It’s no secret that organized religion has taken a popularity hit in recent years, Christianity included. Studies have shown that more and more Americans, especially among the younger millennial generation, identity when asked as “Nones” – they do not ascribe to any particular church or affiliation. The reasons for this are numerous, but certainly some acknowledgment must be made of the sentiment expressed by Karl Marx. Many look at what religion offers – including, traditional forms of Christianity – and it feels a little too convenient, too domestic. With so many causes of injustice and so many examples of suffering, religion for some can become a way of staying up in the clouds and not engaging with the realities of the world as it is.
As you might guess, I don’t agree with Karl Marx, but I do think some people do approach religion that way, even some of us Christians. We can tend to say things like “God’s in charge,” and “Everything happens for a reason,” and “Let go and let God.” These things are not necessarily untrue – but we can use them as a false panacea, a kind of therapeutic cheeriness that glosses over the real pain and suffering that does exist in the world. Whether it’s some private tragedy that we suffer at a personal or family level, or whether it’s the inexplicable devastation of something like the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, religion doesn’t explain all of our problems or make them go away.
Horace Vernet, Jeremiah on the Ruins of Jerusalem (1844)
There’s a time in every Christian's life when we feel a bit like Jeremiah in the first reading (Jer 20:7-9) today: “You have duped me, O Lord, and I have let myself be duped.” Jeremiah was called by God to preach his Word, proclaiming the sins of the Israelite people and the coming judgment for their sins. But his message, as one might expect, was not well received and he suffered great persecution because of it. Jeremiah perhaps had been under the impression that if he was faithful, if he did what God had asked of him, everything would work out fine. Instead, he finds himself abandoned by friends and neighbors, beaten and nearly murdered, and eventually arrested and put into stocks for all of Jerusalem to ridicule. In this context, he cries out to God in the words of our reading, lamenting in desperation all that he has had to sacrifice. We can relate – our faith hasn't saved us from suffering; if anything, we've suffered more because of it.
In the Gospel today (Mt 16:21-27), Jesus is very clear with his disciples what the cost of following him is. Peter, having confessed his faith in Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of the Living God, as we heard in last Sunday’s reading, today takes him and aside him and rebukes him. Imagine the audacity! And yet, the reason for this rebuke is something altogether shocking to Peter, something scandalous even – that the Messiah, the Son of God, would have to suffer and die. Peter’s religious framework did not allow for that – “God forbid” it, as he says. But Jesus is not interested in religion as the way we would have it, in faith as a panacea for our problems. Instead, he says that the Christian life is one of paradox – to seek to save one’s life is to lose it, and to lose one’s life for his sake is to find it.
The mystery of the Cross – that is, the mystery of salvation that comes through Jesus’s sacrifice and death and our participation in that mystery by our own suffering – is not something that makes sense according to the way the world thinks. It does not fit the mindset of the present age, as St. Paul says; as we hear elsewhere in Scripture to many it is foolishness, a stumbling block. Even we who are Christians, who use the symbols of the cross and the crucifix as symbols, too often struggle to understand how our faith is defined by the mystery of the Cross. We end up with a watered-down Christianity, one full of platitudes and nice moral sentiments.
And yet, for 2000 years, people have heard the invitation, “Take up your Cross and follow me,” and they have responded. In every age, in every land, men and women have found in the paradox of Christianity a truth not found elsewhere – that radical love, self-sacrificial love, love in the shape of Christ’s Cross is redeeming and life-giving and world-changing. For Christians, encountering the Cross doesn’t mean finding a set of pat replies to any question we may ask; it doesn’t give us a reason to avoid realities of life and keep our head in the clouds. But what it does give, and what the world cannot give, is the grace of salvation, of true transformation which the world does not know.
A religion that gives easy answers is rightly one we should be skeptical of, as the “Nones” well know. But what Karl Marx and others who think like him did not see, at least about Christianity, was understood well by another German thinker. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a pastor and theologian in the era of Nazi Germany, who as his country was descending into madness, was working with a group of Christians intent upon taking the Gospel seriously. He saw that it was only in Christian faith that the evils of Nazism could be combatted, and so he resisted and encouraged others to do so, a decision that eventually cost him his life.
In one of his famous works, Bonhoeffer writes that discipleship is not an offer that we make to Jesus – as if we will follow him on our terms, if our conditions are met, if it suits us. Rather, it is an offer Christ makes to us – we can take it or leave it, but the terms are clear: we must take up the Cross. As he writes, “when Christ calls a man, he bids him to come and die” – that is, to die to self, to kill all the parts of oneself that do not conform to the radical love of the Cross, perhaps even that it may “cost a man his life,” as it did Bonhoeffer himself, all because from it “it gives a man the only true life.”
