“Those who want to save their life will lose it,” says Jesus in this Gospel lesson from Mark, continuing, “and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” The paradox of following Jesus comes precisely in this moment of letting go of all that control we work so hard to grasp. It is a paradox because somehow in the letting go we realize that we did not have control in the first place, and more importantly we gain something that we cannot possess if we are too busy holding on to this illusion of control.
Walking back just slightly in this Gospel account from Mark we discover Jesus’ first prediction that the Messiah, the Son of Man must undergo great suffering. Peter upon hearing this takes Jesus aside to rebuke his teacher. Famously Jesus calls Peter Satan, or stumbling block. Peter does not dress in a devil costume, but rather his reluctance to relinquish control of whom he believes the Messiah is causes him to stumble on his way of discipleship. If any want to follow Jesus they need only to pick up their crosses and do it. We say this often in church, but what does cross carrying look like in real life?
Today we remember John Coleridge Patteson who served as a missionary and bishop in Melanesia (think Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Fiji) during the middle of the 19th Century. Patteson had a propensity for picking up languages, which he honed during travels through Europe after graduation from Balliol College, Oxford. While serving as a lowly curate he took a call from Bishop G. A. Selwyn to serve in New Zealand. Here Patteson learned twenty-three languages of the Melanesian people. Horrifically, while visiting an island in the Santa Cruz group some islanders mistook the bishop for a slave-trader stabbing Patteson five times in the chest. The attack killed others in the bishop’s party as well.
Patteson witnesses to us a literal laying down of one’s life for Christ. A gift of learning other tongues and a love of sharing the Good News in people’s native language may cause one to face real harm. While most of us do not hear the same call as Patteson, Jesus says the same words to us that he spoke to the crowds and to Patteson. If we are to follow Jesus, we must lose our life, take up our cross, and gain new life through walking with Christ. Somewhere along the way, perhaps when Christianity became the state religion, we lost the wild danger of following Jesus. What we do when we say that our aim in life focuses upon subjugating ourselves so that Christ might live within us stands out as nothing short of radical. However, we often do not know how we might go about practicing this in our lives.
When we take time to stop what we would normally do and pray; when we pray for the broken world; when we sit in silence so that God might look upon us and love us; when we give our time, talent, and treasure; when we say the daily office; when we read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest Holy Scripture; when we do not respond to someone’s hate with hate, but instead with love; when we sacrifice what we are doing to serve someone else; when we truly hear someone else instead of merely wait for our turn to speak; when we see through the disguise that someone is wearing to see the Divine within the other, then in all of these instances we are practicing laying down our lives. Each day in these ways and millions more practice martyrdom, the laying down of the self, so that we may pick up our crosses and follow Jesus into life, death, and resurrection! Laying down our lives might be the scariest thing we ever do, but nothing will ever be as fulfilling as Christ living in our place.
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