The Church’s season of Lent challenges us to take an honest look at ourselves in the light of the good news of fast approaching Good Friday and Easter Day. Lent offers an opportunity to take stock of our relationships with God and neighbour. Such a spiritual audit as this can be, if we dare to be strictly honest with ourselves, a quite difficult and discomforting time. For some, the prospect of such discomfort leads them to give Lent a wide berth! Yet this honest taking stock we are asked to do in the light of God’s amazing love and forgiveness offered to one and all: he loves us and his nature is ‘to be always willing to forgive’. I think most of us realise that, in life, growth – at least growth in character and maturity - requires not only honesty but testing.
It is the same in the Christian life, in the life of discipleship. But here, in discipleship of Jesus, we have an encouragement to do so second to none; we can be honest with ourselves and we can offer ourselves to be tested – especially by our willingness to suffer for Jesus’ sake – because we are also sure of God’s love for us and that his nature is ‘to be always willing to forgive’. For us of course, the trouble is that things get in the way: other priorities, other concerns, other views - of what is important in life or what other people think is important in life, or what they think of us. To such distractions, to the temptation not to take Lent seriously, Jesus offers his love and the challenging but liberating invitation to know him by taking up our cross and following him.
In our Gospel passage Jesus is being very open and frank with his disciples and with the crowd about what must happen to him and what it will mean for them to follow him. It’s one of many passages in the Gospels that give the lie to the popular idea that a person can be a ‘nominal’ Christian – one who shies away from commitment, especially open or public commitment. (If Wayne Rooney were to say, ‘I’m only a ‘nominal’ Man Utd player’, we can easily imagine Sir Alex Ferguson’s reaction!) ‘Nominalism’ is out of the question, says Jesus, as V34 makes clear. Just as Sir Alex, who once said that football is more than a matter of life or death, would not accept anything less than a total commitment from his team, so there is no such thing in the Kingdom of God as a ‘nominal’ Christian. Either I am a committed Christian or I am an enquirer or I am an imposter: Jesus left us with no other choice.
In v31 Jesus refers to himself as the ‘Son of Man’, a term he used to describe himself rather than ‘Messiah’, God’s anointed one. He did this because the people, even his disciples, had some very firm but mistaken ideas about what God’s Messiah ought to be about; and so Jesus used this different term so that people would not jump to conclusions formed by their own ideas and expectations but ,instead, look, listen, and learn about him and his agenda. We can see the wisdom of this because, as vs 31 - 33 make very clear, even his closest friends were still allowing their own ideas and expectations to cloud their understanding of what Jesus needed to do. v31 the Son of Man must undergo...’ This is the agenda Jesus calls us to buy into. This is why we need to leave our personal agendas at home on Sundays; because it is true, sadly, of the Church and of we Christians, isn’t it, that we all too easily allow the personal agendas of our ideas, expectations, tastes, politics, and frustrations even to cloud our understanding of Jesus’ agenda and his priorities, his very clear agenda we learn of in the Gospels. To such attitudes Jesus’ statement in v34 and its explanation in vs 35 – 37 are a shocking revelation. And so that we are left in no doubt, he then reinforces these heartfelt warnings about denying him with his even more harrowing revelation in v 38.
So you and I cannot claim that we did not know; that we did not know that Jesus’ suffering was necessary, that the resurrection is not only important but necessary for Christian belief, or that promoting our own agendas or giving in to the world’s agendas is wrong, or that committed discipleship is not just an option for ‘keenies’, or that self-preservation is ultimately futile, or that denying Jesus, being ashamed of him in our day, will result in Jesus one day being ashamed of us. He has made this all abundantly clear. However, most importantly of all he has demonstrated his love for us; a love that rescues, reconciles, and renews us. Presented with such love, how can we do otherwise than respond with all our heart? But do we? That’s the question the season of Lent asks us to ask ourselves.
I think it all comes back, as all healthy Christian theology (thinking about God and us in relationship to him) does to grace, and whether or not we genuinely want to respond to it.
Simone Weil, the Jewish French intellectual who followed Christ, said that it is as if two great forces rule this universe: gravity and grace. ‘Gravity’, as she termed it, causes one body to attract other bodies so that it continually enlarges by absorbing more and more of the universe into itself. Something like this same force operates in human beings: we too want to expand, to acquire, to swell in significance. Emotionally, we humans operate, naturally, by laws as fixed as Newton’s and remain trapped in the gravitational field of self-love, preoccupied with ourselves. It is God’s grace, and only God’s grace (that orientation away from self and towards God and others) which can break the natural pull of self.
We escape the force of such spiritual ‘gravity’ when we begin to see ourselves as sinners who cannot please God by any method of self-improvement or self-enlargement. Only then can we turn to God for outside help – for grace. And as soon as we do, we realise that a holy God already loves us despite our defects. I escape the force of ‘gravity’ again when I recognize my neighbours also as sinners loved by God; all of us in the same boat. But just as there is nothing you or I can do to make God love us more; there is also nothing we can do to make God love us less. Our spiritual lives are defined and determined in the first instance by our willingness to be honest and open with ourselves, with God, and with others.
All the while we misrepresent ourselves spiritually to God and our neighbour, it is difficult for God’s grace to work in our lives; it is not possible to know him. Such honesty is vital. And it is not enough simply to acknowledge our imperfection and weakness. When the antidote of grace is freely available, we are not only foolish to refuse it, Jesus makes it very clear that we are culpable if we do not. Radical honesty and radical dependence upon God, these two will prove the most enlightening and liberating of truths this Lent as we look forward with joy and great expectation to the good news of Good Friday and Easter Day.
No comments:
Post a Comment