Two Paths

 The scriptures referred to are Isaiah 53:4-12 and Mark 35-45.

I was reading an article that listed 25 characters in TV shows and movies that the writers originally intended to kill off. Rambo, Poe Dameron from the recent Star Wars trilogy, Castiel from Supernatural, Ron Wesley from the Harry Potter series—all were slated for death but, usually due to their popularity, they continued to live. This goes back to Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wanted him to stay dead after his encounter with Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls. In fact he didn't write another story about Holmes for 10 years and when he did, he back-dated The Hound of the Baskervilles to before Holmes' death. But the reception of the book and monetary incentives made the author reread The Final Problem and work out a clever way to save the detective. Ian Fleming similarly sought to kill James Bond at the end of From Russia With Love but then came up with a plausible way to keep him alive for the next book. All of these writers ran up against something deep within the human psyche: we don't want our heroes to die. Because we see dying as failure. That's not what lies at the end of the hero's journey. That's where the path of the bad guy leads. Heroes are winners.

We don't want real life heroes to die either, though we know they will. So we hope heroic deaths await them but they seldom do. Patton died, not gloriously in battle, but of pulmonary edema and congestive heart failure after 12 days of paralysis caused by having his neck broken in a car accident. Richard the Lionheart survived the third crusade only to be shot in shoulder by a boy with a crossbow while Richard was trying to take a virtually unarmed castle. He died 11 days later of gangrene. Doc Holliday, who helped Wyatt Earp at the OK Corral, did not die in a gunfight with his boots on but of TB lying shoeless in a health spa. Even when those who live by the gun, die by the gun, it is not like the movies. While the real life Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were surrounded by soldiers, like the film, they didn't die in a hail of bullets, nor was it over in seconds. Instead it looks like after hours of exchanging fire with the soldiers, Butch dispatched the fatally wounded Kid before shooting himself. Hollywood cleaned it up.

At the very least the hero should die achieving his goal with his last breath, like John Wayne in The Shootist or Neo in the Matrix trilogy or Samson taking out 3000 Philistines. What's not heroic is being betrayed and then executed by your enemies before accomplishing your objective. That's what demoralized the disciples whenever Jesus predicted his being handed over to the authorities and crucified. That was not the Messiah they expected or wanted: a loser. They wanted another David, a holy warrior who would defeat his enemies and reign over a kingdom of God on earth to a ripe old age. James and John wanted to sit on thrones next to Jesus. Heroes are supposed to be winners.

You can even get that idea if you only read certain parts of the Bible, like various psalms and select sayings in the book of Proverbs. But then we have Isaiah 53 which describes God's servant suffering and dying. And not by using the “I'm taking all my enemies with me” strategy of Samson. Samson got himself into that position because of his sins. (Judges 16) He is the classic tragic hero who is brought down by his flaws.

But Isaiah is describing “the righteous one, my servant” (v.11) who is not getting the good things he deserves, the rewards due a winner. Instead “he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities...” (v.5). We screwed up but he is paying for it. That feels like, as our passage says, “a perversion of justice.” (v.8)

This is the cup and the baptism Jesus is talking about in our passage from Mark. James and John don't get it but this is Jesus' mission; this is the path he is called to follow. And the paradox is that in taking this path, Jesus doesn't just take away the sin in our lives; he fills those who accept and trust him with grace, God's unreserved, undeserved goodness

God's servant is not merely absorbing the consequences of our sins, and we are not merely benefiting by not being punished. Isaiah says, “...upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.” While he receives pain and death for what we have done, we are receiving his eternal life, which gives spiritual wholeness and health. That's how “The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous.”

Look at it this way. If EMTs find someone who has overdosed on opioids, they administer naloxone, a drug that reverses the effect of the narcotic. This can stop someone from dying. But it doesn't make their addiction go away. It just means the person isn't going to die...this time. Naloxone doesn't stop the craving for the drug.

But what if the EMTs could also restore the person to a mentally healthy state where they were able to overcome their craving for the drugs they were addicted to? We are not talking about making the temptation go away because that would involve removing the addicted person from the world. Sure, if you were on a desert island, you would have to quit drugs, not out of willpower but because you can't take what you don't have. Similarly, people in jail have to give up smoking and drinking and drugs but once they are out of jail, those things are available to them again and so is the temptation.

So what if rather than the temptation being gone, you received the power to overcome it? What if instead of merely stopping you from going down the wrong path, the path to personal destruction, you were given the power to turn from the wrong one and take the right path, the one that leads to spiritual health and continued growth instead?

Too often we picture good and evil as static states. You are one or the other, Team God or Team Satan. But in fact, being good or evil are dynamic processes, like dying or recovering your health after being sick. Like diverging paths, you are moving more towards one destination than the other. Spiritually, you are either growing closer to God or drifting farther from him. You are either becoming more like Jesus—more faithful, more hopeful, more loving—or less like him. Everyone walks one path or the other.

Hitler did not begin as the figure we now use as a byword for utter evil. He started on that path as a bitter veteran of a lost war. Then he was the spokesperson of a small political group, long on rhetoric but short on actual power. Then he was the leader of one of many small political parties in the German government. Then he was the head of the nation. Then he was an aggressor who kept taking land from other nations. Then he was the instigator of a massive war. Then he was the force behind a systematic program of genocide. He didn't start as the worst version of himself. He became that way over time.

