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Jesus said to his disciples, "The Son of Man will be betrayed into the hands of men. They will kill him, and after three days he will rise." "But they did not understand what he meant," says Mark, "and they were afraid to ask him about it." But I wonder. I wonder if, in fact, the disciples did understand, and understood very well, and that that's why they were afraid to ask. But maybe Mark is right, because all of today's readings - the Wisdom of Solomon, the Letter of James, the Gospel of Mark - speak about people who seem not to understand the way of God with the world. In the Wisdom of Solomon, the foolish and the ungodly speak as ones without understanding. "They say to themselves in their deluded way, 'Life is short and full of trouble, and when a person comes to the end there is no remedy; no one has been known to return from the grave. By mere chance were we born, and afterwards we shall be as though we had never existed, for our breath is but a wisp of smoke, our reason a mere spark kept alive by the beating of our hearts, and when that goes out our bodies will turn to ashes and our breath disperse like empty air.... Our lives will vanish like the last vestige of a cloud.... "Therefore, let us enjoy [all] the good things [of life] while we can.... Let us have costly wines and perfumes to our hearts' content.... Let none of us fail to share in the good things that are ours; let us leave behind on every side traces of our revelry. This is the life for us; it is our birthright. Down with the poor and the honest man! Let us show no mercy to the widow, no reverence for the grey hairs of old age.... Weakness is proved to be good for nothing...." Down with the just and righteous man, down with him "who is a living condemnation of our way of thinking [and living].... He says that the just [and merciful] die happy, and he boasts that God is his father.... Let us test the truth of his claim.... Let us condemn him to a shameful death, for if what he says is true, he will have a protector." Because he was "a living condemnation" of their way of thinking and living, Jesus knew that the foolish and the ungodly would have their way with him. He knew that they would test his claim. "The Son of Man will be betrayed into the hands of men. They will kill him." "But the disciples did not understand what he meant," says Mark. But Jesus adds, "In three days he will rise." And they still didn't understand, says Mark, "and were afraid to ask him about it." And the obvious questions for today's sermon are: Do we understand? And are we afraid to ask him about it? How are we to understand God, and who God is, for us and for the world? How are we to understand Jesus, and who Jesus is, for us and for the world? Perhaps we do not understand Jesus because we do not stand where Jesus stands. Perhaps there is a place to understand, a place where we must stand if we are ever to understand God and Jesus. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews tells us that under the Old Covenant "the high priest carries the blood of animals into the Most Holy Place as a sin offering, but the bodies are burned outside the camp," and that "just so, Jesus also suffered outside the city gate to make the people holy through his own blood. Let us, then, go to him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace that he bore," It is only there, he suggests, only outside the camp where we bear the disgrace of God, that we can understand God. When Jesus told his disciples that they must take up their own crosses and follow him, did they know where they were to follow him to? And when he tells us the same thing, do we know where we are to follow him to? Maybe not, for the misunderstanding of the disciples was not just an intellectual misunderstanding. Their misunderstanding of Jesus was much deeper than that. Their misunderstanding of Jesus, like our misunderstanding, was an existential misunderstanding, because they hadn't yet stood where Jesus was calling them to stand. They hadn't yet followed Jesus to the place he was headed, outside the camp, to his place of disgrace and suffering for the sake of those he loved. Like us, the disciples just didn't "get" Jesus at all. Oh, for three full years they had listened to him teach. They had listened to all that he had said about sacrifice and the love of God and neighbor - about how those who would be children of God must give themselves up for others, and about how those would be first have got to be last and servant of all. But now, as they draw near to Jerusalem, Jesus begins to speak dangerous nonsense. He begins to tell them about how the son of man is going to be betrayed, and even killed. So among themselves they pass the time with more pleasant speculation, arguing with each other about which of them was the greatest! But when Jesus asks them what they have been talking about, they don't answer, because they at least have grace enough to know that they ought to be ashamed of themselves, and Jesus knows that they know at least that much, and they know that he knows that they know, so they just kept quiet. The disciples didn't understand what Jesus meant, and their lack of understanding went much deeper within themselves than to tops of their brains. It lay down in their guts, deep, deep, deep. Deep like ours, because, like the disciples, we too haven't yet stood where Jesus stood, outside the camp, humiliated by