Bad News, Good News, and Life Itself

As much as Jesus is rebuking the Pharisees for teaching harmful stuff to the people, Jesus is opening up the very nature of life and death to them: That, of course: what lies ahead is awful. Of course none of us wants to do this. And yes, I have to do it. But don’t keep my certainty from living, from revealing the Kingdom, from being the children of GOD in all of its glory, in all of its hope.

 

 Lent 2B  |  Mark 8:31-38

Bad News

At some point, all of us have to deliver bad news. Some of us have to deliver it more often than others. A brilliant film from several years ago, Up In The Air, told the story of a professional hatchet-man: the guy called in by cowardly employers to determine who they are going fire, then go about firing them. These employers can defend themselves by using words like productivity, effectiveness, and corporate strategy, but what they were doing was having an unconnected outsider fire their people for them. They were outsourcing the bad news.

Most of us don’t get that opportunity. We don’t get to have someone else deliver a bad message for us. The responsibility falls squarely on us. Mom, I didn’t get my room cleaned like you asked…The trip has been cancelled…Mom has cancer…My son is moving to Japan…It’s time to look at assisted living…Honey, she’s dying…I’m the last one left.

And in the church, we struggle mightily with delivering bad news. We can’t handle speaking or hearing truth very well when it isn’t warm and fuzzy. The church is struggling across the board. Our actions over the last two generations have poorly prepared us for the current environment. The church isn’t dying, but our way of doing church is (if we don’t fix it). We did a poor job of Bible education and didn’t think we had to keep up with current scholarship, theology, or with what our friends are wrestling with. We have let down our kids and our seniors alike. We’re overworking our most committed people and they are joining the ranks of the unchurched and the Nones: the new group being called the Dones.

This is some of our bad news. And for as much as I struggled on Friday to write this and this morning to preach it, it is also hard to hear. And even harder to hear this for what it is: GOD doing good work in our world and our need to reorient ourselves to that. It is hard to hear the bad news for the good news it is. Or for the opportunity it gives us. We’re assured of GOD’s presence, GOD’s grace, and yet we’re blind to it and confused by it. Our goggles of disappointment and depression obscure the true vision; the vision Jesus lays out for his disciples; the vision that causes Peter to be a stumbling block to Jesus. A tempter; Satan.

The Human One

Jesus delivers some pretty tough news, doesn’t he? I’m going to die, he tells them. This is the grand exercise we’re on, people: a march to my death in Jerusalem.

The set up for the disciples’ confusion comes earlier in the chapter. A while back they had fed the multitudes with loaves and fish. At the beginning of chapter 8, Jesus is initiating another feeding: 7 loaves and 2 fish they happened to have feed the multitudes, providing 7 baskets of remainders. A second great feeding. But as they go on their way, Jesus can tell that the disciples aren’t making sense of what is really going on. They are confused: on the wrong track. So he warns them about the yeast of the Pharisees. They think he’s talking about bread, but he’s delivering a warning to them about something more than teaching: about the seductive nature of certainty and comfort. It grows when you just leave it out there.

Then Jesus heals this blind man, smearing spit on the man’s eyes: the man can only sort of see so Jesus has to do it again, so it’ll really stick. Do not even go into the village, he tells the man. That’s where he’s going. You shouldn’t go where I’m going. These people are preparing to go there with me. I wonder if the man understands that it isn’t yet his time to go where Jesus is going, but that if he goes through this, he will have to in his own time.

So then he asks the disciples about himself. He asks them if they get it yet. And Peter says

“You are the Messiah.”

In this gospel, Jesus doesn’t affirm it. He tells the group not to say that about him to other people. Perhaps because he isn’t the Messianic hope: the conqueror, unlike the Messiah described in the midst of the Babylonian captivity 600 years before, who would bring them out of their exile and allow them to go home. At least not in that way. Perhaps Jesus isn’t claiming to be this sort of Messiah, which simply means anointed–the holy one. What Jesus calls himself is “Son of Man,” what we might call “the Human One”. Jesus sees himself differently than Peter sees him. He delivers bad news and Peter refuses to hear it. But that isn’t going to stop Jesus. Jesus will reveal GOD’s being-there in the way GOD will be there.