In contrast, Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone was the indulged son of a wealthy silk merchant. He loved to dress well, hang around with his rich friends and spend money. He wanted to be a troubadour and a knight. On an military expedition he was captured and imprisoned for a year. He had a vision and lost interest in his worldly ways. He joined an pilgrimage to Rome and begged with the poor. In a rundown church, he had a vision of Jesus telling him to repair his church, which Giovanni took literally. He changed paths. He sold some of his father's cloth to help the priest there. In response to his father's anger and his demand he repay him, Giovanni renounced his father and his inheritance. He stripped himself of his fine clothes and the local bishop covered his nakedness with his own cloak. Giovanni became a mendicant, begging for stones with which he rebuilt several small chapels. He nursed lepers and preached brotherly love and peace. He developed a following and created a simple rule of life for them. He went to the Pope and got permission to form a new religious order of friars. During the fifth crusade, he went to Egypt to convert the sultan or die trying. The sultan accepted him graciously and listened to him and let him return unharmed. He handed over the governing of his religious order to others. He is the first person to receive the stigmata, or 5 wounds of Christ, and he died at age 44 singing Psalm 141. We know him by the nickname his father gave him as a child, Francis, as in St. Francis of Assisi.

I chose Hitler and Francis because in their extremes they show how far people can go in either direction if they don't impede the process. Both Francis and Hitler could attract followers. Hitler turned his nation into a cult. Francis could have made his order a bit of a cult and had a good life, being the powerful head of a wealthy order. But the difference is that ultimately Hitler was all about having people serve him, even those being worked to death in concentration camps, whereas Francis was all about serving Jesus and other people. And as Jesus says in today's gospel, “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” He said this to disabuse his disciples of the idea that following Jesus was the path to worldly power and success and glory. Jesus was not the obvious winner that people wanted; he was the suffering servant of God they needed. Neither pain nor death could make him turn from this path or change his mission.

Another option for Francis, the spoiled rich kid, was to have just paid lip service to God on Sunday and drop a small fortune in the offering plate paying for masses to be said for him. But instead he patterned himself on Jesus, sacrificing much to follow his mission, the path he was called to take. And his example did do a lot to repair the church of his day that was drifting away from God on a current of wealth and temporal power.

We're in much the same situation today. We have so-called Christians who see heroes the way the world does—as the disciples did in today's gospel!—as the rightful winners of glory and power over others. Ask yourself this: how many of the TV evangelists and pastors of mega-churches would change the paths of their lives and give up their wealth and comfort and expensive clothing and wander around preaching to the poor and nursing the sick and outcasts, like Francis? For that matter, would any of them voluntarily let their enemies strip and beat and torture them to death, like Jesus? Yet Jesus' qualifications for being his disciples were that they deny themselves and take up their crosses and follow in his footsteps. (Mark 8:34) Do the most prominent Christian leaders and popular preachers fit that description?

Do we? Do I? I'm 67 years old today. From my vantage point, I can say that I've seen God's hand at work in my life and I have heard his call and I have tried to follow Jesus. I even have scars on my hands and feet and sides. But it wasn't from imitating Jesus; it was from a stupid car accident. The resemblances, both physical and spiritual, are superficial; since taking this path as a teen, after more than half a century, I've still got a long way to go to be like Jesus.

Which is why we need to hear passages like Isaiah 53 and the passion accounts and Mark 8:34 and 10:45. Because otherwise we get comfortable and we don't notice the uncomfortable truths about our world. We are harming our children and our fellow human beings and our fellow creatures and the world God gave us through our arrogance and our laziness and our lust and our greed and our rage and our envy and our gluttonous self-indulgences. And if we want to be good stewards of what God has given us, we need to make some personal sacrifices. We need to stop living for ourselves and for the here and now. We need to stop taking the easy way out rather than the right way through each crisis.

At the garden in Gethsemane, after asking God to take away the cup of suffering and death, Jesus could have run the 2 miles to Bethany and avoided all that pain. But he didn't. He made a real sacrifice to save us. We needed it. Only he could do it. His commitment to saving others is what has attracted people to follow him.

But if the official organizations named after him do not show the same commitment to living out a life of loving service to others, then people will turn away from his path. And if you ask me that is why so many young people are leaving the church or never even trying it. They hear Jesus being preached about but they don't see the body of Christ doing the things that Jesus did. There is a huge gap between the ideals of Jesus and the reality of the church. At worst, churches and church leaders have cynically betrayed Jesus' vision of the kingdom of the God who is love. At best, we have congratulated ourselves prematurely on having achieved our aspirations or nearly so.

So we need to check that we are in fact on the right path, and not just dressing up earthly values in holy robes. Then we need to realize that, even after 2000 years, we really have just started. We haven't reached the kingdom of God at the end of the path. We have only sporadically produced the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. We haven't gotten very close to embodying Christ on earth. We need to commit to Jesus' mission as he did.

While it is true that the church is not a museum for saints, when we say it is a hospital for sinners, I think what we are really thinking of is a hospice for those who want care and comfort before leaving earth for heaven. Instead the church should be seen as a rehab center, offering not just rest but also encouragement and challenges for us to meet. Hospitals make folks feel better but rehab centers help them get better at the life skills they need. Hospitals save lives; rehab centers help people have a life again. God doesn't want perpetually passive patients. He wants folks whose chief desire is to be able to stand up and walk with him along whatever path he leads them.

But to do that, we have to be committed to following the Great Physician's orders and to working with his Spirit to make that possible. We have to be willing to do what Jesus, the Divine Healer, tells us to do, no matter how painful, like to love and forgive others. We have to be willing to shed our dignity and sacrifice our pride and anything else holding us back. Nobody wants to use a walker or a cane, just like nobody wants to carry a cross. But if it's the price of getting better, of not being stuck where you are but getting where you need to be, then you just need to grab it and get moving.

And if it hurts—and it will—and you want someone to complain to and you want to talk to someone who understands that pain, talk to Jesus. He's been there, done that, and got the crown. And with his help, we can, too.