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SERMON FOR PENTECOST 15
PROPER 17 “A” * August 28, 2005
HOLY TRINITY/ST. ANSKAR

Those who want to save their life will lose it;
And those who lose their life for my sake will find it.


+ In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity

Last week’s rock is this week’s stumbling block – “satan”, even! (Now, we must remember that satan here means simply adversary or opponent, not the Evil One or the Prince of Darkness the Church was to imagine in later years, in our more Manichæan moments, and depict as the goat-man, Pan.) Peter’s charming impulsiveness got him compared last week to the gushing rock at Cæsarea Philippi – the northern garden-spot dedicated to Pan on the southern slopes of Mt. Hermon. Jesus approved that gusher, which would cause the human spirit to bloom just as the waters of the springs of Dan produce the lush fertility of far Galilee. But today, Peter blurts out some conventional wisdom and gets a dominical rebuke.

Peter must have thought “Well, fine. If I’m the Rock – invincible and irresistible – then I’d better exercise a little of this ‘keys’ power I have been given and set Jesus straight about this ‘suffering and dying’ nonsense. I can ‘bind and loose’, right? So I’ll ‘loose’ Him from this unnecessary course. He’s the Messiah, after all, and my role as chief adviser is to help Him be the Messiah.”

You have to admire Peter. He does have nerve. First he addresses Jesus in terms reserved for God (LORD), and a few minutes later starts to correct Him! And it’s fine for us to laugh at Peter in his foolishness, we who live in the everlasting Light of the Resurrection. But Peter was on the other side of that. He had got it right when he said that Jesus was “the Messiah, the Son of the Living God,” and Jesus remarked that this truth was not something he had come up with on his own, but it had been “revealed” by “my Father in heaven.”

Suffering and dying, however, had not been revealed. And by Peter’s lights, that was not something the Messiah would do. The Messiah was not expected to come to suffer and die. This was incomprehensible, in fact it was incompatible with the revelation Jesus had just so heartily endorsed. Everyone understood the Messiah and the Son of God to be powerful figures, irresistible. He had just said the Gates of Hades could not stand up against the power of the New Israel He was bringing. So this talk of suffering and dying made no sense. It didn’t compute. An “error” message popped up on Peter’s screen. It was outside his paradigm. And that’s what Jesus meant when he told Peter “You are setting you mind not on divine things but on human things.” Peter had lapsed back into everyday, conventional ways of thinking – what flesh and blood knows, as opposed to what is revealed by My Father in heaven. You can’t blame him. Even if he could stretch enough to think that Jesus was the Son of God (hard enough for a Jew), it is way too much to ask him to understand the power of God as the capacity to suffer: to “endure all things” as in Paul’s exalted phrase, and thereby to assault and defeat Death and Hell. How could he? Standing as he did on the other side of the Empty Tomb?

The rest of the passage is clearly editorial commentary from long after the Resurrection: disciples, who presumably want to be like their Master, must “take up their cross” as Jesus did. This would have made no sense before Jesus’ Crucifixion, but after it would be clear that taking up the Cross is what it means to “follow” Him. And then the Evangelist puts in the mystical meaning of it all, the oft-repeated formula that might well be called the motto of the Gospel:

And he ends the passage with the apocalyptic hope of a people already enduring persecution:

In other words, God will make up for anything you suffer or lose now. (Notice that we don’t have to interpret this as revenge on the persecutors, but that the loss of anything – including life – for the Messiah’s cause will be reversed.)

This historical, apocalyptic sense of the story – and what I have called the “motto of the Gospel” – is one thing. I think there is also an inner, mystical or spiritual meaning, which applies to each of us, whether or not we are called upon to endure persecution. We are all going to die, after all. We all shall “lose our life.” How do we make sure that we lose it “for His sake”? I think the key has something to do with what Muslim mystics call dying before death – a mystical idea known also to Christianity. It may mean the renunciation of Adamic grasping. (When Adam took the forbidden fruit, he was trying to save his life, wasn’t he? Trying to enhance it? To “be all that he could be”?) To die before death means to renounce that, and everything we hold dear that is not God, even our own self-consciousness. To die before death is the annihilation of ego, the complete forgeting of “I” – in this life – and the absorption of consciousness in the adoration of God. It is to set our minds on divine things and not on human things.

Now, our inner Peter resists this mightily. He becomes a satan and a stumbling-block to the fullness of joy, which looks to him like just the opposite! The process of dissolving this petrified (Petrine) obstacle to real life is the object of the Collect’s petition: “graft in our hearts the love of your Name.” Now, the Name of Almighty God is unknowable and unpronounceable by flesh and blood - by the mind set on human things. But today we pray that annihilating, consuming, transfiguring Love – the Love of God’s Name, which is to say the awful, personal love of God for us – may be sewn into the depths of our inmost self. Some say it can happen in this life, through the constant remembrance of Jesus, the Divine Name revealed to us. Those in whose hearts the Love of the Name is grafted lose their life for His sake. Or, better, like the lucky finder of the treasure hidden in the field, they happily exchange all they have for something incomparably better.

AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS!