Mark 8:31-38
Then he 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 wish to come after me, 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.”
Every person wants to belong. Next to food and shelter, connection is the most foundational need in a person’s life. Some might even argue that community is more important than these needs. Ecclesiastes places sharing life with others as the foundation of human joy – even going so far to say that even the hard things of life feel better when you face them alongside someone.[1] To be human is to be in community, and community is where humanity becomes more than just a taxonomic label.
John Wesley put it this way: “There is no holiness but social holiness.” In other words, you cannot be a good person on your own. For one thing, how can someone be good if they have no one to be good to? You might say that they would do so by not doing anything that is bad, but that is not the same as being good – that just means you’re inert. A person can only do good when they have someone to be good to, and that requires a community. Secondly, a person can only be holy in community because we need people to instruct us on how we should act. Since we cannot be good by ourselves, it follows that the best lessons we can derive about what we should do come from other people showing us those lessons.
I know how to love my wife, not because I somehow intuited what the proper way to love her is, but because I had the example of my father and step-mother, my grandad and nan. I saw how people can be married and support each other – learning excellence through their successes and learning about pitfalls from their mistakes. I learned to be a better minister by being surrounded by good ministers – again by seeing the ways they excel and the ways they fail. Community wraps around every aspect of our life. I spoke mostly of being good or bad here, but it is so much more than that. Community is comfort, it is peace, it is where we derive so much of our worldview and value. Community is, often, everything of who we are.
Rejection, then, is one of the most powerful forces working against our happiness and goodness in life. I mean happiness, not just in terms of being able to smile and laugh and feel good, but in the sense of general goodness of life. A sound mind, a sound body, a general ability to live life to its fullest – that is the kind of happiness I mean. When we are alone, we struggle to find that. Humanity was incomplete until the first human had a partner to live alongside.[2] Rejection is the conscious decision of one person to push another away and, in so doing, deny them the opportunity to engage with the fullest aspects of life.
Christ sets out in our scripture the reality of his own rejection. His life was always going to end with him being rejected by the powers that be, turned over to the empire that controlled his country, and killed like a common criminal. Jesus did not come to the world to be accepted, but to be rejected and to ultimately create a Kingdom that was founded in being rejected. Christianity is a group of people who belong to each other, and to Christ, but it is not a group that exists to be accepted by the wider world. We exist to follow Christ’s example and to live so that we will necessarily be rejected by some individuals and, by necessity, so that we can accept all other rejected people into our community of rejects.
To put it more plainly – the Church works best when it is the Island of Misfit Toys and not Santa’s workshop. It feels weird to bring in a Christmas movie in February, but we’re gonna do it anyway. We are where the rejects of the world can come and be a part of a community that builds itself upon being rejected. We do not exist to be respected, we exist to do God’s will.
The problem of the Church, in all time, is that we live within the world, we are built out of its constituent parts. You and I do not come to the Church with a blank slate – we have expectations placed upon us by our family, by our family history, our national history, and the culture within all of these larger identities that we are a part of. We bring into the Church aspects of our background and so end up shaping the Church to look more like our culture than like the Body of Christ. That is an inevitability of people, it cannot be fully avoided, but our awareness of it and the work we do to prevent it being overwhelming must be very intentional.
There is nothing wrong with us being American Christians, or having our worship shaped by our American Context. However, when we push our American ideals onto the Gospel we begin to endanger ourselves. We live in a culture that is inherently about trying to get ahead in life. The “American Dream,” long extinct in practicality but still believed in throughout the country, cannot be applied to Christian life and do anything but diminish the impact of our witness. We are not called to win, not called to succeed even, instead we are called to live a life centered on service, devotion, and growth. That growth can sometimes lead to material success, but one does not necessitate the other. Plenty of successful people are morally bankrupt and plenty of poor folk are saints on Earth. Piety is not a thing we can win, and we cannot impose our expectations on it and expect something good to come out of it.
