Last
week my husband, Philip, was taking part in an orchestral rehearsal, as he does.
The rehearsal was taking place in a school in London. It was a splendid building, and clearly the
school was trying its hardest to inculcate in its students an ethos of hard
work. To this end, they had decorated the school with inspirational slogans,
painted on the walls. The one which confronted Philip as he rehearsed said, in
large letters. “Whatever it takes…” That was all, “Whatever it
takes…”
Now,
I get what this was trying to say. It was meant – I am sure – to be an
encouragement to its pupils to put all their effort into their school work, but
Philip wondered, and so do I, whether the school had really thought this
through.
There
were two problems with this slogan. First, you have to ask, “Whatever it
takes to do what?” It is only a good idea to put your whole self into doing
something if the thing you are doing is worthwhile. Jihadi John has put his
whole self into something he believes in. He’s done “whatever it takes” to
achieve his goal. Unfortunately it is ISIS and its campaign of terror. We might
want people to be aspirational, but what do we want them to aspire to?
The
second problem with the slogan was what it by “Whatever” in “Whatever it takes…” Did it mean
that students should push aside others in their rush to achieve their goal? Did
it mean that if a student could get where they wanted by low cunning and
cheating, they should do so? I can well imagine some enterprising youngster
presenting homework they’d copied from someone else with the cheeky observation,
“well, sir, you did say ‘whatever it takes’, and that was what it took!”
That
may all sound rather fanciful and far-fetched, and perhaps it is, but it
highlighted for me the danger of slogans and inspirational quotes if we use
them unthinkingly. That caution should extend to Bible verses too. Take the one
we find in our Gospel reading today. “If any want to become my followers”
says Jesus, “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?” It is a
powerful, stirring call to discipleship – there are no half-measures here - but
if we don’t think about it carefully it can lead us up some very dark alleys
indeed. These are the kind of words which fuelled the Crusades, holy wars –
Christian jihads – which caused slaughter and misery. They are the kind of
words which have encouraged people into joyless repression, giving them the
idea that what God wants, more than anything, is for us to be having a hard
time, carrying crosses for the sake of it, depriving ourselves of comfort and
pleasure. “Whatever it takes…” people have muttered to themselves grimly
as they have hurt and damaged themselves and others in the pursuit of a
completely false idea of holiness. It is the delusional, confused thinking of
the ISIS fighter and the suicide bomber, who imagines they are dying in a noble
cause, so it doesn’t matter what collateral damage there is.
I
don’t believe Jesus meant us to take his words that way, but if that’s the
case, then what did he mean? Perhaps it would help us to ask the same two
questions of these words as I did for that slogan on the school wall. What end are
we supposed to be aiming for, and what means should we use to get there?
Undoubtedly
Jesus wanted people to be wholehearted
in their faith, wholehearted in their commitment, but what was that a
commitment to? Peter thinks he knows. His vision of the future is of a time
when Jesus will sit on the throne of Israel, a victorious king who has swept
the Romans out of his nation. When Jesus starts talking about suffering and
dying, he is aghast. Surely that can’t be right, and it will put the crowds off
completely! He takes Jesus aside to try to persuade him to come up with a more
upbeat message. But Peter just hasn’t understood what Jesus is about, and he
wouldn’t be the only one. He is measuring the success of Jesus’ mission the
same way he would measure a night’s catch as a fisherman, by how many fish
there are in the net. If people are following Jesus, listening to him,
supporting him, then that’s all that counts, never mind why they are doing so.
It’s a temptation we all fall into, to gauge how we are doing by how many
friends we have, how many “likes” on our Facebook page. I might try to assess
the health of the church by looking at how many people come to worship. But all
that really tells us is whether people agree with us, not whether we are right.
The record of history shows countless examples of despots and dictators who had
a huge following – Hitler was elected to his position as Chancellor of Germany,
after all. “You are setting your mind not on divine things but on earthly
things” says Jesus to Peter. The kingdom of God just doesn’t look like the
kingdoms of the world. God’s success criteria aren’t the same of those of a
business or a club.