Only Once

As motivational speeches go, this one certainly isn’t the top of anyone’s list. Hey People, now, I know you’re all excited to go with me to change the course of history, but it isn’t going to play out the way you think. There’s this whole part where I’m going to die. Not the stuff of legend, or cinematic history. Nobody is going to give that speech in an Oscar-hopeful.

But this isn’t the part that we need to focus on, I think. For this may be the bad news that the people are trying to avoid, but the good news comes next. It is the part we’re likely to miss with our blinders on.

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?

There’s an element of YOLO to this speech: You Only Live Once. This rallying cry to do ridiculous or obnoxious things, or at least to talk about how you need to. Like I need to go skydiving. #YOLO But instead of getting all negative and judgy and let the yeast of the Pharisees rise on the counter around us, Jesus is actually talking about living and making this life matter.

What good is getting stuff and yet not really living? he asks. What’s your life worth to you? What’s its trade-in value? Do you really think you can get an upgrade?

As much as Jesus is rebuking the Pharisees for teaching harmful stuff to the people, Jesus is opening up the very nature of life and death to them: That, of course: what lies ahead is awful. Of course none of us wants to do this. And yes, I have to do it. But don’t keep my certainty from living, from revealing the Kingdom, from being the children of GOD in all of its glory, in all of its hope.

Worth

Jesus tells his disciples about his death and then proceeds to talk about how we’re already choosing death over life: that we may misunderstand living. How often do we only talk about the death part or the living part? How often are our minds trained on the not dying or on the working our butts off or on the doing of our great duty and in the end come to our great reward? How often do we focus on all of the stuff the people around us have or don’t have? How often do we focus on what it will take to make it in this world, in this place and put a financial value on it: will it take an iPad, some tickets to a ski resort, and success on the soccer team? Will it take getting a better job or living in the right house, or still living in your own house: never setting foot in one of those homes where they help take care of you? Is that what it takes to feel like you’re really alive?

How can any of that actually make you feel alive? Not when you have family that loves you and a church that cares about you and people supporting you, lifting you up when you fall.

No matter what you try to do to earn your life, it isn’t out there to be won or bought. Your life is already yours, and for far too many of us, we trade it away to feel good or to feel successful or to survive the challenge of high school. We become who we are not to fit in or we study what we’re not good at because our parents tell us to become engineers or we break relationships with people we love because they don’t fit into our lives now.

This struggle and discomfort and discouraging life that many of us find ourselves living into is a life we’ve sold away for a song and we’re desperate later to get it back. Saying “What happened to me? Who is this person in the mirror?” Or we’re selling it to fit in now, trying to make our parents happy or trying to do better at something than our older siblings.

What if all of that is a life given away, a life of death already? What if every act of not being ourselves and not putting this walk of faith first is a forfeiting of our life? What if we decide today to stop seeing those symbols we take as status and instead see them as a giving up too much? What if some of us are staring at that blue/black dress at night and the next day its white and gold and we’re fighting with our friends about what color the dress was as we saw it, and then obsess about what color it is supposed to be and we totally forget it’s just a picture of some dress? It is just some Facebook thing–some kind of cool, kind of weird Facebook thing. But it isn’t really real. It isn’t about the dress or about the picture of the dress or about the lighting or your computer screen or your eyes and what you can perceive, but it is about life and about living your life and it is about living a life you can feel proud of, and living a life that doesn’t end. It doesn’t end the way we think it does. Of course we’ll die. Of course that’s coming for all of us. Of course we’ll get old and of course we’ll need someone else to take care of us. Of course we’ll race and strive and try to make this place better. And of course we’re going to focus on what we can do, what our families can do, and we can make our families better. And of course, in the end, we’ll make this whole world better.

What’s your life worth? Is it worth its living? I think it only has value lived. You can’t sell it for anything of real value. Nothing that endures. Nothing that we’ll be glad to have in the end. But as a life to live, it is priceless.

Our good news often comes with bad news. We can’t be blinded by the bad stuff. The good stuff of life is totally worth it.