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Second Sunday in Lent

Mark 8
31 Then he began to teach them 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. 32He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 33But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’
34 He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35For 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. 36For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? 37Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? 38Those who are ashamed of me and of my words* in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.’


The season of Lent doesn’t pull any punches.

Here we are, in week two, and already things are falling apart. Jesus is speaking frankly, Peter is upset, and the crowd is simply trying to keep up. “Pick up your cross and follow me,” Jesus said, and “What would it profit someone to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” People have barely finished their pancakes and those delightful little sausages and already Lent is a matter of life and death.

“What would it profit someone to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” The church has always had issue with the rich. In the beginning, according to the Acts of the Apostles, believers held everything in common, selling worldly things for the sake of the greater good. It didn’t last. Becoming tolerated, then a state religion, Christianity entered a period of sustained compromise with the world. By the time Martin Luther added his ideas to the medieval version of Facebook, the church had become little more than a spiritual RRSP, adding funds for a secure a future.

The reformers tried various ways to purify the church. Wealth was tolerated, because everyone needs wealthy friends, but no one was made to feel good about their wealth. Giving it away was the best option, according to the church, a concept we have found quite durable.

No where was this tension felt more than in the Methodist church. Methodists in Upper Canada were simple folk, farmers and labourers, who were purposely excluded from power and considered generally suspect. And leading the way were the Primitive Methodists, a kind of protest within a protest, a church that began in Yorkshire convinced that even the Methodists were too worldly. From their base in the village of Brampton, lay preachers fanned our across the colony preaching a return to the first principles of the Methodist movement. It didn’t last.

Eventually everyone got a little wealthier, build bigger and bigger churches, and when mainstream. By the turn of the last century the riches families in Toronto were Methodist, the Masseys and and the Eatons, and there were so many newly build Methodist churches that Toronto was nicknamed “the Methodist Rome.”

We have been considerably humbled since then. Drive by a big church these days, and there’s a good chance you’re looking at a condo. People seem to like the look of big churches, enough to some want to live in them, but that’s about all. Just this past week the good folks of Wesley-Mimico United Church floated the idea of redeveloping their church for greater mission and the neighbours turned out to protest. They are worried about the streetscape, and want to preserve the church just as it is, but obviously not worried enough to go to church.

So the church has been humbled, but the wealthy have not. A condo in Yorkville was listed this week for a cool $30 million, setting a new record. It’s a bit of a jump from Rochdale College and all those rooming houses, and the same gentrification is spreading. I wouldn’t look for a $30 million condo in Weston quite yet, but we are joining the ranks of neighbourhoods that average people can’t really afford.

In 1992, a social scientist named Francis Fukuyama wrote a book entitled, “The End of History and the Last Man.” In it, he argued that the end of the cold war marked triumph of Western-style liberal democracy, and it would become the final form of human government. Now it’s easy to dismiss the book based on all that has happened since then, particularly the so-called “War on Terror,” but his thesis seems to stand. A free market, the conjoined twin of liberal democracy, is certainly looking ascendant. Even with half of Europe on the edge, no one is questioning the overall structure of the world economy. In fact, the other shocking story this week was the meeting of the National People’s Congress, where China’s leaders will gather in the Great Hall of the People, with the top 60 leaders controlling an average wealth of $1.5 billion each. Somewhere Chairman Mao is weeping.

“What would it profit someone to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?”

One of the most curious things about the Gospels is the omission of Sepporis. Sepporis was a Roman city, barely 5 miles from Nazareth, and an important source of wealth for the whole region. And Jesus, as a tradesman, would have spent much of working years in direct contact with the best customers in the Galilee, making objects and gaining a greater appreciation for how the world works. The city is omitted, but the lessons are not.

And Jesus had a lot to say about wealth. The rich young man was told to unburden himself of wealth if he wanted to follow in the way. A fictional rich man was told that he could’t warm his brothers of the torment he was enduring in the afterlife, having ignored the poor Lazarus at his door. Jesus famously said it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven. And tax collectors were warned to collect only what was due to them, and no more, if they wanted to pursue the way of righteousness.

Chapter after chapter, book after book Jesus spoke about money and wealth and the way it destroys the soul and we have moved on. Republican candidates outdo each other in trying to be the most Christian of the group, but mostly concern themselves with women’s reproductive freedom, a topic on which Jesus had nothing to say. Wealth seldom comes up, except to say that taxing the rich is somehow a form of class warfare.

Back in the 18th century, the idiom “an embarrassment of riches” entered our language, meaning the point at which you have too much of something and you become self-conscious. Apparently this no longer happens. Coincidentally, on of my favourite books has the title “An Embarrassment of Riches” and concerns the Dutch Golden Age, the age of Rembrandt and Vermeer. On the cover is a wonderful painting by Jan Steen called “The Burgher of Delft and his Daughter.” The work is noteworthy because the portrait of the burgher and his daughter includes an old woman begging, with the burgher looking at her with some sympathy while the daughter stares ahead. Clearly the burgher was proud of his station, and his wealth, but was also aware that some were less fortunate.

The sub-title of The Burgher of Delft and his daughter could very well be “What would it profit someone to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” My summary of the painting doesn’t do justice to the tension it produces, feeling at a visceral level the divide between these characters and knowing that the tension remains unresolved. We have little doubt that the burgher was a good parent and a good man, but he was clearly anxious about being wealthy. He may have even worried for the life of his soul.

Pick up your cross, the other message of the passage, can be taken to mean enter the tension inherent in following Christ. You give up safety, you give up easy answers, and you give up the assumption that the ordering of the world is as it should be. You are challenged to enter the tension that exists in our world, between we who have so much and those who have so little, and how to resolve it. Pick up your cross means see the world differently, see it from the cross itself, where suffering is more apparent but salvation is obvious too, in Jesus Christ alone, Amen.

posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 2:31 AM