“No Easy Way Out”
Mark 8:31-38
Rev. Melissa D. Ramos
As a pastor, I think
one of the best things about the season of Lent is that it’s a great antidote
to some of the wrong-headed ideas that are popular in
·
Jesus is a nice guy.
·
Jesus helps people get what they want.
·
Jesus gives you “Your Best Life Now”
The first popular myth
is that Jesus is a nice guy. Kind of
harmless, but a nice guy overall. Being
a Christian is about being nice to people.
We are, as Christians, called to be kind and compassionate, but what
about “nice”? Each of these popular
myths about Jesus has a biblical antidote, and the antidote to the idea of
Jesus as a nice guy is in our Scripture text.
Listen to the words again, and see if Jesus would be described here as
“nice.” “And Peter took Jesus aside and
began to rebuke him. But turning and
looking at his disciples, Jesus rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me,
Satan! For you are setting your mind not
on divine things, but on human things.’”
(Mark 8:32-33)
Peter was encouraging
Jesus to take the easy way out. Peter
took Jesus aside to tell him he didn’t need to suffer, he didn’t need to go
before the elders and chief priests of the synagogue, and he certainly didn’t need
to die. Jesus was the Messiah!
Jesus isn’t “nice” to
Peter in this conversation. Jesus
recognized that Peter was encouraging him to do the wrong thing. Maybe as Christians we’re not supposed to be
nice about that kind of conversation either.
When someone makes racist jokes in front of us, maybe we’re not supposed
to be nice about that. If somebody tells
us it’s no big deal to cheat on our taxes, maybe we’re not supposed to be nice
about that. If somebody at school is
making fun of a kid who is different, maybe we’re not supposed to be nice about
it.
Jesus wasn’t just a
nice guy. Jesus lived a life of
righteousness before God, and he wasn’t going to let anybody encourage him to
do otherwise.
Another popular myth
about Jesus is that Jesus helps people get what they need, or what they think
they need. Sort of a year-round Santa
Claus. You need something in life? Just ask Jesus, like a fairy godmother, like
Nanny McPhee, or like the genie in Aladdin’s lamp – you get three wishes. And Jesus will make it happen for you.
And there is some truth
to this idea. God hears our prayers and
answers them. Jesus fed the hungry and
healed the sick and the blind and gave good news to poor people. But the popular idea of Jesus in North
Here’s the biblical
antidote to this popular myth about Jesus.
It’s also a passage from today’s Scripture: “Jesus called the crowd with his disciples,
and said to them, ‘If any of you want to become my followers, let them deny
themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’”
This Jesus is not the
year-round Santa who gives people things that they want. This is the biblical Jesus who says that if
you really want to follow him, there is going to be some hardship
involved. This Jesus isn’t giving people
things but asking them to deny themselves.
A third popular myth
about Jesus is that he gives you “Your Best Life Now.” This is the title of a best-selling book by
Joel Ostein. Ostein is the pastor of a
very large church in
What bothers me most
about the title is the word “now.” In
Maybe in the
conversation between Peter and Jesus, where Peter took Jesus aside, maybe what
Peter said to Jesus was this: “Jesus you
can live your best life now. You don’t
need to suffer, you don’t need to be rejected by your own people and sentenced
to death, and you don’t need to be crucified.
Why don’t you just bring in the kingdom now?” But Jesus rebuked Peter for tempting him to
take the easy way out.
Jesus said to the
disciples in response, “Those who want to save their life will lose it, and
those who lose their life for my sake will save it.” (Mark
Lent is a great time
for deconstructing popular myths about Jesus and about the Christian life. This is exactly what Jesus was doing with his
disciples in our Scripture passage. The
disciples had been following Jesus in his ministry and they had seen some
amazing miracles take place. The
disciples had just witnessed a young girl healed from a demon; they saw Jesus
heal a deaf man so that he could hear.
They saw Jesus feed 5,000 people with a loaf of bread and two fish. They had just witnessed Jesus restore sight
to a blind man. And after they had seen
all these things, Jesus asked the disciples, “Who do you say that I am?”
And remember it was
Peter who said to him, “You are the Messiah.”
At least Peter got that part right.
So for the disciples it’s just beginning to sink in that this man they
have been following, with whom they have eaten and slept and traveled, is God’s
Messiah.
The disciples are
astounded and ecstatic and amazed that Jesus is it! Jesus is the hope of
So when Jesus tells the
disciples about the coming suffering and rejection and dying and rising, and
about the need to pick up a cross and follow, this is very sobering news. It doesn’t fit in at all with the daydreams
and the plans of the disciples. The disciples
are ready to enter glory with Jesus and instead what they get is
disillusionment when Jesus doesn’t meet those expectations. This isn’t the deal they thought they were
signing onto.
