5. Where Do We Look?

They were on the road, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was walking ahead of them; they were amazed, and those who followed were afraid. He took the twelve aside again and began to tell them what was to happen to him, saying, “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles; they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise again.”

“They were on the road, going up to Jerusalem.” That refers not just to disciples long ago. It describes us too. We are all on the way with Jesus, trying to see and understand what hides in plain sight about him — that his way is the way of the cross. We are all going up to Jerusalem, whether we know it or not. For our destiny, indeed all human destiny, is decided in Jerusalem.

Today’s text tells us that “those who followed were afraid.” The first disciples had every reason to be afraid. Did suffering await them on the way with Jesus? Was martyrdom going to meet them along the way? They didn’t know, so they were afraid, probably even more afraid when Jesus told them about his being condemned, handed over, mocked, spat upon, flogged, and killed. If any or all of those things happened to him, would not at least some of those things happen to them? There was good reason to be afraid.

I’m not sure what it means that we follow Jesus on the way and are not afraid. We come to church and there is no fear. We don’t fear because our faith has become a religion of comfort for us.

A minister described his driving to the office everyday. He said. “I had to pass this large billboard, a billboard paid for by a local church, a billboard with the picture of this disgustingly good looking preacher on it, a preacher smiling, clutching a Bible.

“Beneath the preacher’s smiling face, there was always a different human malady listed. CONFUSED? Then readers were urged to call the church’s telephone number. Next week: LONELY? [Call the church.] The week after: DEPRESSED? [Call the church.]”

Surely those who drove by that billboard would have the impression that the church exists to fulfill all our needs, pump us up, and make us happy. Where does it itch? The church exists to scratch it.[1]

I think we have to wonder sometimes if that’s what we have become: just a place where people’s individual needs are met or where we come to feel good. Are we afraid that if we take Jesus at his word, faithfulness and suffering may belong together?

We need to take this question seriously because, as the question in my title asks, where do we look when we follow Jesus? It’s pretty clear, if we take the gospels seriously, that we must look to the cross. But we are not naturally inclined to look to the cross. That’s the human irony in this: Jesus’ suffering and dying on the cross are the means by which we are saved. But we don’t like to look at this any more than we have to. Let me illustrate by talking for a moment about the lectionary.

A lectionary is simply a listing of Bible readings to be read on specific days and there are all kinds of different lectionaries including one of our own. You’ll find a lectionary in your bulletins every week. Each Sunday in the bulletin we print the chapters you need to read that week in order to read through the whole Bible in a year’s time. Imagine how we would all grow in faith if we did that. We also print the passages from one of the standard lectionaries. So in the bulletin you have what could be called the Presbyterian Church in Sudbury lectionary. It’s just a listing of Bible readings designed for a specific purpose.

I mentioned standard lectionaries. There are several of them and many Christian churches today, if they use a lectionary at all, use one form or another of the “common” lectionary, so named simply because it is held in common by many denominations. There is the New Common Lectionary and the Revised Common Lectionary. Presbyterians follow the Revised Common Lectionary for Sundays and special days. This lectionary assigns to each Sunday of the year four readings: a reading from the Old Testament, a reading from the Psalms, a reading from one of the four gospels, and a reading from the rest of the New Testament.

There are three good reasons for using a lectionary like this. First, it lets us read the same texts as many other Christians around the world are reading at the same time. Second, it encourages disciplined and systematic reading of the Bible. And third, it exposes readers to the breadth of the scriptures. One gets the essence of the Old Testament, the best of the Psalms which have shaped the worship and piety of God’s people for 25 centuries, the fullness of the four gospels, and the most essential passages of the rest of the New Testament.

The Revised Common Lectionary also has a three-year cycle labeled A, B, and C. In the “A” year, the gospel readings are primarily from the Gospel of Matthew. In the “B” year, the gospel readings come from Mark’s Gospel, and the “C” year features readings from the Gospel of Luke. Readings from the Gospel of John are interspersed throughout the three-year cycle. The cycles begin on the first Sunday of Advent and we are in the middle of the “B” year when most of the gospel readings are from Mark. Furthermore, it is the habit of your preachers that two-thirds to three-quarters of the sermons in any year are based in one or the other of the lectionary texts for a given Sunday.

Now, I’ve told you more about lectionaries than you wanted to know and, finally, it brings me to the point I want to make. Today’s text is like a banner headline in which Jesus announces as plainly and emphatically as he can the whole purpose of his life and ministry: he is going to Jerusalem, he will be treated cruelly and shamefully, he will be killed, and he will be raised from the dead. That’s what Jesus was about, it is one of the key paragraphs in all of the gospels. Mark expresses it as briefly and as pointedly as possible. Furthermore, Mark has essentially the same words in two other places and Matthew, Luke, and John have similar wording six additional times.[2] So the gospels emphasize this text by repetition and one might think that the lectionary would reflect that. This text could show up in the “A” year or the “B” year or the “C” year. But today’s text does not appear in any year of the common lectionary, New or Revised, nor does the lectionary have most of the similar passages from the other gospels.

Now I have no way of knowing whether or not this paragraph was omitted intentionally from the lectionary. Probably not. But intentional or not, at the very least it is ironic that this one paragraph was omitted from the lectionary which, after all, is designed to provide us the fullness of the scriptures. It is ironic because this is the one paragraph that Christian disciples may least want to look at and if we just followed the lectionary we would not have to look at it.

