Lent II B Losing your life to save it
Our friend Peter is again showing his human side today, as he rebukes Jesus after Jesus talks about his upcoming passion and death. “Get behind me Satan. For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
Well of course, Peter sets his mind on human things, because Peter is our most human disciple. Peter wants to stay and build tents on the mountaintop. Peter later cowers in fear after Jesus is arrested.
Peter, who will be given the keys to heaven, had a ways to go before he could put his mind on divine things. Peter may be the disciple we understand best, perhaps because he is doing and saying the same things we might do, had we been present when our rabbi told us these awful things that were about to take place.
I visited an old and very sick parishioner at home for a couple of years, who, as she began to be more frail and in pain, began to tell me she was ready to die. Her children always chastised her when she said this to them, but she was only saying what she felt inside, that her time was here and that she was ready. Her adult children were putting their hands over their ears because they didn’t want to hear that they would lose their mother, and as many of us do, were thinking about their loss, not about their mother’s need to leave her spent body behind and be at peace in the next life.
Our instinct for personal survival gives us an aversion to any talk of death and dying, or loss of any kind.
Seeing a letter from the IRS in the mailbox may bring chills of fear as we avoid bringing into the house. When you are expecting a phone call with bad news, perhaps you want to turn the phone off. When you see the doctor about unknown symptoms and she comes into the exam room you scan her face to see if it’s good news or bad. Our survival instinct remains on twenty-four hours a day, and is nigh impossible to turn off.
People who can turn off their survival instinct in a healthy way do exist—some are professional therapists who can listen to others’ sad tales objectively so that they can help them. Others can turn off this instinct to run and hide for short periods of time so that they can be open to the experience of friends, listening and allowing another person to be in a dark place and not judge them.
But today, Jesus calls his disciples away from this instinct to survive at all costs, to take the easy way, shut their ears against things they don’t want to hear, shut their eyes to things they don’t want to see. Jesus says that turning a deaf ear and blind eye can be the start of evil, when it does not enter into suffering.
Because Jesus knows something that Peter has yet to understand—that the way of God is the way of truth, the way of justice, and the way of resurrection. Jesus knows that by turning away from the hard things of life, Peter will inadvertently turn away from the very challenges God sends so that new life may be born.
You can’t follow me unless you take up your cross, Jesus says. And it does no good to act on your survival instinct if it keeps you locked up in a closed house, in a closed mind, in a closed community that lacks the courage of love.
Our parish knows what it feels like to reach out when we would rather stay home on Saturday morning to give away a coat to a grateful person or to work on a Habitat house. Entering into the suffering of others or ourselves places us squarely into the stream of lifegiving water that comes from God. It keeps our mind on divine things not human things.
Jesus says that human things are the things that cause us to lose our life. Our survival instinct may seem like the way to life, but Jesus says it is ultimately the way of death. It does not allow us to be in the mind of Christ, the mind that openly accepts the challenges of life, even unto death. The mind of Christ is the way that opens us for new life, even while it may seem like the death of the old life.
This paradox of losing your life to save it requires us to turn away from automatic responses to the suffering around us, whether ours or another’s. Losing our life does not mean denying our gifts, but actually embracing them for others. Losing our life does not mean being lost in someone else’s ego, but putting our ego in the service of others to reduce the suffering of the world. Losing our life does not mean losing our personal uniqueness, but being uniquely God’s gift in love.
Take up your cross by having the mind of Christ—the mind that does not run away from the hard things, but understands them to be the way to new life.
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