-up version of things, in which we fully and unconsciously participate.  Most of us remain for our entire time here completely unaware that the world could be any other way.

The first thing Jesus says when he starts his ministry is to plant in our souls the possibility of a different world called “the Kingdom of God,” which is very near, in fact it is already here within, among, around us.  He proceeds to spend his entire career trying to wake people up to this very present, but unknown to almost everybody, reality.  He preaches, he teaches, he heals, he feeds, he liberates… and it’s all about demonstrating to people that it doesn’t have to be the way we think it has to be.  He keeps poking holes in people’s delusions, allowing brief glimpses into a different reality.  He shows people how to live in tune with this reality.  He sets up communities where people live together according to his vision.  He gives us commandments by which we can at least fake it ’til we make it, because if we act according to the truth, we will eventually see the truth.

II.

Finally, he goes up against our last and greatest enemy, death itself, the ultimate generator of all our fear and manufacturer of all our delusions.  By himself giving up his life and dying he neutralizes death, and he reveals this whole other life on the other side of it.  Which is the life he has been showing us all along, this Kingdom of God, and to which he has been inviting us, which is already here, available, and open.

He shows that death is not a barrier into which we crash and burn, snuffing our life forever.  It is a portal through which we finally pass into God’s Kingdom, to the extent that we have learned to see and live in that Kingdom, now.  That is, if we give up our old selves and in a sense die, we emerge as our new, original selves, and live forever.

The message of this passage, which is one of the core parts of Marks’ gospel, is that we have to take seriously the death of our old selves that is required to see and know who we truly are.  In verse 29, Peter recognizes and identifies Jesus as the Messiah, but when Jesus tells them in verse 31 that he is going to suffer and die when then get to Jerusalem, Peter shows that he didn’t really understand the Messiah thing at all.  Which is why Jesus instructs him to keep quiet about it, because if Peter didn’t get it, no one else certainly would.  Jesus goes so far as to identify Peter with no less than Satan!  It is the influence of the Evil One that deludes us into thinking that our old selves don’t have to die.  That is to set the mind on “human things,” which is to say, products of our old, ego-centric selves.

Then the Lord calls everyone over and lays it out in no uncertain terms.  “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.”  To become who we truly are is not a matter of making a few technical adjustments here and there, and making a few course corrections.  Still less is it just confessing Jesus as your Savior, which Peter does and only gets called “Satan!” for it!

This is about discipleship, which is taking up a cross.  A cross of course is a device the Romans used to torture traitors to death.  It was excruciatingly painful and humiliating.  “Take up your cross” is a way of saying “Prepare to die.”  More than that, it is “Prepare to have everything you ever thought you were exposed, shredded, and extinguished.”  

Jesus doesn’t want anyone getting the wrong idea.  He doesn’t want people falling into the delusion Peter just fell into, of imagining that a mere verbal affirmation of Jesus as Messiah will exempt us from all discomfort and inconvenience and loss.  

This is about losing what we think of as our life.  Transformation doesn’t happen on this side of death.  The Way of Jesus is to die.  The point of new life is not the avoidance of death but the passage through it, something that starts to happen now.  

So, while we are still living in these mortal bodies we have to experience the very real death of our old, small, false ideas of ourselves, so that when our physical organisms do finally give out we will already know who and whose we are.  If we die now we won’t have to die later because we will be in contact with our true life which is beyond the power of death.

III.

Jesus’ words here beg the question about, well, who would join such a faith community?  Who would sign up for what may appear to be a suicide cult?  Take up a cross?  Seriously?  Who does that?    

You don’t come to this place without some recognition that your old existence has become intolerable.  People do not change unless the pain of staying the same is judged to be less than the pain of changing.  If our current approach to life is working fine for us, this Jesus thing probably isn’t for you.  “You have received your reward,” Jesus says to such people quite ominously.  

If the good news of the Kingdom of God threatens rather than thrills you, because you’re perfectly fine with the world as it is, then the idea of giving up anything to get it is ridiculous.  But it also means that anyone who is wealthy, popular, and powerful now only got that way by feeding off the misery of others.  They are the beneficiaries of an unjust and violent system.  They have no use for the Kingdom of God.

But Jesus does not preach death, but life.  When he talks about his own prospects in Jerusalem, he indeed says he will suffer and die “and after three days rise again.”  He says, yes, we are called to lose our lives, but only to “save" them.  We yearn for when the Son of Man “comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”  Jesus is about opening us up to the true, good, eternal, and beautiful.  The only way to get there is for what is false, evil, temporal, and ugly in us to die.  It is the death of the unreal in us which opens us up to the real.

The Way of Jesus, so much of which has to do with the self-denial he talks about here, the losing, abstaining, renouncing, and giving up things, especially prevalent in this season of Lent, is really a profound form of self-love.  By self-denial he means saying no to whatever is keeping us trapped in our small, false, fearful, violent, sad, angry, selfish ways of thinking about ourselves.  He means saying no to whatever is making us enemies, rivals, and competitors of each other.  He means saying no to our prisons and addictions and cancers which we inflict on ourselves and therefore on others.  He means saying no to the hate throttling our souls.  

For by saying no to what is killing us, we say yes to our true life, our deepest and best nature as beings created in the Image of God.  Communion with God and each other and all creation is our purpose which emerges in the immolation of the sour lies that dominate our existence.  The point is removing the blockages and obstacles in our hearts so that the love at the core of who we truly are may emerge and sprout and blossom and bear fruit in lives of compassion, forgiveness, acceptance, non-violence, and joy.

IV.

Jesus says, “Those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”  In other words, those who let go of their old, small, false existence for the sake of following the Way of Jesus, and for the sake of his good news that God’s Kingdom is here, will see their own true lives emerge in grace and glory.  They will live in love without fear, in peace without rage, and in joy without shame.  They will be a blessing to all, the light of the world, from whom truth and goodness radiates in all this broken world.

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Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.  He said all this quite openly.  And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.  But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan!  For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

 He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “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 words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”