Pleasure, Happiness, and the Cross of Christ

We have been reading the gospel of Mark on Sundays off and on since the beginning of Advent and today we come to the pivot point in that gospel. Up to now we have been hearing about Jesus' struggle to help his disciples understand who he is and their struggle to grasp his meaning. In this passage he clarifies once and for all who he really is before turning toward Jerusalem where he will suffer and die.

Today we have Jesus beginning with what sounds like a politician's request for a public opinion poll - "Who do people say that I am?"

The answers all seem plausible and reasonable.

John the Baptist - Jesus' message does seems like a continuation of John's cry that the Kingdom of God is at hand.

Elijah - Perhaps Jesus is really the prophet who had never died, who had been carried away by a whirlwind and now had returned.

Some other prophet - Jesus was clearly doing prophetic things and perhaps God had raised one of the long-dead prophets to come back again.

Then Jesus makes it personal. The translation we just heard has Jesus saying, "Who do you say that I am?" But in the Greek it is much more emphatic. A more precise translation would be, "But you - who do you say that I am?"

In this passage, which for emphasis is sandwiched between two accounts of the restoration of sight to blind men as if to suggest that the disciples - and by extension all of us - are blind too, Jesus presses for the answer that by now the disciples surely must be able to give.

And Peter does, indeed, give the right answer - but for the wrong reason. He says, "You are the Messiah" - the one sent from God. Now, we can infer from what follows that Peter had in mind the kind of messiah that would free the people of Israel from their Roman oppressors. He had in mind a political and military leader who would rally the people and force the occupiers out at the end of a sword.

But almost as if Jesus has not heard Peter's answer, Jesus begins to speak of himself as rejected by the elders and of suffering and death.

At this point Peter takes Jesus aside and if we could overhear them we might hear Peter saying, "Listen, Jesus, you've got to quit this crazy talk about suffering and death. That's not what the messiah is all about. That's not what the people want to hear. You're tired and you're not thinking straight - maybe you need to take a few days off."

As he usually does, Peter here speaks for all of us. Who among us is comfortable with all Jesus' talk of suffering, of taking up a cross in order to follow him? Can't we follow him just as well by being nice to one another and by living moral, upright lives? And can't Jesus overthrow the things that oppress us and weigh heavily upon us the way Peter expected him to overthrow the Romans?

The answer for us is the same as it was for Peter. Jesus isn't operating by the rules of this world. He is not operating by human values and standards, even when those standards are all that is most noble. Jesus is calling us to something else, to something that transcends everything we know.

In telling us who he really is and what will happen in Jerusalem, Jesus tells us what is also expected of us if we want truly to follow him:

• We must surrender our own wills to the will of God.
• We must put aside our own selfishness and focus on the needs of others.
• We must suffer for others.
• We must love in a radical, unconditional way.

We hear this throughout the gospels and through the ages from countless Christian mystics who have spent their lives struggling to become closer and closer to God. If we can get past the sweet picture of Francis of Assisi with the birds and the animals, we can see it in his life and the life of his friend Clare who left a life of power and wealth to give completely of themselves for the poor.

The apostle Paul wrote in First Corinthians: "Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles." And so it is with us - the cross is a stumbling block and foolishness for us too. We would prefer to eliminate this ugly part of the gospel and focus our attention either on the sweetness and gentleness of Jesus or on the power of God to wipe away all our tears. Surely that's enough, isn't it?

Well, my friends, Jesus is trying to tell us in this gospel that that limited image of the Christ and of our call as his followers is not enough.

Think of the suffering and death of Jesus this way which I have borrowed from the book Stalking the Divine by Kristin Ohlson: Jesus is saying to you and to me, "I will suffer to save you from your own limitations; I will give you an example of someone who chooses suffering to help others; and further, I will face the worst of what all of you will have to experience at some point in your life - betrayal, ridicule, pain, and death - and by doing so know you as well as any creator can. In a sense, he was saying: I will become you (page 206)."

By seeing Jesus' suffering and death in this way we can see how the stories of the Last Supper and the Crucifixion are really parts of the same story. In the Eucharist humanity is invited to share in the divine, and in the Crucifixion the divine becomes one with us.

On a more prosaic level, self denial has some very practical applications to living a Christ-like life as we can see in these examples:

• "I couldn't give the homeless man in the subway station any money because I was afraid I would miss my train if I stopped to help him." or
• "I would have spent Saturday morning working at the soup kitchen, but it was such a beautiful day I just had to go to the beach." or
• "I know my friend needs someone she can talk to about all the pain in her life, but it's such a downer for me to listen to her that I just tend to avoid being with her." or
• "What with classes, and rehearsals, and things going on at my eating club, I'm just too busy to tutor kids in Trenton."

The cross of Jesus is high drama, but most of the time the crosses we could carry for Jesus would only take us away from ordinary things that provide only fleeting pleasures.

What I mean by this is that we tend to focus our lives on those things that give us pleasure, but we miss those things that give us happiness. In each of the examples I just gave the choice was made for pleasure rather than happiness. Rather than living our life in the present which is the world's way to live, Jesus is asking us to live our lives fully in the present but also with an eye toward the ultimate future of our lives - the life beyond this life.

Jesus never lost this focus in his life. His selfless life was always focused not on present pleasures but on ultimate realities, on lasting happiness. When we grasp this, it is possible for us to think of Jesus on the cross being happy in spite of being in unbearable pain.

Jesus asks us to make this distinction in our own lives - the distinction between a life of pleasure and a life of happiness. They are not the same thing. For more on this, I refer you not only back to the gospels, but also to Aristotle's Nicomachian Ethics. The suffering of Jesus and his insistence that to follow him is to take up our cross brings this distinction and all its implications into sharp relief.

The ramifications of this message for the choices we make in life are clear, but challenging and uncomfortable. They have an impact on how we spend our leisure time and how we choose a career. They have an impact on how we see ourselves in relation to those around us and to our God. They concern our relations to alcohol, drugs, sex, money, food, and the use of all our talents and gifts.

The world seductively calls us to pleasure.

Jesus lovingly calls us to happiness.

Which shall we choose?