The way through

Proverbs 1:20-33
Psalm 19
James 3:1-12
Mark 8:27-38

I’m not sure exactly how old I was, maybe seven or eight, and I was on summer vacation at my grandparents’ cabin in the Sierras.  I went for a morning hike with my mother and younger brother on the old stagecoach road that runs along behind the cabin.  After a half –hour or so of walking, we had to scramble down a steep bank onto a wide, freshly-graded road that cut into the old one.   Going on a little further we came around a shoulder of the mountain and out from under the forest cover onto a hot, naked hillside.  It was dotted with stumps of trees and large heaps of bark, branches, and bulldozed earth.  My mother began to cry out in grief and fury.  She started shouting words that I recognized from my father and his carpentry projects, but that I’d never heard her use before.  This was a place she knew, a place she had visited from her childhood, a place she remembered as a cool, green, magical forest.

That day made a strong impression on me, and it wasn’t long after that I created a new imaginary self.  This was not the first time that I’d daydreamed a fantasy life.  As children do, I used to create scenarios in my mind and return to them again and again, making them more and more elaborate until finally it took more energy to reimagine them than the pleasure that they gave, and I moved on to something new.  But this particular fantasy was one of the most vivid I ever had. 

I was the leader of a band of merry outlaws who roamed the Sierra Nevada.  Relying on swiftness, stealth, woodcraft, and cunning, we would appear as if out of nowhere to fire our arrows into the tires of logging trucks, before melting away into the forest without a trace.  Our enemy, The County Sherriff, would use every trick in his book to capture us, but in spite of all his dogs and radios, deputies and helicopters, his stratagems were in vain--we always were one step ahead.

The child, becoming painfully aware of the injustice in the world, imagines himself a hero who can set things right.  He draws on stories like the legend of Robin Hood and retells them to himself in a way that makes meaning of things that are troubling, things that he doesn’t understand.  And something kind of like that seems to be happening in Galilee when we pick up the story of Jesus in today’s passage from the Gospel of Mark.  Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” and they say, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets."

For the common people of Galilee, the words and deeds of Jesus evoke the prophets, who destroyed foreign idols and faced down corrupt rulers, who healed and worked wonders and spoke the words of God.  Jesus awakens the imaginations of people sinking deeper and deeper into debt, people becoming landless laborers or slaves on the land of their ancestors, people crushed by the greed and ambition and violence of vainglorious overlords.  His words and his deeds remind them of the legends of their heroes, and these legends are the memory of hope.  Perhaps Jesus is a prophet like them, perhaps he is one of them, come back to life to deliver his people in their hour of great need. 

But Jesus wants to dig a little deeper.  He wants to know if his disciples have a different idea, and Peter does.  At the time of Jesus’ life Jewish ideas about the Messiah were various and somewhat vague.  And Peter doesn’t say exactly what he thinks he means when he says that Jesus is the Messiah.  But I think we can assume that one thing Peter means is that his master is more than the return of a legend.   He is someone unique.  He is the One we’ve all been waiting for, the one the prophets themselves were waiting for.   He will not just cry out against injustice, he will do something about it.  He will not just predict God’s deliverance of Israel, he will bring the plan to fulfillment.  Jesus is the hero of Peter’s ultimate fantasy. 

So it’s understandable that Peter balks when Jesus starts talking about the fate that awaits him in Jerusalem.  The hero of Peter’s fantasy is not supposed to be rejected by the leaders of the people—he’s supposed to be acclaimed by them, to lead them to put aside their petty quarrels and rivalries and unite under his authority.  He’s not supposed to be killed—he’s supposed to subjugate the enemies of Israel, bringing any who oppose him to their knees, begging for mercy.  And as for rising from the dead; well, fantasy is all well and good, but let’s not get carried away.

Part of the power of this story is that Jesus recognizes the temptation that Peter is putting in his path.  When he says “Get behind me, Satan!” he’s not being insulting.  He’s acknowledging that Peter’s fantasy has crossed his own mind.  He’s remembering a certain encounter he had in the desert, fasting there for forty days after his baptism.  He’s acknowledging a voice that’s always lying in wait for him, always flattering, cajoling, provoking him: “you have a special gift.  Don’t throw it away.  You see how desperate they are—how they only want to follow you, to do anything you ask.  Give them what they want.  You say the first will be last, and the last will be first, so how long do you want them to wait?  Just imagine how much good you could do.” 

But Jesus turns his back on that voice, and turns toward his disciples.  And I like to imagine that in that turning he is turning towards us.  He turns away from the fantasy of power and virtue, and looks to the truth of our experience, and his eyes are the eyes of compassion.  Jesus turns away from the myths of redemptive violence, and toward the reality of weakness and suffering.  And he opens his mouth, and he speaks words of hope.   They are hard words, but that is because sin has made a hard world, and he knows that we don’t need yet another fantasy of escape.  We need a way through, a real way, a way that doesn’t ask us to be superheroes, or to submit to a “great leader” and his cult of personality.   He knows we need a way to go that takes into account who we really are, and how the world really is, and what it is actually going to take to make it all the way to a new world of universal peace and perfect justice.

And we know that way is real because Jesus walks it.  That is his unique, divine mission.  That’s what makes him the Messiah.  The only truly free person in the whole world freely chooses to die as a prisoner.  Only in that way, can he show the prisoners they are captives of a daydream.  Only in that way, can he show the rulers that they are rulers of a lie.  Changing the nameplate on the door of the corner office, changing the pattern on the White House china, these things do not make change.  Change happens when people like you and me wake up from our fantasies of hero-worship, and start taking the slow, simple, sometimes costly steps in the direction of real life. 

Life—in the bodies God gave us.  Life— with the people God gives us.  Life— in solidarity with the poor, the outcast, the unloved, and the afflicted.  Life—that accepts illness, and old age, and death as part of the plan.  Life—in dogged resistance to organized selfishness and the needless suffering it causes.   Life—trusting in the basic goodness of the world and of human beings, and in God’s wisdom to turn even the worst disasters of human folly toward the good.  Life—in daily celebration of the glory of God in the work of creation.  Life, in short, in the footsteps of Jesus.