And sometimes we, too,
can feel the same way when God’s plan doesn’t meet up with our
expectations. Sometimes we also have an
image of Jesus as the conquering hero, who breaks in on the scene with a cape
to take us out of all the hard things we face in life. And when it doesn’t work out that way we get
frustrated or mad at God. Or maybe like
Peter we’d like to take Jesus aside and say, “You know it’s not supposed to
turn out like this.”
But the season of Lent
asks us to let go of our myths about Jesus rescuing us from the
wilderness. Lent instead asks us to take
a few more steps into the wilderness.
And in the wilderness we run into many familiar faces. In the wilderness we see Abram and Sarai in
the pain of their childlessness. In the
wilderness we see Job, caught up in the whirlwind of loss – his children, his
home, his job taken from him. In the
wilderness, we see the Israelites exiled from their homeland, suffering in
And in the wilderness
is Jesus, and if we want to follow him we’ll have to go there, too, from time
to time. We would much rather take
another path around the wilderness and meet Jesus on the other side. But Lent calls us to step inside and embrace
the barrenness. Lent is a time to
reflect on God’s discipline of us.
Not God’s punishment,
but God’s discipline of us. God is at
work molding us and shaping us in the Holy Spirit because we are God’s children
and God loves us beyond all imagining.
God desires intimacy with us, and we also desire to be closer to God. That’s why we sing songs like “Open the Eyes
of My Heart,” and “In the Secret,” and “Arms of Love.” We want to see God; we want to know God in
the secret, quiet place in our hearts.
We want to feel the loving arms of God around us.
Sometimes the only
place God can get close to us is in the wilderness. Sometimes in the pain and struggle and
frustration of life, in this wilderness is the place where we are open and
vulnerable to God. And sometimes when
we’re in the wilderness with God, we understand that we need to make a change
in something about ourselves, about our living.
And, although it’s not
a popular idea, God does actually ask things of us that are hard and
painful. It’s not a popular idea, but
it’s a biblical one.
Intimacy with God is an
exciting and a dangerous place. Faith in
Christ Jesus is a dangerous thing.
Because God is at work changing the world, and that means changing us,
too. God calls us into the wilderness
and doesn’t usually give us an easy way out.
We would rather go straight from Advent to Easter, but instead God gives
us 40 days in which to ask ourselves how God might be at work disciplining us,
shaping us, pruning us.
Like a plant that needs
to grow, sometimes we need to prune off dead branches and dried-up leaves. When I was a teenager in high school, one of
my weekly chores was to prune the rosebushes in the front and the
backyard. My parents were big on their
garden and they had a lot of rosebushes back then.
My dad worked with me
teaching me how to prune the rosebushes right.
In
The hardest part of
pruning a rosebush for me was when my dad taught me that a rosebush shouldn’t
have more than one bud on each stem. So
when the new buds would pop out, part of my job was to go cut off the extra buds,
which were perfectly viable, and would have turned into pretty flowers, but I
cut them off so that the surviving bud would grow larger, healthier, and the
whole plant would thrive.
It’s the same with us
during Lent. Sometimes God prunes what
seems to us to be perfectly good buds that we would rather keep. There may be nothing wrong with the buds
themselves, but they keep the primary flower from growing, and losing those
smaller buds brings more water, more life, more growth, more health to the rest
of the plant.
Sometimes God prunes
us, and Lent is an especially good time to think about what God might be
wanting to prune from our lives. So I’ll
ask you to think about that: What might
God be wanting to prune from your life?
Jesus called the crowd
with his disciples and said to them, “If any of you want to become my
followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life for my
sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”
And as you’re thinking
to yourself what God might be wanting to prune from your life, I’ll give you
some examples from mine:
·
X Files – bad dreams
·
Coffee – heart condition
·
Friendships – unhealthy
·
Coats – to give away in winter
We’re better off giving
these things up even if we struggle with God over them. God doesn’t offer us an easy way out of the
wilderness. Jesus calls us to walk
through all 40 days with him, but we are called to remember that there is
always an end to the time of wilderness, and that the joy of resurrection is on
the other side.
Invitation to write on
tissue paper something God is wanting to prune from your life. Also a time to write prayer requests you
might have, maybe for God to help you pick up your cross and follow in an area
of your life where you are struggling.
While the band is playing, let’s write down what we want to give to God
this Lent, write down our prayer requests, and then come forward and place them
in the holes in the cross.