Mark 8:31-38
“Joining the Struggle Against Evil”
By: Rev. Kenneth Emerson Sauer, Pastor of Parkview United Methodist Church, Newport News, VA
Jesus spoke plainly when predicting His upcoming death and resurrection and “Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.”
A “Rebuke” is a sharp reprimand.
Isn’t this strange? Just a short time before, Peter had acclaimed Jesus as God’s anointed.
Now he rebukes him.
It is tempting to judge Peter’s actions…but in a sense all of us are guilty of reprimanding Jesus.
Peter’s unwillingness to accept Jesus’ prophetic words was perfectly natural in Peter’s situation.
This death stuff went against every idea of the Messiah that Peter had ever known.
He simply refused to believe it!
Centuries of Christian history have made us very familiar with the idea of a suffering Savior.
We accept it.
We sing about it.
Yet, often in the deep recesses of our minds, in our attitudes and actions, we too rebuke Him.
Many of us prefer to have an idea of discipleship that leaves the Cross out of it.
Multitudes of Christians prefer a cheerful, moderate, “sensible religion.”
We try to shut out the necessity of any painful sacrifice.
After all, we live in a practical world, and a cross is a very impractical thing.
But Christ’s way was to be the way of suffering.
And unless we see this clearly we will miss both the glory and the pain of the Gospel---
---because the glory and the pain are inseparably intertwined.
Without the Cross, Christianity can degenerate into petty legalism…
…or as Paul warned Timothy: “a form of godliness but denying its power.”
For the power of the Christian faith is the life saving, the life changing Cross of Christ!!!
In 2nd Timothy chapter 4 Paul predicts: “For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great many teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.”
A famous man once said, “There are four things I hate: tobacco smoke, lice, garlic, and the cross.”
Jesus spoke plainly about the cost of His ministry and the cost of discipleship…do we?
Carl Henry once said: “The transformation of the bloodstained wooden cross of Calvary to the diamond studded gold cross of a cathedral may well signify humankind’s attempt to remove the offense of the cross.”
I remember, in college, meeting up with some pretty wild looking punk rockers.
I noticed that they all wore crosses around their necks.
I wondered why?
Were they Christians?
When I asked them what the significance of their crosses meant…
…their answer was: “There’s no significance. They just look pretty.”
I remember one preacher in Macon, Georgia who proclaimed: “We need to get rid of this bloody cross!”
And in many ways we have.
Jesus spoke plainly about the cost of His ministry and the cost of following Him, but so often we don’t follow His frankness…
…instead we often mumble His words and slur them over.
So often discipleship has been presented as something that doesn’t matter very much.
It’s been watered-down, overlooked, ignored…
…and as a result---the kind of discipleship that we many times end up with doesn’t matter very much either.
Jesus was speaking to many 21st Century Christians in the Book of Revelation when He proclaimed: “Because you are lukewarm---neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.”
Peter reprimands Jesus.
He wants Jesus to talk about more “cheerful and sensible things.”
And yet because of this, Jesus calls him Satan!
The merely “cheerful and sensible” views of Christianity…
…are always Satan’s.
A Christianity that is diluted into just a cheerful and sensible religion, in which God’s act of redemption in Christ has dropped out of the picture, is completely a creation of Satan.
It is Satan’s masterpiece!
A concept of Christian discipleship which is reduced to common sense, in which there is no room for “the foolishness of the Cross” is a Satanic triumph!
Peter rebuked Jesus.
“But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. ‘Get behind me, Satan!’ he said.
‘You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.”
Do we have in mind the things of God, or the things of men?
How do we spend our time?
What do we fill our minds with?
How common is it for us to rebuke Jesus, to rebuke Him by the things we do—ignoring His claim for undivided allegiance…
…rebuking His refusal of violence and His choice of the way of love…
…and His insistence on the denial of self?
Then Jesus “called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: ‘If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”
Here, in one of the greatest declarations of Jesus, are two of the hardest words that a person can ever face—deny and Cross!
The word “deny” is not a vague and foggy word.
Denying ourselves means far more than…say…giving something up for Lent.
