Audio version here (N.B. I managed to leave out a vital "not" as I preached this, at about 3mins. 15 seconds . The quote should be "You are setting your mind not on divine things, but on human things."Fairly crucial to the meaning! It is correct in the text below!
There’s an item that I put on
every agenda of every Parochial Church Council meeting we have at Seal. I call
it the Vision Question; it’s designed to help us think about the broader issues
of our church life. Otherwise finance and building work discussions swallow us
up. One Vision Question I asked a while
back was this, “What are our success
criteria as a church? How do we know whether we are doing what we should be
doing? “
Success criteria can be
fairly easy to come up with in many organisations and businesses. If you own a
factory that makes rivets, your success criteria are presumably that you sell
lots of them, and that people come back for more. That’s what tells you you’re
getting it right. But what does a successful church look like?
The PCC answered the decided
that we would know we were succeeding if
those who came here felt loved and welcome, if they were are growing in faith,
if we could see that we were making a difference to our community. Much though
we like to see the church full, numbers weren’t the key, we felt – these other
things mattered far more. It was an important conversation to have because our
success criteria set our direction of travel, the paths we walk on as a church.
Consciously or unconsciously, they shape our church’s life.
Being clear about what we
think success looks like isn’t just important for churches and businesses,
though. It’s important for us as individuals too. How do I know whether I’m doing what I’m
meant to be doing with my life, whether it’s going in a good direction, whether
I am treading the right path or being led astray? If we want to know the answer
to that, we have to begin by asking where it is we want to get to, and what our
lives would look like if we arrived there.
In today’s Gospel reading,
Jesus talks about success and failure and what they look like, and what he says
comes as a surprise to those who hear him. “Jesus
began to teach his disciples” says our Gospel reading today, “that the Son of Man must undergo great
suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes,
and be killed, and after three days rise again.”
“Whoa, Jesus!”
says Peter. “What are you going on about?
It sounds like you’ve really lost the plot! What has all this suffering and
rejection and death got to do with being God’s Messiah?” Surely God’s
chosen one should have an easy ride, straight to glory!
Jesus doesn’t mince his words
when he answers. “Get behind me, Satan!” You
are setting your mind not on divine things, but on human things.” He obviously
wants to hammer the point home. But what’s the problem? What’s wrong with human
things? After all, God, in Jesus, became
human, and he enjoyed the humanness of life – eating, drinking, relaxing with
his friends, so he isn’t telling Peter that he should reject the material
world, or despise bodily existence. What Jesus is challenging is Peter’s
success criteria, his judgement of what success and failure look like. To
Peter, at this point in his story, success is all about health, wealth,
popularity, the respect of others. But if he truly wants to follow Jesus, if he
wants to see God’s kingdom come, “on
earth as it is in heaven”, he’s going to have to learn to look at things
differently, otherwise he’s going to come badly unstuck and very soon.
Not long after this exchange,
Jesus will be arrested and nailed to a cross. At that point, everything about
him will scream “failure”. He’ll be mocked. He’ll be suffering. He’ll be alone.
The crowds that have followed him, and even his closest friends, people like
Peter, will desert him. It’s true that after three days he will rise again, but
only after he has gone through this painful and humiliating death –
there’s no way around it. Why should this be so? Peter has always assumed, as most people did,
that God wouldn’t let anything bad happen to his Messiah. Why would he, when he
could surely prevent it? “If you are
God’s Messiah, come down from the cross” the bystanders shout at Jesus as he dies. But
they are just saying what most other people – including Peter – are thinking.
By anyone’s success criteria, the crucifixion doesn’t look like success.
Sometime around the beginning
of the third century, a bored Roman scratched some graffiti into a wall of a
building on the Palatine hill in Rome. It’s a picture of a man with a donkey’s head, nailed to a cross, with the words beneath it “Alexamenos worships his God”. I’ve put a sketch of it on the pew
leaflet. It’s now in a museum in Rome. It’s widely regarded as the first
representation of the crucifixion we have. We don’t know anything about
Alexamenos, but it seems he was Christian, and he was being ridiculed for it.
