The Crossroad before the Cross

TEXT:   LUKE 22: 39-54

Before he came to the cross, Jesus came to a crossroad: a decisive moment, a tipping point, a choice.

Before Jesus hung from a tree, the future of God’s kingdom hung in the balance in a garden of olive trees.

Before he suffered and died at Calvary, Jesus suffered as he prayed in Gethsemane.

Luke’s Gospel tells us that “in his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground” (Luke 22:44).

The bloody crucifixion may seem the hardest test Jesus faced. But maybe what happened in Gethsemane was harder.  Certainly it was not Jesus’ first test. Remember his ministry began with Satan’s testing in the wilderness. Don’t forget the relentless testing by scribes and Pharisees wanting to trap him into saying words that would warrant arrest. But Jesus’ final test was in a prayer garden. After that, he was out of options.  Jesus was mainly silent during his trial.  He endured torture.  He met his death.  But in Gethsemane he was still playing out possibilities before making a decision, a choice. He prayed, he discerned, he sought God’s will. And that process was agonizing.

We don’t know all the options Jesus agonized over once he realized his arrest was imminent. One option would have been to rouse the crowds for bloody insurrection. But his previous choices had prepared him to choose the path of peace at this critical juncture.

Now some scientists and philosophers may question if humans have real choice, so “programmed” are we by genetic codes and cultural conditioning and environmental influences. They think we may THINK we’re choosing when we in fact are responding predictably to other influences.  But evolution requires the role of chance.  This dance between chance and choice, predictable laws and randomness, may mean our lives follow some kind of trajectory, but we’re not confined to a script.

Have you seen the movie The Adjustment Bureau? Matt Damon plays a budding politician who falls in love with a beautiful woman through a chance encounter on a city bus. But their meeting was not meant to happen.  Because the “Bureau” that secretly determines all major human decisions on our planet and has been positioning Matt Damon’s character to gain political power-- hadn’t mapped out the possibility of love for him. The “Bureau” fears the young woman will distract the aspiring politician from achieving his political potential. So they make course corrections on the young politician’s map which prevent him from seeing her again. “The Bureau” of men in business suits and hats has that kind of power. They literally pull out maps to chart the lives of human beings—mainly with the benign intention of exerting some control over our tendency to blow up the planet.  Maybe the “Adjustment Bureau” represents God in a fedora, or fate, or simply the succession of choices that seem like choices but really aren’t.  The film calls into question how much choice we really have. But it also suggests that love is always a possibility.

If our choices are more limited than we like to think, it may be because our previous choices have narrowed our current options. As Robert Frost said, “way leads on to way.” We can think of our lives as the sum of our many choices which test our convictions and shape our souls and prepare us for the bigger tests in life.  You responded today—to someone else’s comment or to the lure of some habit or to an opportunity to act with kindness—because of earlier responses to life’s tests. You’ll act tomorrow because of some choice you made today. Surgeons and airline pilots and soldiers and astronauts are trained to make life-and-death decisions instantaneously.

You and I make seemingly minor decisions—not the big Gethsemane choices—every day.  In doing so, we are wiring our minds and hearts for future actions.  Each choice—for steamed broccoli instead of French fries, for kindness rather than criticism—each choice paves the way for the next.  And thus a life is made.

Now some tell the Jesus Story as if there were no choices.  As if God’s inexorable plan of salvation was to implant in a human child a suicide directive.  They believe Jesus’s purpose was to be executed—as if Jesus were an ancient version of the Manchurian Candidate, groomed for leadership and programmed to “self-destruct” in the service of a bigger cause.

I do not believe God mapped out Jesus’s life so that it ended on a cross. As I’ve said, I believe that Jesus, his culture, the authorities, and the crowd made all sorts of choices that resulted in his crucifixion.  I do not believe that violence was God’s choice or plan. We may justify our hate or make a tragedy comprehensible by ascribing such events to the will of God. But a god of love does not cause suffering.

 

As we enter Holy Week again, I repeat from this pulpit a statement contrary to what some of us were taught: God’s “plan of salvation” did not require violence. You may believe otherwise. That’s okay. We don’t require theological uniformity among us.  But I stress this point because harm can come from the idea that Father God sent his son into the world to die as a sacrifice so that God could finally forgive the sins of the other children. This theology reinforces the pernicious falsehood that violence can end violence. It makes God either cruel or stupid. Did we not hear Jesus shout, “No more of this” to the disciple who pulled his sword in the garden?  Have we not known God best through Jesus who died rather than harm another?  How could God, creator of the universe’s laws, build into that universe an equation that one man must suffer before forgiveness can be offered to the others?  The cross is a consequence of a violent humanity, not the intention of a loving God. If we worship a violent God, then we will justify our own violence.  Jesus risked the possibility of his own violent death in order to live fully into the way of nonviolence.