A preacher tells the story of a telephone call he got at 10 p.m. during Holy Week.
The parishioner on the other line asked the preacher when Lent was over and Easter had begun.
The parishioner had counted forty days, but he had forgotten to count Sundays.
The preacher later said: “I have a hunch he had given up something for Lent and was very anxious to resume.”
The denial of self means that we cease to make ourselves the objects of our lives and actions…
…and there is nothing more liberating and life-giving than this!!!
Denial of self is making ourselves not an end, but a means, in the kingdom of God.
Denying ourselves is not just for the sake of denial like some sort of moral Olympics….
….but it is for Christ’s sake…
…it is for the sake of putting ourselves into Christ’s cause!
And as the Church of Jesus Christ we are called to deny our petty self-interests for the larger good…
…for the sake of whole body of Christ and for the world.
The word “Cross” is also a difficult word to face…
…and it has certainly been one of the most misused words in the entire vocabulary of Christianity!
We often speak of calamity as a cross that we must bear.
But a calamity is not a cross.
It might be a tragedy…but not a cross.
We might speak of sorrow or loss as a cross.
These things are horrible heavy burdens…but they are not a cross.
Some of us might speak of our own shortcomings, our uncontrolled anger, our tendency to be overly sensitive, our impatience, as a cross we must carry.
We can even become quite pious about it.
But taking up the Cross of Christ does not mean stoically enduring what happens to us.
The Cross for Jesus was His deliberate choice to give His life as a ransom for many, His deliberate choice of ministering to our needs about the truth of God, to our need of love…no matter what the cost!!!
And taking up a Cross for a Christian means taking up Christ’s Cross…not our cross!!!
It is our deliberate choice of taking up something that could be evaded.
It is our deliberate choice to take up a burden that we are under no compulsion to take up---except for the compulsion of God’s love in Christ.
It means following Jesus Christ.
It means suffering.
It means danger.
It could mean death.
It is the choice of taking upon ourselves the burdens of other people’s lives, of putting ourselves—without reservation---at the service of Christ.
It is our choice to join the struggle against evil, no matter what the cost!!!
“For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it.”
The great servants in human history are those who have forgotten themselves into immortality.
How many millions of unknown and unsung people have found life, the largest, richest life, by losing it!?
They have been brought out of grief to find abundant life in service…
…out of the fatal boredom of self-absorption they have found adventures among the needy, the outcast, the sorrowing.
The result is that lives that have been so smashed up…
…so that there was an air of death about them…
…have been born again through the outgoing of God’s love!!!
“What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?”
To this question much of the world roars back its answer: “Plenty!”
We are continually face to face with the solemn fact, which is so easily forgotten in busy days and years, that life’s choices are eternal choices!!!
Indeed, there are many rich people who belong in a home for the destitute.
They do not know the incredibly rich life which only comes from giving themselves in love and service to Christ.
Their names are written in no Book of Life, no matter how prominently they may appear in some Social Registar.
To gain a whole world of things and miss the glory that Paul tried to express by his words: “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” is life’s biggest blunder!!!
“If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.”
These words have a peculiar pertinence to us during this time in history.
This is no time to be ashamed of Jesus or His teaching!
How can we be ashamed of Jesus in a world that has gone over the dizzy edge of disaster through the disregard of Him and His Words?
How can we be ashamed of Jesus when at least a generation of history has given us an appalling validation of His teaching?
How can we be ashamed of Jesus in a day when it appears more blindingly clear than ever before that there is no foundation for human survival other than in Christ?
This is not the time for apologies!
This is the time for tremendous affirmation!
This is not the time to be ashamed of the Only Word of salvation for a world which is becoming increasingly lost each day!!!
“Get behind me Satan!…If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”
This is the time for all of us to put ourselves—without reservation---at the service of Christ…
…to join the struggle against evil—whatever the cost!!!
And in doing so, we will find life!
Let us pray: Holy God, so often we allow our own self-interests, and our own pettiness to get in the way of Your saving message. Forgive us we pray. And in these times, give us the will to resist temptation, take up the Cross of Christ, and lose our lives for others. In Jesus’ name and for His sake we pray. Amen.