men, disgraced, despised by all, suffering for justice or love for the sake of those we love. Long before Jesus, Job knew that understanding occupies a place. "Where is the seat of understanding?" Job asks God. "Where does understanding live? I know where other precious things are found," he says. "Copper lives in the earth, and so does iron, and one goes into the earth to find them. But where does one find wisdom and understanding?" he asks. For Job, as for Jesus, there was a place of understanding, and perhaps we just have to get there before we can find it and make it ours. Let me provide an illustration from ordinary life. In 1519, the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, following Columbus and with the support of the King of Spain, set out to do what Columbus had failed to do - actually arrive in the East, and then return to Spain, by sailing west. Magellan himself did not make it. Only eighteen of his men made it back to Spain in one barely floating vessel. It was almost three years after they first set sail, after 1,084 grueling days at sea, that those eighteen men returned with a wealth of new knowledge about the world. They spoke of things no one in Europe had ever heard of, of places where the sun and moon seemed to move backwards, and of seas where fish flew. And they brought with them an additional mystery. They had been absolutely meticulous about keeping records. And yet, according to Antonio Pigafetta, who kept the diary of the voyage, "When we arrived back home, for us it was Wednesday, but for those on the shore it was Thursday." "And this was a great cause of wondering for us," Pigafetta continued. "We could not persuade ourselves that we were mistaken. And I was more surprised than the others, since having always been in good health, I had, every day, without intermission, written down the day that was current." The truth about the earth and time had to be experienced before it could be documented, and even then the truth was not quickly accepted. The truth about the earth and time had to be experienced and wondered about before it could be understood and accepted. One had to cross the place of understanding for the experience of understanding to occur, and more than one had to cross the place of understanding for it to be generally accepted, so the missing day of the Magellan voyage, and of those that followed, continued to confound voyagers for two or three centuries. Fuller understanding waited upon additional experience, and it wasn't until 1884, just a little over a hundred years ago, that a place of understanding was generally agreed upon and established with the International Date Line. It still confounds me, even though I have crossed it myself. I rather think it's similar with wisdom and spiritual understanding. Experience precedes understanding, and only experience confirms it. We don't understand Jesus, because we haven't yet arrived at the place of understanding - outside the camp, at Calvary. So Jesus tells us that if we will have understanding, we must submit ourselves to the experience. "If anyone wants to become first," Jesus tells his disciples, and us, "he must make himself last of all and servant of all." Then Jesus took a little child, and set him in front of them, and put his arm around him. "Whoever receives one of these helpless ones like this in my name, receives me; and whoever receives me, receives not me but the One who sent me." And Jesus' words this morning are but preparation for what he is going to go on to counsel in the chapters of Mark to come in the weeks ahead - that anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it, that only those who become as helpless as children will inherit the kingdom of God - the weak, the orphaned, the dispossessed, those who have no power or wealth of their own to rely on, and who know, therefore, that their only hope is God. Today's Gospel is but preparation for Jesus' telling the rich young man the spiritual truth about himself - that if he has kept all the commandments and is still seeking to win eternal life, he will have to give up his wealth and give it to the poor, and that then, after he experiences it, after he lets go of his costly wines and perfumes and the good things he believes are his life, then he will understand, for then he will find treasure in heaven. But, of course, "at that the rich young man's face fell," Mark tells us, "and he went away with a heavy heart, for he was a man of great wealth." We do not understand what Jesus means, and we are afraid to ask. Or is it, rather, that like the rich young man we do understand, and understand all too well, and it's because we understand that we are afraid to follow? Or is it that our failure to understand is just so profoundly deep? Is it because, like the disciples, we have not yet arrived at the place of understanding, the place where Jesus is headed - at Calvary, outside the camp, where love must suffer for the sake of the beloved? On the road with Jesus that day in Galilee, Peter had not yet arrived at the place of his own suffering, where, for love of Christ, he would be crucified upside down in Rome. Philip had not yet arrived at the gallows in Phrygia on which, for love of Christ, he would be hanged. And Bartholomew had not yet arrived at the site where, for love of Christ, he would be flayed to death. Perhaps it can be only then, only at the places of our own understanding, at the places where the value and cost of