February 25, 2024 – Lent 2B

“[Jesus] began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any 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 will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” Mark 8:31-38

What is Suffering? As I see it, we have several meanings to the word or concept of suffering. Suffering can be a physical or emotional injury that causes pain or discomfort. People with chronic pain know what it means to suffer. Suffering can also mean self-sacrifice – denying ourselves something for a cause or for the sake of others. Both of these definitions we can clearly associate with the season of Lent. It is in Lent that we focus on the cross – the implement that is used to cause Jesus’ suffering. So in Lent we do things to focus ourselves on some minor and mostly inconvenient denial that, though it does not reach the same level as Jesus’ suffering, it reminds us of his sacrifice.

The suffering that the Gospel of Mark is talking about in this text is something other than physical pain or self-sacrifice – the suffering Mark is talking about is the suffering that comes from taking yourself out of the ordinary and putting yourself into what makes you uncomfortable – specifically taking yourself more and more out of the things of this world that brings you comfort, and placing yourself into the way of the cross.  And this kind of living is truly counter-cultural – at least from our 21st century view.  For us in the 21st century, we are part of the “me generation”.  We hear people every day telling us to “put ourselves first” – be sure to “take care of number one” – and on and on.  But for the first century Jew, where people identified themselves within a multi-generational kinship group, to suffer would be to take oneself out of the family group – to leave everything as the disciples did.

In the 21st century, a society that is increasingly identifying itself with the individual – the individual is more important than the family group, and the individual is a growing unit of society. From the 21st century view, suffering, or carrying the cross for Jesus, would be looked upon as nothing more than self-sacrifice – nothing more. You may hear someone say “I have given up coffee for Lent – that is my cross to bear.” But it should mean much, much more. For example, we encourage you to do some devotional exercises in Lent – things like giving up coffee, or chocolate – and these are meant to be helpful and good for just the season of Lent – they are an individual thing. But picking up one’s cross for the sake of Jesus should go to a different level – it should at least mean taking oneself out of what society has deemed important. In other words, to deny the self means to stop focusing on just our own needs, to stop focusing on the individual, to stop focusing solely on ourselves.  And in the process we increasingly focus on helping those on the fringes of society, helping those who cannot help themselves, help those that society wants to “throw away”. And when we live this way, when we see this as “picking up our crosses”, then we should expect people to give us a hard time, yes even to persecute us, because we have taken ourselves out of the ordinary, out of the comfortable, out of the cultural mainstream, and put others ahead of ourselves.

If we spend our whole life trying to avoid suffering, we will be like the dog trying to catch its tail – running around and around in a complete act of futility.  This life will present us suffering – and how we endure it may make us stronger people. Allow the cross to be a signpost for your life – pointing you to serving those who are the last, lost, least and little in our society.  That, that would be truly denying yourself in the 21st century.

Pastor Dave