Lent 5
6 April 2025
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
Gregory Pope
CROSS
Mark 8.27-37
Following Jesus Through The Gospel of Mark
We have reached a turning point in the gospel of Mark. From here on out we are facing the cross.
Walking down the road to Caesarea Philippi, Jesus gives his disciples a pop quiz. “Disciples,” after all, literally means “learners” or “students.” “Who do people say that I am?” he asks. Hands shoot up: “I know, I know. Let me answer.” “John the Baptist re-headed.” “Elijah.” “One of the prophets.” “But who do you say that I am?” Jesus asks.
It’s an important question. Because who we believe Jesus is has a direct bearing on what we think it means to be his disciple.
The disciples grow quiet. Except Peter, who is always ready to rush in where angels fear to tread. “You are the Messiah!” Peter proclaims. So sure of his answer, he’s now ready to take his place at the head of the class. Not so fast, according to Mark. Jesus then warns the disciples not to tell anyone, because though Peter’s words are right his understanding is not. Then Jesus begins to teach them what they never expected to hear: that he will be rejected, arrested, killed, and then on the third day rise. One moment – Messiah. The next moment – a man to be killed. This doesn’t make sense to the Jewish mind. Suffering Messiah was a contradiction in terms. Like “Patriotic Traitor.” It was the oxymoron of oxymorons.
When Jesus talked about how he must suffer and die Peter rushed in and began to rebuke Jesus: “No Jesus, you’ve got it all wrong. This can never happen to you. You’re the Messiah.” Then Jesus hurls the rebuke back at the big fisherman like a boomerang, saying perhaps the harshest thing he ever said to anybody: “Get behind me, Satan. You do not have in mind the things of God. You’re thinking human thoughts.”
How does it happen that God’s revelation and Satan’s messages and human error get so mixed up together in our minds? But they do, don’t they? It was all so strange, so horrifyingly strange.
This is such a radical reversal of thinking that Jesus is demanding of his disciples. Jewish expectation was that when the Messiah came there would be no more misery. That’s what the disciples had heard all their lives. And now Jesus is saying that he, the Messiah, has come and that he will be killed. So instead of saying, “Where the Messiah is, there will be no more misery,” Jesus turns that thought on its head and says, “Where misery is, there is Messiah.” That made absolutely no sense to them. Then even more confusing: After foreshadowing his own cross Jesus tells the disciples that this applies to them as well. “The cross is not just for me,” he says, “it’s for all who would follow me.” If any want to become my disciples, let them deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me.
We are in a similar situation to the disciples. The idea of suffering for our faith runs against the grain of American church culture. I thought all we had to do was say a prayer and ask Jesus into our hearts. Then we will succeed, flourish, grow. What does this talk about taking up crosses mean for us comfortable American Christians?
The lesson Jesus is teaching here is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “the cost of discipleship.”1 Jesus is talking about a particular kind of suffering that comes when we live as faithful followers of Jesus. What many Christians in America consider “suffering for their faith”
is sometimes nothing more than losing some of the social privileges we used to have simply because we were Christian. Most of what we consider sufferings are nothing more than inconveniences and frustrations that do not threaten our lives and hardly fit the category of “taking up the cross.”
To take up the cross, to deny self, and to follow Jesus means to take up Jesus’ way of life as our own and to obey his teachings no matter what the cost. To take up the cross is to carry our own personal suffering in such a way that it becomes a ministry to others. It is to pray, “O God, allow my suffering to deepen my soul, enlarge my sympathy, increase my understanding, soften my heart, extend my arms, move me into some kind of action on behalf of others.” We do not choose most of the suffering that comes our way. But we can choose what we do with our suffering. Jesus says take up your suffering as a cross and let it shape your life into a life for others.
We also take up the cross when we intentionally and willingly take up the sufferings of others
as a ministry of service. While we often think theologically about the meaning of Jesus’ death as the way of forgiveness, that’s not why the Romans and religious leaders put him to death. Jesus was killed because of his outspoken opposition to the corruption of religion, the oppression of the poor, and the perversion of justice. It was because he challenged these social evils and because of his identification with the outcast, the racially mixed Samaritans, and the oppressed that led the coalition of religious and political powers to put him to death. So for us to take up the cross means to step forward regardless of the sacrifice required, and confront the powers of injustice and stand with the excluded and the powerless, relieving suffering and injustice, rescuing the weak, bringing peace and compassion to bear on the world.
Very few people have embodied this path of suffering discipleship like Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was a brilliant, young, German theologian. At one point in the 1930’s he came to New York City to study at Union Seminary. Bonhoeffer struggled for years with what it meant to take up his cross and follow Jesus. In his writings he warned the Church that it was in danger of succumbing to cheap grace when the grace of Jesus is always a costly grace.
But as Hitler rose to power and the crisis of his own German people intensified, Bonhoeffer found it impossible to stay in New York. He said he must go back home to Germany. Although his American friends feared for his life and begged him to stay, Bonhoeffer said, “I must go back and be with my people and resist the policies and power of Hitler and the distortions of Christian faith.” Bonhoeffer challenged his Christian brothers and sisters in Germany to be loyal to the Christian faith even if it means wishing the defeat of your own nation.
When he returned home to Germany he began to work against Hitler and his policies. Hitler said he was going to save the German nation by the resurrection of Christian values and patriotic virtue. The cost of such nationalistic policies was what people did not see, which was the elimination of anyone who opposed him and the extermination of people groups that he said were a threat to the nation. If you opposed him he considered you a threat to the nation, and he went after you. What began as hateful racist language couched in the name of religion led these groups of people to their death in concentration camps. Six million Jews were slaughtered. One and one half million of them children. Twelve to fifteen thousand homosexual men were killed. Along with untold thousands of gypsies and other people groups.
The German church as a whole said nothing against Hitler. Nazi emblems filled churches and they lost their prophetic voice all in the name of loyalty to country. The German church chose the racist way of Hitler and his idolatrous promise of national glory over the way of Jesus. They were not the first church to do so, nor the last.
Pastor Martin Niemoller, himself jailed eight years for his opposition to Hitler, traveled around America after the war. And he would close his speeches with these now famous words:
They first came for the communists,
and I did not speak up because I was not a communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I did not speak up because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I did not speak up because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I did not speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one left to speak for me.
Bonhoeffer joined the resistance against Hitler. His discipleship to Christ would not let him be silent while any of God’s children were being persecuted and killed. He could not stand piously and safely on the sidelines and let others do the dirty work of opposing Hitler. He said, “In terrible times like these, the church has a responsibility to question the legitimacy of its government’s policies, as well as an unconditional obligation toward the victims of any social order, even if they are not members of the Christian community.”
On April 5, 1943 Bonhoeffer was arrested for opposing Hitler and helping Jews escape into Switzerland. On that same date two years later Hitler personally signed the execution order that condemned him to death. His last recorded words were: “This is the end. For me, the beginning of life.” He was hanged four days later, April 9, 1945, 80 years ago this Wednesday. He was 39 years old. That is persecution. That is suffering for your faith. That is taking up the cross.
The turning point for Bonhoeffer came some four and a half years before his arrest: November 9, 1938. It was a terrible night “Krystalnacht” – “The Night of Broken Glass.” This was the night that the hidden, unofficial violence against the Jews turned open and official. Hitler gave the orders for Jewish synagogues to be destroyed. There ensued a rampage of violence against Jewish sanctuaries and homes and places of business. Music of worship and praise were overwhelmed by the sounds of shattering glass and axes. Holy books were burned. Thousands were injured and killed or shipped off to concentration camps. Can you imagine watching our sanctuary being destroyed, windows smashed, burned to the ground all in the name of God and country?
On Krystalnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, Bonhoeffer opened his Bible to Psalm 74 and read it: O God, why dost thou cast us off forever. . . Thy foes have roared in the midst of thy holy place. They set up their emblems here. . . They burned all the meeting places of God in the land. How long, how long, O God, is the foe to stand? Bonhoeffer read the psalm and wrote in the margin of his Bible: “How long, O God, shall I be a bystander?”
That’s what it means to take up your cross. It means to no longer be a bystander. It means to stand with those who are hated, excluded, and mistreated. For Bonhoeffer, to refuse to be a bystander cost him his life. But better to lose your life, Jesus said, than to lose your soul.
During his two years in prison, Bonhoeffer’s friends carried letters out which we know now as Letters and Papers from Prison. In one of them he wrote, “The church is the church only when it is there for others.”
Flannery O’Connor once wrote: “People think faith is an electric blanket, but it isn’t. It’s the cross.” So may God grant us the grace to pray not for an easier life, but for strength to give our lives away for others and the grace to realize that if there is nothing for which we would die, then we do not have enough for which to live.
As the poet Amanda Gordon put it: “. . . never stay kneeling when the day calls us to stand.”2
In the face of hate speech, oppressive poverty, racism, and the violent mistreatment of others, how long, how long, will you and I be a bystander?
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- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, Touchstone, 1959
- Amanda Gorman, “Fury & Faith,” Call Us What We Carry, Viking, 2021, 157