Take up your cross and follow him...

2nd Sunday of Lent – Eucharist – 25.ii.2024

(Genesis 17.1-7, 15-16; Romans 4.13-25; Mark 8.31-38)

Here’s a story from America:

There is a gravestone back near Kearney, Nebraska which has on it the name, Susan Hale.  As a young bride, Susan and her husband were part of the gold rush on the Oregon Trail, but she drank some contaminated water, came down with a high fever, and died before they reached Fort Kearney. Her husband made a coffin for her body using the wood of their wagon. He buried his wife on the highest ground he could find, and marked the grave with wooden stakes so that he would be able to find the place again after he had gone on West and made his fortune.  But he changed his mind.  Instead of going west, he retraced his steps back eastward to St. Joe, Missouri, which was the closest outpost of European life. There he had a stonecutter cut into granite his wife’s name and the date of her death.  Then he tried to get someone to haul it westward, but no one would.  They didn't have time or space; their wagons were loaded, and they were impatient to get to the gold fields.  So he bought a wheelbarrow, put the stone on it, and pushed it all those miles to Kearney and set it up over her grave.

That’s the story of the grave. There is no indication as to whether the husband ever made it to Oregon or California or found his fortune.  You can only reflect on what might seem like a foolish thing, a costly gesture pushing the barrow all that way.  Why did he do it?  Perhaps it was because he knew that there are some things that we cannot easily and conveniently walk away from; he knew that there are some values in this life that are too important to neglect.  The easy thing to do would have been to dig a shallow grave and leave the body there.  But he did the hard thing.  He chose a road few would take and made a journey out of love.  That is the road, Jesus says, that leads to life – the costly path which is the path of love.

Today’s Gospel reading shows us Jesus on the road with the disciples. And as they go he begins to speak of his approaching death, ‘that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected.... and be killed, and after three days rise again.’ The disciple Peter immediately takes him to task. Surely this isn’t the way God works, he says. It is hard to believe. What does this Gospel reading concerning Jesus’ death have in common with today’s other readings. Our Old and New Testament readings are concerned with Abraham, a man given a promise by God that the generations descended from him will know the fullness of God’s blessing. For Abraham the hope is of continuity, of descendants in their millions, one generation after another. Talk of Jesus’ death, on the other hand, speaks of disruption and the denial of all that his followers might hope for – who will they follow if Jesus is taken from them?

Perhaps the problem is that we don’t see the whole picture. The story of Abraham is a long story which we rarely read in its entirety. It involves him in a long journey. He hears the call of God, he leaves behind his homeland to strike out across the desert, believing, but not knowing, that God will be faithful to his promise. He is brought into the land of Canaan, but he never comes to a land that he will possess. At best he can live amongst other peoples as a guest, always on the move grazing his flocks where he can. For the sake of responding to God’s call, he puts himself at risk of famine, in danger from feuding kings... When in his old age his wife finally bears him a son, his faith is tested most sorely as God seems to ask him to be ready to give up that son as a sacrifice. It’s a sacrifice which is not in the end required, but throughout Abraham is a man for whom the easy road is not an option. And in all his travelling, he has no more than a promise to go on – no fulfilment for himself, only the belief that God will work through the people who follow, because of his faithfulness to God’s call.

And Peter, the disciple who has had the faith to leave his livelihood behind and to follow Jesus, the one who has recognised  Jesus as the Christ, God’s chosen one,.... like us he can’t see the whole picture. Can Peter be expected to see how Jesus’ death will play a part in fulfilling his purpose? No one can. Jesus himself says it’s beyond our understanding when he tells Peter, ‘you are setting your mind not on divine things, but on human things.’ But what else should Peter think about? The human is where we are, and what we are called to be.

Except that the way of Christ is to show us what is truly human by bringing God into our human picture – by entering even into human suffering and death. The invitation Jesus extends to his disciples is not one to be accepted lightly: ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’ We can’t think that anyone who heard Jesus say this when he said it could possibly have understood what he meant. Only after Jesus’ death and resurrection, only after they had begun to live the Christian life for themselves could it possibly make sense. Like the husband of Susan Hale who buried her body, meaning to carry on and make his fortune before returning to her grave – it was only when he’d buried her that he could understand the different road he had to take, the burden he must bear out of love.

What does it all mean for us as Christians? – to take up the cross and follow Jesus? In his great book, ‘The Cost of Discipleship’, Dietrich Bonhoeffer makes the distinction between ‘cheap grace’ and ‘costly grace.’ Grace is the gift of God, freely given for our sake, without any price. It can’t be earned – because it’s a gift! But do we give it any real value? 

‘Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church,’ writes Bonhoeffer. ‘We are fighting today for costly grace. Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjack’s wares. The sacraments, the forgiveness of sin, and the consolations of religion are thrown away at cut prices... Grace without price; grace without cost!... Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian “conception” of God.... Cheap grace... amounts to a denial of the living Word of God, ... (it is) grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

(But) costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has.... Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. 

Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ....’

These are words which Bonhoeffer wrote in the years after Hitler had come to power in Germany. They are remembered because Bonhoeffer himself was to live them out so fully. Arrested by the Nazis, he spent the last two years of his life in prison. His last words were recorded by an English officer held in the same jail who attended a service he took on April 8th 1945. Scarcely had the service ended when two men in civilian dress ordered him, ‘get ready to come with us.’ That officer, Payne Best, records: “Those words ‘come with us’ – for all prisoners had come to mean one thing only – the scaffold. We bade him goodbye – he drew me aside – ‘This is the end,’ he said. ‘For me the beginning of life.’.... Next day at Flossenburg he was hanged.”

Bonhoeffer had recognised that the way of Christ was the way of the Cross – putting faith into practice, he lived out his own conviction, ‘When Christ calls a man he bids him come and die.’ Is this the road on which we are called? Perhaps most shocking is the fact that round the world Sunday by Sunday, hundreds of millions of Christians can hear the story of Christ’s passion and death repeated – and that’s it!.... We just hear it. So much more honest is the response of Peter who tells Jesus off, who cannot grasp what Jesus is saying and tells him so.

Each Sunday in Lent the blessing at the end of the service is given: “Christ give you grace to deny yourselves, take up your cross and follow him....” But do we want that sort of grace? Are we ready to follow? Are we ready to put ourselves out just a little from our established routines? What choices do you face today?  What roads are before you in your life? Which one will you choose?  The well-travelled path?  Or the path of least resistance?  Will you choose that way which leads you in the footsteps of Christ?  We need to remember that God is with us in our choosing.  God is with us as we travel.  By the way of the Cross, God is calling us to life.