Friends, in the Gospel today, Jesus assures us that we will suffer if we follow him, and this at times is truly a hard thing to understand and accept. But at the end, the Cross can help us face down any evil because after it comes the Resurrection. A Christian faith that has not wrestled with suffering, and found in the Cross the possibility of redemption, has not fully matured. Jesus asks us, like Peter, not to be “Satan” – the word means “adversary” – not to be opposed to the way of grace he has given us. When we resist the message of the Cross – as too antiquated, as too difficult – then our religion might as well be the tame sentimentalism that Karl Marx decried. However, if we embrace the mystery of the Cross as the mystery of our sanctification, the way in which we work out our salvation, in the words of St. Paul, then our discipleship will lead us through the Cross to the Resurrection.
May this Eucharist which we will share in a few moments, in which we unite ourselves to the mystery of Jesus’s Death and Resurrection, be for us renewed strength – not to find easy answers in our faith – but to take up our daily Cross, mysterious as it can be, and follow our Lord.
In the Gospel today (Mt 16:21-27), Jesus is very clear with his disciples what the cost of following him is. Peter, having confessed his faith in Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of the Living God, as we heard in last Sunday’s reading, today takes him and aside him and rebukes him. Imagine the audacity! And yet, the reason for this rebuke is something altogether shocking to Peter, something scandalous even – that the Messiah, the Son of God, would have to suffer and die. Peter’s religious framework did not allow for that – “God forbid” it, as he says. But Jesus is not interested in religion as the way we would have it, in faith as a panacea for our problems. Instead, he says that the Christian life is one of paradox – to seek to save one’s life is to lose it, and to lose one’s life for his sake is to find it.
The mystery of the Cross – that is, the mystery of salvation that comes through Jesus’s sacrifice and death and our participation in that mystery by our own suffering – is not something that makes sense according to the way the world thinks. It does not fit the mindset of the present age, as St. Paul says; as we hear elsewhere in Scripture to many it is foolishness, a stumbling block. Even we who are Christians, who use the symbols of the cross and the crucifix as symbols, too often struggle to understand how our faith is defined by the mystery of the Cross. We end up with a watered-down Christianity, one full of platitudes and nice moral sentiments.
And yet, for 2000 years, people have heard the invitation, “Take up your Cross and follow me,” and they have responded. In every age, in every land, men and women have found in the paradox of Christianity a truth not found elsewhere – that radical love, self-sacrificial love, love in the shape of Christ’s Cross is redeeming and life-giving and world-changing. For Christians, encountering the Cross doesn’t mean finding a set of pat replies to any question we may ask; it doesn’t give us a reason to avoid realities of life and keep our head in the clouds. But what it does give, and what the world cannot give, is the grace of salvation, of true transformation which the world does not know.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945)
A religion that gives easy answers is rightly one we should be skeptical of, as the “Nones” well know. But what Karl Marx and others who think like him did not see, at least about Christianity, was understood well by another German thinker. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a pastor and theologian in the era of Nazi Germany, who as his country was descending into madness, was working with a group of Christians intent upon taking the Gospel seriously. He saw that it was only in Christian faith that the evils of Nazism could be combatted, and so he resisted and encouraged others to do so, a decision that eventually cost him his life.
In one of his famous works, Bonhoeffer writes that discipleship is not an offer that we make to Jesus – as if we will follow him on our terms, if our conditions are met, if it suits us. Rather, it is an offer Christ makes to us – we can take it or leave it, but the terms are clear: we must take up the Cross. As he writes, “when Christ calls a man, he bids him to come and die” – that is, to die to self, to kill all the parts of oneself that do not conform to the radical love of the Cross, perhaps even that it may “cost a man his life,” as it did Bonhoeffer himself, all because from it “it gives a man the only true life.”
Friends, in the Gospel today, Jesus assures us that we will suffer if we follow him, and this at times is truly a hard thing to understand and accept. But at the end, the Cross can help us face down any evil because after it comes the Resurrection. A Christian faith that has not wrestled with suffering, and found in the Cross the possibility of redemption, has not fully matured. Jesus asks us, like Peter, not to be “Satan” – the word means “adversary” – not to be opposed to the way of grace he has given us. When we resist the message of the Cross – as too antiquated, as too difficult – then our religion might as well be the tame sentimentalism that Karl Marx decried. However, if we embrace the mystery of the Cross as the mystery of our sanctification, the way in which we work out our salvation, in the words of St. Paul, then our discipleship will lead us through the Cross to the Resurrection.
May this Eucharist which we will share in a few moments, in which we unite ourselves to the mystery of Jesus’s Death and Resurrection, be for us renewed strength – not to find easy answers in our faith – but to take up our daily Cross, mysterious as it can be, and follow our Lord.
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