When
Jesus dies on the cross the crowds that followed him so enthusiastically
earlier are nowhere to be seen. As Jesus hangs on the cross you wouldn’t know
he had ever been popular at all. We know that Resurrection is just a few days
away, but even then Jesus appears just to small numbers of people. It’s not the
triumphal takeover that Peter, and many others would have been expecting from
God’s Messiah, and yet his death and resurrection have had more impact on the
world than almost anything else in human history.
That’s
why Jesus warns his followers that if they really want to come after him, to
walk in his way, they need to be reconciled to the fact that it may involve
crosses for them too, things that look like failure. We need to be careful how
we measure success, this passage warns. Jesus talks about the risks of gaining
the whole world but losing our lives. The Greek words he uses are revealing.
The word for world is “cosmos” and it really meant the created order, what you
see in front of you , the material stuff of life. There was nothing wrong with
it – it was made by God – but it was just stuff. We get our word “cosmetic”
from the same root, something that looks good, but may only be skin deep, and
is transient and temporary.
The
word translated as “life” is “psyche” – it’s probably better
translated as “soul”. It is the essence of ourselves, but specifically
in Jewish thought it is the essence that was breathed into us by God.
In
the story of the creation of Adam from Genesis 2, God first makes a man out of
the dust of the earth, a mud-pie creature, essentially. It is fine, but it’s
not alive. So God breathes his own breath into him and Adam becomes, according
to the Hebrew a “nephesh” a living man. His soul isn’t just a spiritual
part of him, it is a divine part of him, the part of him that comes from God
and is of God and belongs to God. It might seem paradoxical but to be really
human you have to have this divinely gifted soul within you.
So
Jesus is saying that it’s no use if you have all the riches the material world
can offer, if you haven’t got, in here, the presence of God which brings you
his life. And if you have that life of God within you, you will find that the
prizes of power and wealth and popularity don’t really matter that much anyway.
Jesus
said that he came to bring “life in all its fullness” . That’s the only aim
worth pursuing, for ourselves, for the church, for the world. Not numbers, not wealth, not prestige, but
life. That is what the Kingdom of God is all about .
So
if that is our aim, what are the means by which we achieve it? There again,
Peter has missed the point. Later on he will be the one who reaches for a sword
to fight off the guards who come to arrest Jesus. He thinks the kingdom will be
won with the tools and in the ways earthly kingdoms come into being, by force,
by political strategy, by manipulation. He hasn’t understood what Jesus has
been saying about it starting in small and gentle ways, with things the size of
a mustard seed or a grain of wheat or a tiny piece of yeast. He hasn’t understood that it isn’t won
by overthrowing the might of Rome, but by overthrowing the selfish and
judgemental impulses in our own hearts. He‘s missed the bit where Jesus talked
about removing the beam in your own eye before complaining about the speck of
dust in someone else’s, as we all so often do. “Consider the lilies”
Jesus has said, “who neither labour nor spin, and yet God clothes them more
beautifully than King Solomon” You don’t need anxiously to protect your own position in the world,
says Jesus to him, and to us, because you have the only position you really need,
held securely in the hands of God. You don’t need to be top of the human heap,
because you are the apple of God’s eye already.
The
route to that aim of “life in all its fullness” starts within us, as we learn
to pay attention to what needs to change in us, so that we can learn to love because
we know that we are loved. In the end, this passage isn’t so much about our
commitment to God, but God’s commitment to us, which is total and faithful,
just like the covenant he made with Abraham in our Old Testament reading. He
gives “whatever it takes”, in the person of Jesus who gave his life out
of love for us, and only when we know that can we healthily give “whatever
it takes” to him. In doing so we can afford to lose everything the world
might offer us, if that is what it costs to live with integrity, because we are
rich beyond our wildest dreams anyway, rich in the love of God who will never
let us down.
Amen
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