We’re used to seeing glorious
and moving representations of the crucifixion in art and architecture. We decorate our churches with crucifixes and
wear them round our necks, but that can make us blind us to its horror. To
those who saw crucifixions happening all the time around them, they were a sign
of failure, a deliberately shameful form of execution, handed out especially to
traitors and rebels. And that’s how most people at the time saw Jesus - as a
traitor, a rebel, and most of all, as a failure. Why would anyone want to worship,
let alone follow and emulate, someone like that? The person who scratched that
graffito didn’t get it. And yet people like Alexamenos did. Evidently, somehow
he’d come to understand that in dying on
the cross, in deliberately embracing it, Jesus had transformed its shame. Through it, he’d identified
with those the world had cast out, the marginalised people he’d befriended in
life, those who were crucified daily by prejudice, poverty, hatred, the mess of
their society, and their own sense of guilt. Through his innocent death on it,
the cross had become a reminder that whoever and wherever you were, whatever
you had done and whatever had happened to you had a friend in him.
Peter eventually got his head
around this too, but he had to learn the hard way. When Jesus was arrested, Peter was challenged
by some bystanders as he lurked in the shadows near the place of his trial. “Aren’t you one of his followers?” they
asked him. But Peter denied it. He knew that he risked losing everything he
valued – his status, his self-respect - even his life - if he admitted to being
Jesus’ disciple. He was desperate to cling to what he had. But as soon as he denied Jesus, he realised
he’d sacrificed not only his integrity, but also his friendship with the only man
who’d ever unswervingly accepted and loved him. Nothing he had was worth the
price he’d just paid. He wept bitterly,
thinking there was no way back and it wasn’t until after the resurrection that
he found the healing and forgiveness he needed.
Jesus had warned him, as he
warns us, about putting too much trust in “human things” – about judging
ourselves and others by the success criteria of the world around us – honour, status,
wealth and strength. They aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. They often don’t
make us as happy as we thought they would, they bring their own worries and pressures
with them and, getting to those goals often means treading pathways that,
looking back, we bitterly regret. To paraphrase Jesus’ words here, “What will it profit someone if they have
become the CEO, but have abused their power in order to do so? What will it
profit someone to win an Olympic Gold medal, but only through doping? ”
What value do these prizes have if getting them has corroded our souls by
killing our capacity to love and care?
And to cap it all, those
things won’t last. If we put our trust in our jobs, our families, our earning
potential, what will happen to us when retirement, illness, or simple bad luck take
away those markers of achievement? How
will we measure the “success” of our lives then?
It seems to me that Jesus is
telling us that, in the end, the only goal that’s really worth giving ourselves
to is the goal of knowing that wherever we are, whatever is happening to us,
we’re held in the hands of God, who will never leave us. Living or dying,
healthy or sick, famous or obscure, rolling in money or without tuppence to rub
together, we are his, loved, known, never forsaken. That’s the prize worth giving
everything for, the prize that is still there when everything else is lost.
One of the privileges of my
work is to take communion to people who can’t get to church easily themselves
anymore. Some of those I visit have dementia. They may have achieved all sorts
of things in their lives, brought up families, held positions of authority, but
gradually even those memories slip away, or survive to taunt them with what
they used to do. I wish I had a magic wand to make life easier for them, and
those who care for them, but I don’t. I
wonder, what does “success” mean for them? What does it mean for me as I visit
them, when they may have forgotten my visit five minutes after I’ve gone? Is it
worth going at all?
I’ve never doubted that the
answer is yes. Just last week, I visited one man who, at the end of our little
home communion, with its familiar words and symbols said, as he always does “Anne, that was wonderful!” And I
absolutely believe it was.
In that twenty minutes or so,
as we prayed together, we both knew that we were in the presence of God, right
there, right then. It didn’t matter what we remembered or didn’t remember, what
we understood or didn’t understand, what we’d achieved or failed at in life.
None of that could make God love either of us any more or any less, none of
that could change God’s mind about us. A great deal had been lost – memories,
skills, purpose – but for that brief time we had the only thing that really
mattered, an awareness of the love of God, which nothing could destroy. Whatever
we think a successful life might look like, in the end, to loved and to know we
are loved, is the only success criterion that really matters.
Amen
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