In our scripture, after Christ explains that he is meant to be rejected and die, Peter pulls him aside. Peter, not yet getting what Christ’s ministry is really about, says something many of us find ourselves saying. “Jesus, love your work, but if you talk like this it might scare some people off. Besides, you’re a winner! None of this downer talk. These guys have had a rough week, tell them about how you’re gonna win in the end, not about this crucifixion business.” Jesus responds to this diminishment of his work in an entirely reasonable way. “Get behind me Satan!”
Peter, who was just pages ago named Jesus’s successor in earthly ministry, is now being called Satan. Why? Because he had heard Jesus preach rejection and got nervous. Peter was all about being part of Christ’s messianic community, being set apart as a special early acceptor of the Gospel, but not about living that Gospel out. If it meant being rejected, if it meant bearing the shame of his savior being killed a criminal’s death, if it meant risking life and limb and even worse – reputation – he wanted another sermon to be preached. Peter wanted the Messiah everyone else was waiting for, not the one that was standing in front of him.
We all are guilty of wanting a savior other than the one we have. You may say, “Not me, never!” But trust me that this is something we often do without even thinking. We look at Jesus’s teachings and we go, “That’s too much! He can’t really mean this!” And so, we tweak things a little. Our Matthew Bible Study ran into several teachings of Jesus that made us deeply uncomfortable, some because of cultural differences between us and the first century, but often because Jesus was asking a lot of us.
How do you love the poor to the point you lose some of your own security? How do you forgive others to the point you will sometimes be taken advantage of? How do you live as Christ called us to live at all? And what do you do when people push back against you. When someone is upset at you for feeding the homeless, will you relent? When someone is mad at you for saying that it is wrong the way the poor suffer under this or that law, do you relent to their accusation you’re being too political? What do you do when the life and death of your neighbors is in your hand, in the finger you’re about to press against a voting machine, and you have to deal with the fact not everyone will agree with your choice?
Christ bids all who love him to come and die.[3] Thus goes my paraphrase of Bonhoeffer’s famous “Cost of Discipleship.” He lived that to the end. Rejected by the German Church that had capitulated to Hitler’s hate, he was put to death for his refusal to accept the idea that any person was inferior to another. He believed that God made all people, and all people had to be respected as such. Bonhoeffer rejected the evil of his day, and so was rejected by those who would rather be successful than to do what is right.
Life is hard for someone who is challenging what society expects of us. The person who feeds the hungry and deals with being accused of enabling them. The many unnamed nurses and doctors who helped dying AIDs patients in the days where polite society treated them as sinful threats to the public. Those who feed immigrants fleeing oppression in their homeland rather than cheering their deaths wrapped in razor wire. Those who speak out against injustice, oppression, and evil however they present themselves will always be written off as dissidents.
Christ was one such person. Killed on trumped up charges of insurrection and blasphemy. Peter rejected him on the road long ago when he told him to quiet down about his future death, and even as he stood trial rejected him three times more. Peter was not willing to do the hard work of caring for people even if it meant people accusing him of all manner of evil. He was willing to take up a sword and fight for Jesus, to die a warrior’s death, but it took him many years to be able to put down his weapons and live for Jesus, to die a criminals death as his savior had.
We too can repent, can change, can be shaped into something useful for Christ. This only happens, however, if we are willing to be rejected by those around us. To accept that our material wealth is not actually that important. We have to stop letting people tell us what matters and instead cleave to what scripture tells us matters. The dignity of all people made in the image of God, the work of relieving all the evils of this world, and to begin the work of both by repenting here and now of our contribution to the world’s evils. We have to change, we have to reject the world as it is – because only then will we taste the rejection Christ once knew. The rejection that, contrary to what it would mean in all other circumstances – breathes life, and life abundant.
Let us repent of our desire to be accepted, and take up the mantle of the reject, standing up for them wherever they are found. – Amen.
[1] Ecclesiastes 4: 9-12
[2] Genesis 2: 18
[3] Bonhoeffer’s translated quote is properly rendered, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
Teach us to Number our Days 