love becomes personally clear to us and where we either pay love's price or give it up, that we can understand what Jesus meant. Because there, in those places, we will stand where Jesus stood - in Gethsemane, and at Calvary, outside the camp, suffering for the sake of what is truly important to us, for the sake of that which endures. It was only later, as the disciples stood in those places of their own understanding, that they understood what Jesus did that day when he placed a child in the midst of them and then said that "whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name, welcomes me." For it was only then that they themselves actually became children, children like the children of the Roman Empire, like those without the rights and privileges of empire, who could be killed without penalty by their own fathers. Not cute little boys dressed in Easter finery, but non-persons, at one with the weak and poor and powerless of the world. It was only then that the disciples became more like Lafeyette in Alex Kotlowitz's There Are No Children Here, one who knows the reality of childhood in black Chicago enough to say, "If I grow up, I want to be a bus driver," not when I grow up. Or like the desperate children of Port-au-Prince who ply the garbage dumps for scraps to eat. More like the child, in Jesus' day, who lived, in effect, outside the camp, not worthy of consideration, and often, in Israel, even despised. Like the leper. For this was not the first time Jesus acts out this parable for us. For we remember how the leper, also from outside the camp, from outside the circle of the clean, had come to Jesus one day and begged, "Sir, if you are willing, you can make me clean." And we remember how Jesus, "filled with compassion" - that is, how Jesus, suffering with the leper - stepped outside the camp to embrace him, and became himself unclean, disgraced, ridiculed and despised, in order to share God's love with him. And we remember how he was despised like the one spoken of in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah in the Greek Old Testament, where the word used to speak of one who is "despised and rejected by men, afflicted, a man of sorrows, familiar with suffering and without esteem" is the same Greek word Mark uses for "a child" in today's Gospel reading. Who is the greatest? The greatest is not among the ones we ordinarily discuss along the road of life. The greatest, said Jesus, is the one who embraces those who are weak and powerless, those who are despised and rejected by the world - those outside the camp, outside the Broadmoor, even those inside the Broadmoor but who are still outside the camp - the weak, the lonely, the mentally ill, the street people, the sinners. The greatest, says Jesus, are those who open their arms to folks like that, and embrace them, and suffer with them, and welcome them within the camp of God's love in his Name. We do not understand what Jesus means, and we are afraid to ask. Or maybe we do understand and are afraid to ask. But thank God for grace. Thank God for the gift of time, because maybe it's just that we have not yet stood in the place of understanding, and there is still hope for us. There is still hope for us, because we do have a place to begin to understand. Herbert Chilstrom, a Lutheran bishop, arrived at the place of his understanding when his son committed suicide. He was asked how he coped with such a tragedy, and he said that he did not understand it at all. But he did understand this - that those who follow Jesus are a people who "find a way through the darkness," a people who have a place to go to deal with suffering and to come to terms with those things they don't understand. The place those who follow Jesus go, he said, is the place where the disciples went - to "the origins of our faith." For despite all our differences, there is one pilgrimage that all Christians can take together, and that pilgrimage is to a place just "outside the gate" of Jerusalem, "to the foot of the Cross." "There we can stand with Jesus," said Bishop Chilstrom, and "grasping the hands of one another, [we can testify] to the world with one voice" that because of Jesus - because of the one who is both just and merciful, because of the one who, although he was himself in very nature God, emptied himself and made himself nothing, and took our very nature and became in every way like us, even in our folly and sin, and even in our deaths - because of Jesus we have hope, and we live in faith, and are strengthened by the comfort of God himself. So this, I believe, is where the author of the Letter to the Hebrews points us: Let us, out of love for him, now go in faith to the place of understanding, outside the camp, and stand there with Jesus, not only with our lips but in our lives. Let us go bearing the disgrace he bore, testifying with one voice that, because of the Cross and the empty tomb, we know that the foolish and the ungodly are blind. We know that justice and mercy and wisdom do have a Protector - that God loves the world, that the future is in the hands of God, and that, therefore, we understand enough to know that at the end the lives of the just and merciful and righteous do not vanish. So in the meantime, in the world of time and space, we can live in hope, in the faith that wisdom and justice and mercy, and we ourselves, have a future, even though we do not yet fully understand. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |