"The Compassionate Christ"

This is the second Sunday of the season we call Lent.  Lent is like a journey—a virtual journey, to be sure, but a trip, nonetheless.  Our trip always begins on Ash Wednesday and continues for 40 days, plus 6 Sundays.  We always begin in the wilderness and many would say our destination is Easter Sunday, but I’d rather think of it as Coming Home to God[1].  It is a process of discernment, focus and commitment, moving toward our deepest longings.

Michael told us last week that the tradition is often to give something up during Lent—sweets, tobacco, TV watching, even preaching on Paul!  It’s a symbolic way of recognizing our habits or shortfalls and making an effort to change or improve.

On this journey, Jesus is our guide, the Bible is our map and repentance or turning around is our vehicle.  Today’s reading in Mark’s Gospel gives us the shorthand prescription for Lent, the route to take for the journey home, if you will: deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Jesus.  Whew!  I think I’d rather give up sweets!

The Jesus story is one of humanity.  The first Sunday of Lent we always have the story of Jesus in the wilderness, an acknowledgment or correspondence with our own condition.  We tell the story over and over again, because it is the story of life—our lives, the cycles of life on earth, the life of a Christian.  So, here we are again, telling the stories of Lent, the process of new life emerging from death.  When you think of it in terms of the seasons, it is the slow emergence of new buds of life out of the dead-looking trees and earth of winter.  It is, personally, emerging from the wildernesses of our souls into the new life, the abundant life, that awaits us as Disciples of Christ Jesus.

This morning’s Gospel reading comes from the book of Mark.  Don’t you love it?  In Mark’s account the Disciples travel with Jesus, they see and hear him, they share their lives with him and he with them, but they never really get it, do they?  They are with him all the time, but they don’t know who Jesus is or what he’s about.  I read this Gospel and I truly feel like a disciple of Jesus, because there are all too many times when I don’t get it either!

This pericope or section of the story comes right after Peter has confessed that Jesus is the Messiah*.  For that outburst of truth and honesty, Peter is rebuked by Jesus.  Now, you might think that any Disciple who understood Jesus to be the Christ would be rewarded or commended, instead Peter and the rest are told to keep quiet and then Jesus sits them down and teaches them a lesson (today’s reading).  Now he tells them what is going to happen: he will be persecuted by the religious leaders of his day, killed and in three days rise.  Now, from our 21^st Century advantage of hindsight, that might not sound so startling, but those early Disciples were aghast.  I often say that the Bible tells us the story, but it never tells the whole story.  We don’t get, for instance, a description of the looks on their faces when they hear this news from their leader and master.  Can’t you just see it?  Shock and awe might be too mild a description.  It’s not surprising that Peter takes Jesus aside and says, No way!  That’s not going to happen to YOU!  And now, poor Peter, gets reprimanded (again!) for that!  First he’s too other-worldly, now he’s too down-to-earth worldly.  What’s the poor guy to do?  Jesus says, Stop thinking about things in your old earthly way and start thinking about things in God’s way—a holy way. 

New Testament scholar Herman Waetjen[2] claims that this discussion ensues because the Disciples cannot understand that Jesus is ushering in a new era, a new order.  This new order is a new, real socio-political order of the way God wants us to live.  These poor guys are trying to figure out what Jesus is saying and doing, according to the systems and structures of the world in which they live.  Jesus is telling them that they have to expand their thinking and see things through God’s eyes.  Jesus wants us to put on our God glasses to see the world in a new way.  In this divine perspective, the ultimate authority, the Messiah or anointed one, is also a servant.  This holy order means that the most esteemed and honored one will be persecuted and killed.  Everything we know is turned upside down and inside out.  In order to be a part of this new, godly way of life, we have to give up our old ways of understanding.

It is the death of the old that gives way to the possibility of the new.  We have to repent of our old ways of thinking and acting in order to open ourselves for a new way, God’s way.  It is the message and the process of Lent that leads us through the recognition of our dependence on worldly values and priorities and turns us around to see another way.  Soon we see that it isn’t the one with the most stuff who is the most blest; it is the one who gives away the most who knows the blessing of satisfaction.  It’s not our investments in banks that we should care so much about, but how we invest in people.  We should not care so much about growth stocks as about the growth of young minds.

Jesus gives us the formula for full, abundant life: focus on others instead of yourself, learn the joy of giving, follow Jesus and… suffer with others.  Ouch!  Did I just say suffer with others?  What kind of abundant and full life would that be?  We are critical of those who choose to suffer.  But when Jesus calls us to follow him that is what he means by taking up your cross.  That is what Jesus means when he says to deny ourselves.  The word compassion means to suffer with or to suffer together.  We admire and appreciate those who are compassionate.  We speak of the Passion of Christ (usually referring to the suffering of Jesus on the cross).  We talk about being passionate about something—which quite literally means to suffer for.  This requires us to focus on others—to be aware of their needs/wants.  It is a challenge to the whole competitive, combative style of life to which we have become accustomed.

When we learn to become compassionate, we become aware of the unfairness of our world.  We see the evils of the world: hunger, violence, abuse, deprivation, coercion, exploitation.  Jesus warned his followers 2,000 years ago about living in a sinful and adulterous time—things haven’t changed, much, have they??  What Jesus tells his followers (then and now) is to become aware of the suffering of others and to suffer with them and, thus, bring about healing and wholeness.  We call it community.

Healing and wholeness is an amazing thing.  Ask any doctor or nurse or therapist and they will share with you the marvels of human health and healing.  The broken heals and is made whole again, by the grace of God and the miracle of life.  As I understand it, when a broken bone heals, it becomes thicker and stronger.  That is the sort of mending/healing we are to do—mend & make strong like a broken bone.  Orthopedist, Dr. Martin Yahiro says a healed break is usually thicker [and] the new bone may even be stronger than the old.[3]  Imagine what would happen if we could be agents of mending, healing and repair like that to our old, hurting, broken world!  We are called to suffer together—to live with compassion, if we are to be counted among the followers of Jesus the Christ.  We are all in this together and when one suffers, we all do.  True followers then become a community of compassion.

Jesus calls us to follow and to carry the cross.  Now, I personally think that phrasing or wording is Mark’s way of saying that Jesus said we have to live in a new way.  We know that Jesus had to carry the cross of suffering.  If we model our life on his, we, too, must carry the cross of compassion.  That cross is often heavy, awkward, splintery, and out-of-fashion.  It is a very good metaphor of what it means to be compassionate, as Christ is full of passion for others.  It may mean giving what we have, it might mean speaking out for the voiceless or standing up for the powerless.  It means being agents of justice and mercy and love in a broken world.  The recent Warner Brothers movie, North Country[4] depicts a woman (played by Charlize Theron) who spoke out against sexual harassment in the mines of Northern Minnesota.  Eventually, she stood up for her values and was joined by a handful of others.  They made a difference and brought about a better life for many.

Jesus tells the friends gathered around him to come, suffer, give, love, serve and you, too, will have new and abundant life in the new realm which is God’s realm: God’s kingdom here on earth.

Jesus shows us the way; God waits.  Come home—all is forgiven.  Amen.

[1] Jones, Alan, Passion for Pilgrimage, Notes for the Journey Home, Harper and Row, 1989.

* Mark 8:29

[2] Waetjen, Herman, A Reordering of Power, A Socio-Political Reading of Mark’s Gospel, Fortress Press, 1989 pg. 145ff.

[3] Yahiro, Martin M.D., a Baltimore orthopedist in private practice and a consultant on fracture treatment devices to the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Devices and Radiological Health as quoted in: http://www.fda.gov/fdac/features/396_bone.html (downloaded 3/11/2006)

[4] http://northcountrymovie.warnerbros.com/