Here’s what it looks like when someone tries to gain the whole world, and loses his life in the process. It looks like Peter, taking Jesus aside and attempting to save him with a friendly rebuke: “God forbid it, Lord,” he says, “[crucifixion] must never happen to you.”
It’s hard for me to believe that Peter started out to follow Jesus in hopes of becoming a stumbling block, in hopes of missing the message. Just last week we heard him making excellent progress and recognizing that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of God. How did he get it so wrong here? How did he end up like this, attempting to talk Jesus out of his mission, talk our savior out of saving us?
It’s often said that Peter just can’t imagine Jesus being the kind of Messiah who dies on the cross. It’s easier for him, maybe, to believe that Jesus is the heroic Messiah than it is to believe that the Messiah is not heroic. That sounds true enough to me. But what’s under that? Why, if you believe that Jesus is the Messiah, are you unwilling to believe that the Messiah is the kind of Messiah he tells you he is?
Jesus’s death means so many kinds of things for Peter. It means personal loss, personal danger, personal vulnerability. It means that Peter is not going to be second in command of a revolution. It means that there will be no glory in which to bask. The crucifixion of Jesus will mean that God’s relationship to Israel is not waiting for fulfillment in some way that Peter recognizes. It means embarrassment and disillusionment. It looks like the triumph of injustice, too, the solidifying of Rome’s brutal power over Peter’s people, once again.
Those are all things to worry about and I’d like to talk Jesus out of them too. But I’m going to try to hear what Jesus is saying to Peter when he rejects Peter’s version of success. I’m going to try to accept the implicit diagnosis that Jesus is giving Peter here: you are trying to keep the world by losing your life.
What would it have looked like in this context for Peter to have gotten what he wanted? What would it have meant for him to gain the world? I guess it’s that second in command fantasy. Jesus would win some earthly contest—maybe a defeat of the Romans or at least the religious authorities—and Peter would be his lieutenant. But then what? What new wave of oppression or dissent would arise to be done away with by Peter on behalf of Jesus? When do battles end? And for how long does anyone want to be second in command? Why not first? Peter had better ideas about winning than Jesus did, it seems. Why not step up and actualize his real potential for leadership?
So it’s easy enough to see how Peter would have lost his life by saving Jesus from crucifixion. He’d have turned Jesus into a vehicle for his own fantasies of gain. And gone from Peter’s life would be forgiveness, humility, true strength, love, hope, the actual kingdom of God: Jesus.
I imagine that if they had had a longer conversation about all this, if Peter hadn’t more or less been stopped in his tracks by Jesus’s sharp response and his cryptic wisdom, Jesus might have gone into more detail about this business of gaining the world and losing life.
Jesus might have pointed out, first, that nobody ever gains the world. The world is not a gainable thing. It can’t be had for any price, and even if you could have it, you could never keep it long enough for the ink to dry on your contract. Having the world, gaining the world, is a fantasy of control. Invulnerability. For Peter it meant being second in command. For us it might mean never facing hunger, not even when the supply chains break down. Gaining the world for us might mean that no virus and no natural disaster would ever topple our kingdom. It might mean that our economy could keep expanding without environmental consequences. It might mean some kind of mythical freedom not to wear masks.
If Jesus were to ask us today what it would profit us to gain the world and lose our lives, we could provide a very detailed answer. We would have statistics about gross national products and trade balances. We would be able to point proudly to skyscrapers and virtual realities and recreational drugs and plans for success and any number of other things that allow us that feeling of having gained the world.
And Jesus could, in turn, tell us very specifically about how, in gaining this world we live in, we are losing our lives. Without Jesus and his cross we are only aiming like Peter to control the things that scare us. And like Peter we will try to keep our savior from saving us if we can’t face the cross. If we can’t face our own sin, our own death, our own vulnerability, our Christian faith becomes a shield against reality. It’s a bad shield, a costly one, one that ultimately takes our own lives from us and denies others the chance to live and flourish. It takes away our eternal life, and it also takes away the feeling of eternal life that we may be blessed to experience right now on earth.
Sometimes on a Sunday morning a preacher likes to turn to the week’s events to see whether there is a gospel lesson in there for us. I wouldn’t know where to start this week, or more honestly I wouldn’t be able to stop once I got going. So much anxious clinging to control. So many fantasies of invulnerability. So much lost life on every level: physical, moral, spiritual. How many times do you imagine Christians turned away from Jesus this week to focus on some fleeting fantasy of strength and power?
I don’t know whether you had time to focus on the basketball strike this week, in the midst of so much else, but there was a real word of truth spoken from the depths of that conflict. Doc Rivers, head coach for the Los Angeles Clippers, gave us a powerful secular version of the truth that Jesus was giving Peter. Coach Rivers was talking about the way white communities bond together in fear of black people. He didn’t mention Jesus but he was deeply honest and I swear I heard Jesus in his diagnosis.
"What stands out to me,” he said, “is, just watching [and then he names recent political events], and they're spewing this fear. All you hear is… all of them talking about fear. We're the ones getting killed,” he said, speaking of the black community. “We're the ones getting shot. We're the ones that, we're denied to live in certain communities. We've been hung. We've been shot. And all you do is keep hearing about fear."
That’s as clear a description as even Peter could need of the price all of us pay when some of us try to gain the world. White America looks to control, looks to build walls around suburbs and along national borders. And seeking to keep that imaginary all-white life, we shut Jesus right out. I wasn’t expecting it, but Jesus was speaking right to us, to the world, in that basketball coach. You want to save your life, your vision of life, he tells us. And all you get from that is fear. You are losing your life, and taking mine too. You are in power and all you can talk about is fear of losing power to black and brown people.
It doesn’t take much to figure out why fear is has such a grip on so many people these days. It’s not hard to understand why Peter was afraid of Jesus’s strange prediction. What Jesus tells us, as he told Peter, is that we are not following him if we are looking to him to shore up our sense of invulnerability. Jesus is the Messiah who saves us by leading us right to the heart of the loss. Right into sin and death. No less honest savior can save us.
And our fear is the symptom of a misunderstanding about Jesus and his cross. It’s perfectly reasonable to be afraid of the cross, but what we do with that fear, how we react in self-defense, what we are willing to sacrifice for the sake of escaping fear: that makes us dangerous. When we live in fear of the cross we are dangerous to other people and we are dangerous to ourselves.
For your own sake, let Jesus do his job. Let Jesus be about his Father’s business. Let him take us with him, where he is going.
Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
30 August 2020
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia