Sermon for March 17, 2024 - The Fifth Sunday in Lent
Does anyone else feel like we just went back in time? Because it feels like we just heard this story. In fact, we did hear this story just three weeks ago on the Second Sunday of Lent; only we heard it from Mark’s gospel.
In our gospel today, Jesus offers the disciples and the crowds gathered around him the same paradoxical analysis of discipleship: “Those who love their life, lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” While not exactly word-for-word as Mark’s “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,” they both convey the same truth about discipleship; the ways and will of the world are antithetical, mutually incompatible, to the ways and will of God as illuminated through Jesus. To follow Jesus means we will come up and against those who wish to perpetuate the status quo. To follow Jesus means that we have to spiritually die to ourselves, so that we might let go of our ego driven self-centeredness and embrace God’s will for us and Creation. To follow Jesus means that we might actually lose our life for the sake of the gospel. Ok, we will likely not die as a result of our discipleship, but if we fully surrender ourselves over to God, then we will be transformed and our old life and ways of doing things will be gone.
These two stories from different gospels share a similar truth, and clearly John, as the last gospel writer writing some fifty years after Mark, is inspired by the other gospel writers as he tells Jesus’ story. And yet, while they share these clear similarities, the authors use the words of Jesus in very different settings, in very different locations in Jesus’ ministry, but to similar effect.
For Mark, these words come at a turning point in his Gospel. Jesus has been preaching, teaching, and healing in and around Galilee. His reputation has grown and so too has the crowds following him. These words of Jesus mark a transition, both in geographical location and in understanding.
It is at Caesarea Philippi, in the northern most reaches of Galilee, that Jesus’ focus shifts from Galilee in the north to Judea and Jerusalem in the south. His thoughts shift from the comforts of home and what is familiar in Galilee to unknowns of the long road south and what awaits him in Jerusalem. It is also here, when Peter confesses that Jesus is the Messiah, that a shift occurs in the disciples’ understanding of Jesus’ purpose amongst them and his impending death. While they do not fully understand nor fully embrace it, they begin to accept that this is the path forward and that Jesus’ death is part and parcel of God’s plan for redeeming the world. Through Jesus’ death and resurrection, God will demonstrate for all to see that the powers of this world cannot contain God; death does not have the final say.
For John, these words come towards the beginning of the end. Jesus has arrived in Jerusalem to great fanfare on the back of a donkey for what will be his last Passover festival. In just a few short verses Jesus and his disciples will be sitting down for their last meal together, sharing those intimate moments of food, fellowship, and community. This story comes at a turning point for Jesus, where if he wanted he could have easily left Jerusalem and avoided these confrontations altogether. Instead, these words mark Jesus’ full embrace of God’s will for him. Again, he reveals that he must die and will be raised up, to which the disciples can’t fully understand what Jesus is saying. They will soon find out that themes of liberation and freedom found in their Passover celebrations will also be woven into Jesus’ horrific crucifixion and resurrection.
Jesus’ discourse on the meaning of his death and implications for discipleship echos Mark in that followers must lose their life in order to save it. John’s narrative focuses on the conflict between the life of discipleship and the ruler of the world. “The world” in this context does not have the same connotation as “the world” God so loves. Those who “hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” John is clearly telling us that this world is under judgment, and the ruler of this world will be defeated.
Jesus’ speech prepares the disciples for the passion narrative. According to John, Jesus’ death and resurrection is a judgment against the imperial powers and ultimately – and paradoxically – a victory over them. Gospel commentator Daniel Schowalter observes that “this language of elevation and glorification is [also] reminiscent of Roman imperial propaganda.” Indeed, this entire discourse about Jesus’ elevation “…might be seen as reference to an ironic enthronement in which Jesus by his death on the cross offers the ultimate challenge to Roman authority.”
Just as Peter couldn’t fully understand the path that Jesus had to walk through death as the Messiah in Mark’s gospel because it upended their very notion of how the Messiah would bring liberation and peace, so too do the disciples and the gathered crowds not fully understand what will happen to Jesus in just a few days’ time in John’s gospel. For the disciples, in both gospels, death is understood as an end.
For us in this world, death seems like the end. It has been built up by our popular culture as something to be feared, something to be avoided at all costs. We don’t talk about death. We don’t talk about grief. We barely allow ourselves a moment to lament, before we are encouraged to move on. And yet in the midst of such avoidance, our gospel reminds us that God’s ways are different than the ways of the world, and as such, as we have seen in the raising of Lazarus and in the resurrection of Jesus, death is not the end, nor should it be feared.
The truth of God embodied in Jesus, the oneness of God with all Creation, including you and me, contradicts the accepted norms of this world. In particular, John alerts us to the seductive powers of the world. There can be no compromise. Jesus is King. The emperor is not. As we walk the final days of Lent through Holy Week, this truth both sustains and challenges us as we contemplate Jesus’ death and exaltation.
Following Jesus is a matter of life and death. Or, to put it another way, life and death matter to those who follow Jesus.
During this season of Lent we will follow him all the way to Golgotha, all the way to the cross, where we will stand beneath it, together with his followers. It is there, in the face of the world’s many ways of death (poverty, economic collapse, hunger, sickness, war) that we are drawn even closer to Jesus. It is there, in the light of the stark reality of life at its end that we begin to catch a glimpse of life at its fullest.
We hear these words and this truth from Jesus multiple times in Lent, and I think we need to be reminded of it again and again. It is far too easy to become all too comfortable with the status quo; where our silence and conformity makes us unwitting participants in the ongoing structures of our world that perpetuate oppression, exploitation, destruction, and death. We hear these words of Jesus twice in Lent to remind us that this is not the way the world has to be. Nor is it the way God wants it to be for us. And in a few short weeks, we will see firsthand how God radically changed death into life as a sign of hope that things can change, this world can change, if we are willing to let go of our old selves and lose our lives in the process.
