13 September 2009 - "A Long and Lonely Road"

Usha Hull - St Mary's
Mark 8 27-end

It was a sunny day, many years ago when I first met Mother Teresa. As many of you know, Mother Teresa used to be a Loreto nun before she founded the religious order the Missionaries of Charity. Even after she left the Loreto order of nuns she retained a fondness for Loreto Darjeeling, the convent where I was educated. So one day, she took time off from her work in Calcutta to visit those pupils who were in their final year at Loreto Darjeeling, myself among them, to encourage us to visit Shishu Bhavan, her home for children, when we were in Calcutta.

It was an invitation I was to take her up on, and in the process I was privileged to learn much about her and much about human suffering, coming into contact as I did with people who had nothing and no one. In those days there was a great deal of suffering on the streets of the city. I came to know what it was like to hold in my arms a baby found in a dustbin. I saw elderly people cast out on the streets to die, lepers begging for a living.

To countless people like these, Mother Teresa brought hope, dignity and the love of God. In her own life she embodied what happens when a person gives up a relatively comfortable existence, armed with nothing but a few meagre possessions.

Mother Teresa was not the only one working in the darkness of that suffering, for there were other, less well known people, people who lived lives of quiet heroism through the sacrifice, hard work and loving giving of their lives. Throughout Christian history, it is these unsung heroes, along with other well known great Christian souls, who embody what it is like to give up one’s life in order to gain it.

The call of Jesus to die to oneself in order to truly live is a call to every Christian in every age, to each and every one of us here, and to realise how this applies to you and me, we have to look closer at today’s Gospel reading.

In today’s reading from Mark, Jesus says that if anyone would be his follower they must put aside their own pleasures, and shoulder their Cross. Peter, however, isn’t having any of this kind of talk. He’s riding high on a wave of euphoria. After all, the Lord to him is a sound investment. Peter has given up a safe and steady living being a fisherman. He’s left his home and his family. And up to now, it’s all paid off as he’s seen Jesus make the lame walk, the blind see, the deaf hear, even the dead brought back to life. He’s seen Jesus change water into wine, walk on water, calm the storm, feed the thousands.

All these things fit Peter’s idea of how the Messiah will bring about the salvation of God’s people, and the state of Israel. Peter wants to go from glory into glory. And the last thing he wants to hear are the words his Lord has just spoken, words like ‘rejection’, ‘death’, ‘suffering’.

To Peter a suffering Messiah is unthinkable. And to him, the Cross and all it stands for under Roman oppression is a symbol of pain and failure, of degradation and torture. For him, the Cross is reserved for criminals and no-gooders, the dregs of society. So he doesn’t understand what Jesus is talking about when he talks of the Cross, of suffering.

When Jesus had first asked Peter, ‘Who do you say I am?’ Peter had replied, ‘You are the Messiah.’ Yet now, here is Peter telling Jesus the sort of Messiah Peter would like Jesus to be, a Messiah who follows a safe and sure path, a Messiah whose ultimate goal is glory and the glory of Israel.

Having created in his mind the image of what God must be like, Peter now wants to build on that image. So he takes his Lord aside and rebukes him. ‘You mustn’t say things like that,’ he says to Jesus. For Peter, the path Jesus must follow is the path of earthly glory, a path that has already begun to wind its way through the throngs of adoring devoted masses who follow Jesus.

And is it any wonder then, that Jesus, who knows who he is and the path he must follow, who has his face set like flint towards Jerusalem, is scathing in his reply. ‘Get behind me Satan,’ says Jesus. Our Lord knew that the path he must follow was going to be lonely, frightening, hard, yet because of his integrity, because of his obedience to his Father and his love for us it was a path he chose to take.

The world we live in takes its shape from the image we have of God and the impact has sometimes been terrible, causing much suffering. If, for instance, you believe that God is a God of vengeance, and that your time has come, you will hijack a plane, fly it into a building and kill thousands. If, on the other hand, you believe that God is telling you to wage war on the perpetuators of such crimes in far-off lands, then you will send out more planes, that will eventually also kill thousands of innocent people.

Let’s remember that the people responsible for such acts are not people who deny the existence of God. Rather, they are people of passionate faith who have created a false image of God that is in line with their own feelings and hopes, very much as Peter did when he walked with Jesus at Caesarea Phillippi.

Perhaps you and I are more like Peter than we care to admit. Do any of us like to hear words like suffering, denial, rejection? I think not. We live in a world where power is everything. Our culture teaches us to admire strength, wealth, success, the feel-good things of life. We are taught from an early age to strive for status in life, to compete with one another, to be upwardly mobile, as it were.

And we are taught that our God is a God of power, of might, of victory, and rightly so, for God is all these things. And yet, if we were solely to focus on the fact that God is all powerful then we would miss completely the fact that with the incarnation God is also found in the vulnerable, the weak, the outcasts, those we would avert our eyes from because they have no beauty, no redeeming features, nothing that appeals to us. So Isaiah was to say of the Messiah, he was ‘a man of sorrows, aquainted with grief’, despised and rejected.

In the world we live in it’s considered very unfashionable to talk about carrying our Cross. So I’ll be unfashionable, then. Jesus never said that to carry our Cross would be easy. He promised comfort, but he never said that what he offered would be always comfortable. He said, ‘Come to me all who are heavy laden’, but he never said that life as a Christian would be without strife or that life wouldn’t come down on us sometimes with crushing pain and sorrow and often ugliness.

As human beings, we strive all the time to make sense of all the things that life throws at us. And sometimes we can’t make sense of it at all. But what if God became human in order to identify with us and meet us at the place of our deepest need? What if he knows what it is like to suffer and so can support us in our own suffering? What if, through the suffering that we meet in the course of our lives, God would like us to grow closer to him, to know our need of him, to become more fully the people he would like us to be? What if, through the example he himself set, our Lord would like us to become people who can bear suffering without bitterness or self pity or despair, who can take hurt without passing it on to others, who can continue to believe in the essential goodness of others and the love of God through all that life throws at us?

It’s not just about suffering either but about facing in a Christian way the challenges we are sent every day of our lives. In her book The Watchful Heart, Ruth Burrows, a Carmelite nun, says this, ‘The friends of God evade nothing, be it trying situations, uncongenial people, difficult duties. They take each day as it comes, with its pleasures and its joys, its disagreeable things and its pains. They shoulder their Cross. The significance of the Cross is not suffering but obedience, of doing the Father’s will, regardless of whether it is easy or hard.’

Uncongenial people, trying situations, difficult tasks, well we all know about those things. We all know what it’s like to have to do things we would rather not do but which we know to be right; to have to deal kindly with people who are unpleasant or unkind; to be in situations we dread, but which must be seen through. And like our Lord, we too are aquainted with grief, as Isaiah puts it.

I spoke in the beginning of great Christian souls who have brought the love and light of God into the suffering of this world. They always had a choice in how they faced the brokenness of this world. The decisions they took, made all the difference. Like them, we too have a choice, every day, in how we deal with all that life throws at us. Does how we face life, with all its sorrow, show to the world the love of God that is in our hearts? Our Lord, who knew all about suffering, would have it so, and let us take comfort in knowing he walks with us.

I end with a brief quote from that lovely hymn by Joseph Scriven, What a friend we have in Jesus, written in 1855:

Have we trials and temptations? Is there trouble anywhere?

We should never be discouraged; take it to the Lord in prayer.

Can we find a friend so faithful who will all our sorrows share?

Jesus knows our every weakness; take it to the Lord in prayer.

In joy and in sorrow, all situations of life, let us ever love the Lord.

Amen.