Christian disciples don’t like to look at this paragraph because it tells us things we don’t like to know. We don’t like to know that our LORD Jesus Christ is the SERVANT Jesus Christ who came to die.[3] We don’t like that because if Jesus’ way is the way of the cross, then our natural glory-seeking, honor-seeking, and wealth-seeking ways are clearly out of place. We may not want to look at this but if we do not look, we will not see Jesus clearly and, therefore, we cannot follow him truly.

So the human irony is that we don’t like to look at the very thing that leads to our salvation and, therefore, to our deepest joy. But it is the divine irony that through suffering and death — Jesus’ and our own — come life and joy.

Thomas Cahill is an author in the midst of writing a seven-volume series about what he calls “the hinges of history.” The third volume in this series is called Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus. Cahill writes, “In all the tragic dramas of antiquity, whether lived or staged, we detect the same pattern: the hero, be he Alexander or Oedipus, reaches his pinnacle only to be cut down. Only in the drama of Jesus does the opposite pattern hold: the hero is cut down only to be raised up.”[4]

This pattern that we see in Jesus is why Bill Wilson, the cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, reached the unshakeable conviction, now a canon of twelve-step programs, that an alcoholic must “hit bottom” in order to climb upward. Twelve-step programs are, as with everything in our cynical age, frequently parodied now. But they work because they are built on the pattern of divine irony. Wilson wrote his fellow strugglers: “How privileged we are to understand so well the divine paradox that strength rises from weakness, that humiliation goes before resurrection: that pain is not only the price but the very touchstone of spiritual rebirth.”[5]

I found that quote in a book by Philip Yancey who also writes frequently in the magazine Christianity Today. Yancey has interviewed a wide range of people in his journalistic career and he divides them into two types: the stars and the servants. For the stars — NFL football greats, famous authors, TV personalities — he has sympathy. These “idols,” he says, “are as miserable a group of people as I have ever met.” They appear to have more troubled marriages, tormented psyches, and incurable self-doubts than most.

The servants, on the other hand — relief workers in Bangladesh or Ph.D.’s scattered through the jungles of South America translating the Bible into obscure languages — are, Yancey says, “the favored ones.”

“I was prepared to honor and admire these servants, to uphold them as inspiring examples,” says Yancey. “I was not, however, prepared to envy them. But as I now reflect on the two groups, stars and servants, the servants clearly emerge as the favored ones, the graced ones. They work for low pay, long hours, and no applause, ‘wasting’ their talents among the poor and uneducated. But somehow, in the process of losing their lives, they have found them.”[6]

Is it any wonder that they have found their way? For again and again our Lord invites us to follow the way that lies hidden in plain sight, the way to the cross, the way to losing our lives for the sake of others. The amazing, ironic, and divine blessing is that only the way to the cross leads to life and the deepest joy.

It is in this context that Kathleen Norris writes about Christian perfection. At one point Jesus told his disciples to “be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5.48) In the Christian sense being perfect is following Jesus on the way, becoming mature enough to give ourselves to others. Norris says that perfection demands that we become fully ourselves as God would have us be: mature, ripe, full, ready for what befalls us, for whatever is to come.

Norris gives the example of an acquaintance, Catherine LaCugna, a professor of systematic theology. When doctors informed her that there was nothing more they could do and that cancer would kill her within a few months, LaCugna did not run away to nurse her wounds. No, she continued teaching. She told only a few close friends that she was near death and she went on living the life she had chosen. She was able to teach until just a few days before she died.

Norris writes, “I can scarcely imagine what it meant to her students, when they found out what she had done. When they considered that they, and the dry, underappreciated work of systematic theology that they had been engaged in together, had meant so much to her. Now, whenever I recite the prayer that ends the church’s liturgical day, “May the Lord grant us a peaceful night, and a perfect death,” it is her death that I think of. A perfect death, fully acknowledged and fully realized, offered for others.”[7]

You see, if we can get to this point — and it’s not easy but the challenge of a Christian lifetime — if we can get to this point there is nothing we need to fear.

So I conclude today with the words of a hymn normally sung just during Holy Week and we’ll sing it again this Holy Week. But this hymn needs to be an abiding anthem of our hearts.

Where are we going to look? Only by seeing clearly Jesus on the cross can we follow him truly on the way to life and joy.

[1] William H. Willimon, “He Taught Them to Suffer,” Pulpit Resource 22.1 (1994): 36.

[2] See Matthew 17.22-23 and 20.17-19; Mark 8.31, 9.31; Luke 9.22, 9.43-45, 18.31-34; John 12.16.

[3] David E. Garland, Mark: The NIV Application Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996) 415. “This passage forces Christians to reflect on what it means to have a servant for a Lord. Can they shamelessly seek after glory and honor when our Lord has given his life in a shameful death? It also forces us to reflect on how one defines greatness and to examine how to attain it. Clearly worldly notions of rank, honor, and privilege are out of place in the church that names Jesus as Lord. Self-seeking has no place in a church founded on the ultimate self-giving sacrifice of Jesus Christ. The road to the cross leads in a different direction from the road to success. If one follows Jesus along his road, seeking glory for oneself is out of place.”

[4] Thomas Cahill, Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (New York: Doubleday, 1999) 130.

[5] Quoted in Philip Yancey, Reaching for the Invisible God: What Can We Expect to Find? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000) 280.

[6] Yancey, Christianity Today, 11/18/88, p. 80.

[7] Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998) 57.

[8] The Presbyterian Hymnal: Hymns, Psalms, and Spiritual Songs (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1990) hymn 98.