Lent 2. Mark 8: 31-38
Silly old Peter. He got it wrong again! It’s easy to say that, isn’t it? We know the rest of the story. We know that out of the suffering and death on the Cross comes the Resurrection. Peter didn’t know that. If we had been in his shoes we would have said the same as he did. Jesus was wonderful. He was doing so much good. He was creating a new world. It was so obviously right for him to stay alive. It was quite wrong for him to think of death, especially in those terms of rejection, pain and death on a Cross. That must be stopped. But Peter was wrong, and we would be wrong. And Jesus was right. That’s how life as a Christian often does go. What is obviously wrong, turns out to be right. What is attractive and sensible, turns out to be wrong. It is a world in which Alice through the Looking Glass would be at home – normal values are upside down and back to front.
Take Lent as an example. I suppose we all began Lent with a certain sense of reluctance, of apprehension. Can I really give up beer, or chocolate, or meat, for six weeks? Is my life going to be miserable without it? Can I really get up earlier to pray, or read the Gospel every day, or whatever devotion we have added to our life? If that has been the mood in which we started Lent, it is no surprise if most of us have already broken our Lenten discipline more than once! Somehow we should enjoy it, and look forward to it. One of my older brethren goes running every day, even in the rain. I think he’s crazy. He says he loves it. That’s why he does it. That’s really how we should look on Lent. We are clearing out the rubbish. We are becoming spiritually lean and healthy. We are spending more time with Christ who loves us. We are detaching ourselves from material things and learning to feed on the gifts that God wants to give us. Shouldn’t we love that? If we don’t love it, we need to look rather carefully at ourselves and our motives for being Christian at all. The present Patriarch of Romania once told me how monks in the Orthodox Church, in Lent, fast every day till their one evening meal. “For the first ten days we find it hard”, he said. “Then we get used to it. Then we feel rather sorry there is no longer a battle to fight.” I actually think that our trouble with Lent is not that we try to do too much, but we don’t try to do enough. Our fasting and prayer is trivial so we don’t take it seriously. It doesn’t allow much space for God. The more we do, the more space we offer God, the more he can give. Perhaps Lent should be like a physical training programme. We should add something new each week, and so grow fitter and fitter.
But in one sense I’m missing the point. Lent is not just a time to get spiritually fit. We are preparing ourselves for the joy of Easter. As Lent goes on we get closer and closer to that amazing moment when Christ overcomes death and bursts out of the tomb. It’s really worth working hard to prepare ourselves for that!
That brings us back to the words of Jesus. “Whoever would save his life will lose; whoever loses his life for my sake and the Gospel’s will save it.” That is a pretty clear call to martyrdom. Most of us are not very keen on being martyrs, in the literal sense today. Yet we all know the stories of martyrs who put up with terrible suffering for the sake of Christ. They didn’t only put up with it; they seemed to rejoice in it. Some martyrs thanked their torturers for giving them the privilege of suffering for Christ. Many found joy in the experience. Many showed love to those who killed them. This is just amazing to us. How does it happen? How do they do it? Yet we see it ourselves.
None of us wants to get sick, or suffer pain, yet we have all seen people in sickness or pain who bear it patiently, even joyfully. We see some whose Christian faith is deepened by it. I suppose we have all had the experience of visiting a sick person, thinking we are doing good, and coming away knowing how much we have been blessed. Could we do the same if we had cancer, or a stroke, or some other horrible illness? We all fear the dark – the darkness of pain and confusion, the darkness of not knowing. Yet when we go into it, it turns out to be different. It can be a place of God’s love. It is the same with death. I suppose none of us wants to die – at least not right now. That may be because we are enjoying life so much. It may also be because we don’t really believe what our faith tells us, that life after death with God is going to be absolutely marvellous. Yet some of us here today have reached an age when we have to admit this is a real probability quite soon. We have to face the challenge Christ offers us. Losing our lives into His hands is not going to be loss at all. It will be the finding of life and love and joy of a quality we have never known. Can Lent, this Lent prepare us for that?