As we enter Holy Week, I imagine Christ continuing to experience agony when we trust in violence rather than love. I imagine that we perpetuate Jesus’ suffering on the cross by worshiping a God who requires a sacrificial death in order to forgive her beloved children. 

  

When Jesus learned Judas had betrayed him, he could have fled or gathered revolutionaries. One of his followers chose the Empire’s way and drew his sword in the garden of prayer.  And the sword drew blood.  And you can imagine what normally would have happened next.  Instead of arresting and executing one man, the temple police would have drawn their swords, and soon the garden where Jesus went to pray would have been a battlefield.

Instead, Jesus practiced what he’d preached.  He refused to be drawn into violence.  In fact, he did the opposite.  He reflexively healed the man his disciple wounded.

If he’d been a fanatical martyr, Jesus would likely have rushed headlong into that death with some ferocity of resolve, some exultation about his mission, some shout of triumph in the name of his God.

 

Instead, Jesus sounded more like Martin Luther King, Jr., (who sounded a bit like Jesus, of course) both of whom recognized what their witness to God’s love might cost. He/they might have hoped that, if death came, it would serve to illustrate God’s love more powerfully than their sermons about peace ever had. But Jesus truly had a choice. Over and over he had chosen how to live and love, how to seek God’s way rather than the Empire’s way--long before his cruel death exposed the vileness of the Empire in the most decisive contrast between God’s way of love and the Empire’s way of domination.

I have given up the God who requires violence and suffering. But I’ve also given up the God who removes suffering.  Because it’s plain to see that suffering still exists.  I’ve forsaken the God who uses the suffering of one poor soul for the salvation of another—and the God who intervenes to make sure I won’t ever suffer.  I turn instead to the God who suffers with us. Who stands by us if we suffer.  As Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount, there are some creative ways to return good for evil that do NOT require our very lives.  But when all the creative nonviolent options were gone, Jesus’s choice to die rather than to kill, to feel hurt rather than to wound, is a hopeful choice.  To choose to suffer rather than to perpetuate the cycle of violence is a choice that NO ONE HAS TO MAKE---if we ALL make that choice. Hear that paradox again:  If we ALL choose to suffer from violence rather than commit violence, then NO ONE ever has to suffer from violence again.

 

Next Sunday we’ll return to another garden setting.  Our Hebrew Bible reading will take us to Eden, brimming with first life.  Our Gospel reading will take us to the garden where Jesus was raised to new life.

 

But this evening we have read of a Garden that could have become a battlefield, that did become a testing place, a dark place, but an oddly victorious place where Jesus, despite death threats and darkness, lived into the way of light.  Shouting to his followers, he cried, “No more of this violence!” Shouting to those arresting him, he accused: “This is YOUR hour, and the power of darkness!”  He exposed the injustice. He named the darkness.  He named it.  He did not deepen the darkness by adopting their tactics. He diverted from their script.

Jesus had been tested long before the cross.  By the time of his arrest, he was clear eyed and focused. He knew who he was and what he must do.  His reflex was healing.  He would not fight. He would not flee. As the temple police pressed forward, Jesus had to trust the God whose power is love.  Without knowing if or how someone might tell the end of his story, he walked to the cross ready to commend his spirit to a loving God. 

Before Jesus came to the cross, he came to a crossroad.  We will make a thousand choices tomorrow, most of them seemingly insignificant.  This is not a call to overthink, to be anxious about minor decisions, to feel overly responsible.  This is a call to appreciate that all of life is bound up together—and that love is the direction Jesus always took—to the cross and beyond.

PRAYER: Loving One, in our darkness, call us to the Light.  In our quandaries, lead us to peace.   In our hurting, stay beside us until Easter dawns.

Customized Crosses

Mark 8: 27-36

A few years ago Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, was asked why books on Buddhism were selling better than books on Christianity. “I think,” he said, “it’s because Buddhism presents itself as a way of life, and Christianity presents itself as a system of belief”[i] He was making a distinction in how these two religions “present” themselves, with Buddhism as a way of living and Christianity as a set of beliefs.  How ironic is that contrast since the early Christians were known as the people of The Way.  The first Jesus followers, living before the church councils were convened and the creeds were composed, saw themselves as faithful Jews practicing their faith in the way of Jesus of Nazareth.  Jesus’ followers identified themselves not through a shared set of beliefs but by a commitment to Jesus’s spiritual path.  Likely those early Christians resembled Buddhists more than modern Christians in their approach to spirituality. They were “following in Jesus’ hopeful way,” to use a key phrase from Open Table’s mission statement.

        

When and why Christians began to create doctrines and institutions—and then formed their identity around them—is a topic for another day.  What’s important at this Lenten season is for us to recall, once more, that Jesus’s Way led him to a cross. We will be following him liturgically to that cross and beyond until Easter. As our Gospel reading today reminds us, the writers of Mark’s Gospel understood Jesus telling them that if they followed him, they too, would have to take up a cross.  If Senge is right—that Buddhism offers a way of life—must those of us who do recall the original Christian commitment to Jesus’s Way then concede that Christianity’s way is the way of the cross, the via dolorosa, the way of death rather than life?  If so, why would any sane person take that path?

The easy Easter answer is that Jesus’ death leads to life. 

But let’s be honest: a paradox devolves into mere contradiction if it doesn’t ignite insight.  A paradox deserves to survive only if it is produces light and life.  The way of Jesus should be equated with the way of the cross only if the cross somehow leads past horrific and undeserved violence to healing love.

For centuries some have used Jesus’ cross, the linchpin of Christian theology, to rationalize violence.  Many who know it has been misappropriated now wonder if the cross can remain a viable symbol for Christianity. While one can argue that even the most innocent of symbols are subject to misuse, the cross was arguably a logical emblem on the battle flag of the Crusaders and as a trademark terrorism tactic for the KKK.  That’s because the cross of Jesus is deeply rooted in a theology of violence in service to a God of violence.  Many have misconstrued Jesus’s crucifixion as an act required by a righteously angry God who exacted the life of an innocent victim to pay the penalty of human sin.   

But that unfortunate assumption that God required an innocent victim in order to forgive humanity—which is the foundation for substitutionary atonement theology—led Christians to use the cross to sanctify their own need for new scapegoats.  And because Jesus told his disciples they, too, would have crosses to bear, the powerful in this world have sometimes justified oppression by telling the powerless that, well, we all have our crosses to bear. 

Heartrending examples of how Jesus’ cross continues to create new victims are found in the book Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us.[ii]  The book begins with the story of one female pastor, Pat, whose parishioner, Anola, was stabbed to death by her enraged husband, who wielded ten kitchen knives in front of their three children.  One of the children would later report, “Daddy bent the knife in Mommy’s tummy, then he went to get the sharp knife.  We was crying when Daddy was killing Mommy” (19). Pat, their minister, confided to one of the authors that Anola had thought it “her religious duty” to return to her abusive husband even though Pat counseled her otherwise and offered her shelter at the parsonage.  Pat explained, “I t[old] her it’s her religious duty to protect her own life and take care of herself so she can protect her children.  But my words . . . [were] not enough” (Brock and Parker 17).  The author, upon hearing this colleague’s anguish, responded:

“Pat, the only way you could have helped Anola more is if the whole Christian tradition taught something other than self-sacrificing love.  If it didn’t preach that to be like Jesus we have to give up our lives in faithful obedience to the will of God.”

“But,” Pat said, “this IS what the church teaches.  And Anola is dead.”

The author says from then on she tested Christian theology against this question: “Would this theology have helped Anola . . .  resist the violence [she] faced?” (28-29).

I tell you this story before unpacking today’s text because I believe the church has often misunderstood Jesus’s call to “take up our cross.”  I think this misunderstanding especially takes place when a religious authority or some other person in power tells someone else who has less power—to take up their cross.  This is such a serious matter that I will not talk about taking up the cross of Jesus without this warning: no one but Jesus has the right to ask you to take up your cross.  No minister or loved one or institution can even define that cross for you.  If someone asks you, explicitly or implicitly, to sacrifice your selfhood, your freedom, your dignity to enhance their power and privilege, consider this:  Such a request is likely an act of disrespect at best and abuse at worst.  Remember Jesus believes you are worthy of infinite love.  Remember that those who can offer selfless love are able to do so only when they have whole and healthy selves to share.  Remember that any virtue can be twisted into something harmful and that selfless love can be misshapen into self-loathing and self-destruction.

It’s no wonder, friends, that the apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians that proclaiming “Christ crucified” was “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (I Cor. 1: 13).   That the Messiah would endure an ignoble death surely seemed confusing and even foolish.  But worse than confusion, worse than foolishness is the harm caused by those who’ve used the cross to justify oppression and violence.  Let us remember that the cross--at the “crux” of Christian theology--should remind “its followers and all other religions that to know God is to be concerned about [all] victims of our world”[iii].

Wary of how the cross has been misused, we return once more to Jesus’s warning that if the disciples were going to follow him, they would have to take up their crosses, too.  As soon as Peter expresses his understanding of Jesus as the Messiah (the anointed one whom God sent to save them), Jesus explains that to fulfill the Messianic role, he’ll have to suffer and die.  Peter believes Jesus has misunderstood.  How can Jesus rally the people and resist Rome if he’s killed? So Peter takes Jesus aside to correct him. But Jesus corrects Peter and then explains to all who were gathered: If you want to be one of my followers, the cost is high.  You must deny yourself and take up your cross and follow me.  Because in order to save your life, you must lose it.  A key theme in Mark is the high cost of discipleship.

Now keep in mind that Mark’s Gospel was written about the year 70 CE, not long after Rome burned in 64 CE and Nero, who blamed the Christians, then incited their persecution.  So Mark’s readers were already suffering for being Jesus followers.  The community that produced Mark is both recalling Jesus’s teaching that God’s way is costly—and actually experiencing suffering for being followers of The Way.  This story puts together the community’s memory of Jesus and their current experiences of living with the cost of being his followers.

Of course, you and I live in very different circumstances.  Certainly in some parts of the world some Christians endure persecution.  But when Americans who live in the Deep South and who live as part of the Christian majority complain that they are being persecuted—when they complain, for instance, they are not allowed to pray publicly in schools or erect a cross on public  property—they’ve confused persecution with simple restrictions that respect others’ rights.  Our cultural situation differs greatly from the political/social conditions of Mark’s readers.  We are in no danger of being crucified because we follow in Jesus’s way.

And yet, in some sense, we too, are called to take up our crosses. While aware of the misuses of the cross, we nevertheless find deep wisdom at the core of Jesus’ teaching that is, back to the Peter Senge comparsion, not so different from a Buddhist teaching.  To be “crucified with Christ” so that, as St. Paul said, we no longer live but Christ lives in us, is like the Buddhist concept of Sunyata, which literally means “Emptiness.” “Not emptiness in the purely negative sense of nothingness but emptiness in the sense of being able to receive anything.  .  .  . Sunyata means to have one’s own existence blow away (crucified?).” (Knitter 12).  Buddhists experience Sunyata when they let go of selfishness to become other-centered and inter-related with all.  Christians experience the unitive “mind of Christ” when they die to self in order to become Christ-centered  and inter-related with all. 

To die or crucify the self is not an act of masochism but of letting go, a turning loose, a trust in something larger than oneself, a relaxing into God’s arms, a relinquishing of the illusion that we are in charge of the universe.  This kind of spiritual dying is freeing as a false self dies and a truer, fuller self is born.

As we take up our crosses, notice that means each of us has a distinctive cross to bear. Jesus’s way, I believe, is less about all of us finding the same route and more about how we travel whatever road.  Jesus, you see, never spelled out what exactly his followers were to believe and very little about what they were to do.  Instead, he said, “Follow me,” as if they’d only understand by watching and by taking one step at a time.  Good teacher that he was, Jesus didn’t lecture; his students learned by doing, by being with him, and then by reflecting on what they had done.  So together they fed the multitudes, broke some religious laws, healed the sick, listened to parables, etc.  No wonder multiple Gospels developed: everyone’s experience of Jesus was a bit different.  Like any meaningful relationship, your followship of Jesus will be uniquely yours. 

Likewise, the cross you take up is unique to each of you. 

But for all of us there is some kind of dying we must do in order to live.  There is something in our lives that we grasp too tightly and we can be saved only by letting go of it, or at least our dependency on it.  It may not threaten our physical life, but it compromises our spiritual health.  It may not be a bad thing in and of itself, but it may be limiting us.  

Even in our community of faith, friends, we must learn to love and care for this fellowship while holding it lightly.  What a spiritual challenge!  To love with deep commitment but without a sense of ownership.  Open Table will continue to mature only to the extent that we can hold it closely, dearly, yet not tightly.  We can’t follow Jesus into freedom and spiritual maturity if we are overly concerned about the mere survival of our young church, or if we equate our membership in Open Table with our relationship to God. Self-preservation cannot be our highest goal.

You and I cannot, as individuals, follow Jesus except, step by step, moment by moment, crucifying our egos and agendas upon our customized crosses.  We cannot follow Jesus by adopting a correct belief system that demands little from us.  Instead, we follow Jesus by carrying a cross weighted with the cares of the world.  This is a demanding discipleship.  But Jesus leads on ahead of us.  

PRAYER

O Dying and Rising Savior and Friend, teach us, day by day, to bear our crosses, to trust the God of Compassion enough so that we can love more deeply and live more freely. Amen

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[i] McLaren, Brian. Finding Our Way Again.  Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2008, p. 3.   

[ii] Brock, Rita Nakashima and Rebecca Ann Parker.  Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us.  Boston: Beacon Press, 2001

[iii] Knitter, Paul.  Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian.  Oxford: OneWorld, 2009, p. 126.