Taking Up the Cross

Sermon 2nd Sunday in Lent

Taking up the Cross

Mark 8:27–38

Rev. Jeff Springer

As our lectionary goes we have spent much of our time at the beginning of the gospel of Mark.  We heard much about how Jesus ministry began with his baptism and his temptation in the Wilderness. Later we heard Jesus healing the sick, excising and silencing demons and forgiving sins.  Today’s text lands us just prior to Christ’s transfiguration which we covered a couple weeks ago with Rev. Armstrong.

All throughout the Gospel of Mark there is this common theme of concealing Jesus true identity. The identity that he is the Messiah, the Christ, sent from God the Father.  Rather than state who he is and make claims, Jesus would rather His works speak for him.

In the beginning it is the voice from heaven and later the voices of fearful demons that name Him to be the Holy One of God. Now after eight chapters we finally come round to who men say that he is.  The people know and believe that he is one of the figures that represent the ushering in of the messianic age but which is he.  Is he John the Baptist? Elijah? or one of the other prophets whose spirit has joined his.

When Jesus asked the disciples who have been traveling with him and learning from him, who he is, Peter steps forward with the right answer. You are the Christ! Almost soon as the words come out of his mouth, Jesus in a strict and rebuking tone charges them not to tell anyone about him. 

The disciples were witnessing the Christ in their midst but it was not time for Jesus to be revealed as the Christ. This honor would be reserved for the Heavenly Father for the appropriate time. This seems counterintuitive. But it in God’s perfect timing it was not yet to be revealed.

Jesus next begins to teach his disciples the eleven he would later send out into the world plainly what it means to be the Christ.  Jesus was not using parables or metaphors he was teaching them plainly, literally what the Heavenly Father had sent him to do.  Jesus taught them that the Son of Man would suffer many things, that he would be delivered over to the Pharisees, the Chief Priests, and the Scribes and he would be found wanting. He in their judgment would not measure up. Then they would murder him and in three days he would rise again!

This was the great secret. This was the mission the Father had sent Jesus to accomplish. He would be rejected by the church leadership, the political leadership, he would suffer, be put to death on cross and like Jonah out of the belly of the fish he would rise again after three days!

This testimony we find here in the gospel. This is the witness we confess in the creeds. This is what we proclaim every Sunday at the sacrament of the altar.  Jesus was going to take up the cross.

But was Peter’s reaction?  It is audacious but not unlike ours.  “No God let this not be so!” Peter rebukes Jesus with the same intensity that Jesus used to charge them to keep this secret silent.

Jesus turns to his disciples so that they are all clear where this idea comes from, he rebukes Peter in turn saying, “Get behind me Satan!” The tempter was still at it. He had not let up and he would never let up until he saw Jesus silenced and dead. Little did he know that God would use the hatred of Satan to defeat him to silence his ability to accuse the faithful.

Satan was either going to get Jesus to worship him by renouncing the Word of the Father as Adam had done or he would put an end to him by killing him and then accusing all creation before God of this great sin and injustice. The latter would have worked if Jesus had stayed dead but he would not, The sinless Holy One judged innocent by the Father would rise.

Today we are quick to run past the suffering in this life and to the life to come.  We are not unlike the old Adam Peter who wished to skirt the cross. There are some so-called Christians who are offended at the site of the crucifix.  They say “Jesus is risen, he is no longer on the cross.” But in this life in our sinful state this is where we need him, to be a sacrifice for our sins. 

I know some churches feel we need to move on from the cross. We know all that. Let’s not fixate on that. Let us be about building up the kingdom. But nothing gets built unless God builds it and he builds his Church through the forgiveness of sins made a reality by the suffering and death of Jesus.

Other churches wish to avoid all forms of suffering. They pander to the Old Adam.  The church becomes a place where people tap into the power of God so that they may live healthy, wealthy, successful and victorious lives. In these churches little about Jesus is preached except for an occasionally example.  You are told you possess the divine spark within you, that like God, you can speak by faith, your own reality into existence. No kidding. It is this kind of mysticism that you will get from Oprah and Joel Osteen, but this is not the cross. It is not Jesus coming to you offering you his flesh and blood but you trying to attain to God or be like God through your positive thinking. It is the devil’s old trick of convincing you that you are your own god.

Do not be deceived. Your desire for health, wealth, success and victory can ensnare you as it has millions of others. Repent and find the Christ revealed for you where the Father deigns him to be revealed from the cross.

And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.  For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul? For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

Taking up the cross means, crucifying those unholy desires within us. It means given them to Jesus who takes those sins into his flesh and nails them to the cross.  Yes, you will lose your life but God will save it.  Taking up the cross means enduring the humiliation of an adulterous and sinful generation that calls God’s ways and orders backward, bigoted, misogynous, and judgmental. Taking up the cross means bearing with each other as we sin against one another and forgiving one another as Christ did from the cross.  Following Christ means listening to his words and not a made up conception of our own minds or opinions.

The cross is not health and wealth by the world’s standards because it is self denying. And this is something we refuse in our flesh to do.  The cross is that surgical instrument that seems to do damage but is meant by God for our good. St. Paul writes from our epistle this morning, “we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”

I know that it is natural for us to be ashamed of our afflictions. We try to hide from people that we may have trouble hearing. We may rather not come to church then come in a wheel chair or with a walker. Why? because we do not want to show our weakness, our dependence.  Perhaps we are trying to cover up some sort of foolishness that caused your injury. But our Lord loves the weak and the foolish.  If you are broken, then you are in the right place. 

Together we come around this altar and we join together as one body. We join Jesus as he takes up our crosses and we join our one crucified Lord as he takes up His cross.   One body nourished by our Lord bearing the needs of one another in our life together, this is taking up the cross.

This is nothing to be ashamed of but rather we glory in this. We glory in Christ crucified where our Savior in the breaking of bread is fully revealed to us as Savior and deliverer from sin.  This is the meal where the angel of eternal death passes over us and our Lord prepares us for the life to come.