Last week we heard Peter proclaim that Jesus was the messiah. This week we see that Peter didn’t really understand what was to happen to the messiah and denied that Jesus would suffer and die at the hands of Roman authorities. Peter goes from being a rock for his proclamation to a stumbling block to the good news for his denial of suffering.
For some Christians I know, Peter had it right—being Christian for them is about good things happening, happiness and good fortune, feeling good always. But for other Christians, taking up the cross is central to their understanding, and they believe they can’t be Christian until they feel guilty and bad about themselves.
But both these type of Christians seem to me to be missing the core of the gospel message, which is to lose your life so you can gain it. Another Christian paradox, but when you have lived it you understand fully how this works.
Pain and suffering are all around us—emotional troubles, mental illness, physical disability, poverty, and for many, being sidelined from access to good jobs and homes and schools and other opportunities for living fully into their talents. In fact, I believe that Jesus is saying that we each have our cross to bear, none of us is exempt, whether we seem to have it all, like Bill Gates, or seem to have nothing at all. This is the human condition and one of the first things we learn as we become adults—life can be challenging, can sometimes even seem to beat us down.
Jesus says, don’t shy away from those calamities of life, but embrace them even. This is the heart of the paradox. Like the fire response we learned as kids—if you have fire on your body, don’t run, drop and roll. Counterintuitive and really hard to do, which is why we have to practice it.
How does one embrace life’s calamities and challenge? Jesus gave us the answer—by going towards it fully aware of its meaning, just like he moved toward Jerusalem, ready for the most frightening calamity of all, death.
Moving toward our challenges involved great courage, courage to enter into dark and scary places, to encounter things about ourselves or other people that we don’t want to encounter.
The psychologist Carl Jung called those dark places our shadow selves. Going into grief or loss or disappointment can call up the parts of our psyches that we would rather not claim. You can identify the shadow part of yourself by how you react to other people—if someone’s personality trait really bugs you, chances are they are exhibiting your own shadow personality trait.
Example, oversimplified: if you are normally generous and giving and those who are stingy with their time and talent really bug you, chances are that being stingy is your shadow self. You have parts of that stinginess in you, but you can’t embrace it. What Jesus tells us, and Carl Jung found in his work with people, is that you can’t be a whole person if you are constantly denying your shadow self. If the person claims they are totally generous all the time and never have feelings of wanting to be stingy, they are not being honest, they are not picking up their cross.
A person’s cross can be anything that really challenges us to get outside our clean little box we have constructed for ourselves. Any life event, big or small, any person who gives us grief, anything that makes us want to close our eyes and deny that it exists—that is a cross for us.
The first part of the paradox is that by not denying, not closing our eyes, but opening them wide and entering into this frightening or challenging moment, we have begun to take up our cross, to lose our life as we know it. Which leads to the second part of the paradox, finding a new life.
Kathleen Norris (A Cloister Walk): “The point of our crises and calamities is not to frighten us or beat us into submission, but to encourage us to change, to allow us to heal and grow.”
Think about something you did that seemed impossible—grieving the loss of someone close, taking a job you didn’t think you could do, trusting someone or forgiving them when you didn’t want to, being so disappointed you didn’t know you could go on. Whatever it was that made you decide to enter into this calamity, when you came out on the other side of it, you had been changed.
If you really embraced the challenge, if you really kept your eyes open and your feet on the ground, then you gave God the chance to heal you, to embrace you in love. One way this happens is in Christian community. By coming here and sharing your pain, sorrow, disappointment, you allow God to share in it through the community’s love for you. We don’t take it away from you, but we support you as you walk through whatever fire God is giving you. Here you are given courage in fear, hope in despair, healing for wounds, and new life from the old. Just like some seeds must undergo fire before they can become new plants, so too, we each undergo the fire of death in order to know what life can be.
I encourage you today to embrace your cross, bring it with you to this altar and be transformed in healing.
No comments:
Post a Comment