Our Lenten journey continues, the Scriptures asking us to draw near to the Lord who drew near to us, once and for all. Today Jesus tells the disciples for the first time that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. Peter does not like that. He does not think that is any way for a Messiah to be thinking. He rebukes Jesus as if the devil had gotten hold of him. But Jesus shoots right back: Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things. Incomprehensible as Jesus’s path of suffering is to Peter, it is the path God has in mind for Jesus. And not only for Jesus, but also for all who follow him: Those who want to become my follower, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.
Now a perplexity arises. Why then would anyone ever want to – follow Jesus? What’s the deal? Isn’t Christianity supposed to be a good deal – believe a few things, live a good life and go to heaven when you die? What’s going on here? Even worse, Jesus continues. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. Whoa! That sound like what a poker player calls upping the ante. Or an investment advisor warning that you’re pricing yourself right out of the market! Not only is this beginning to sound like a real dealbreaker – believe in Jesus and you get to suffer too—now the stakes have been raised to eternal life and death. For what will it profit to gain the whole world and forfeit life? Indeed, what can one give in return for life? Pie in the sky in the sweet bye and bye? So it may seem: Jesus is talking about true life, the life of the resurrection, life with God in his coming kingdom, the pearl of great price, the one thing needful. Are you willing then to give up everything else here and now, to let go of present goods in hand for the sake of an unseen future in someone else’s power? Bad deal, bad odds. Not a few have on reflection, said: Forget it!
Indeed so it seems to any one of us when we, like Peter, are setting our mind not on divine things but on human things. Paul calls it the stumbling block of the cross, the foolishness of what we preach: Christ crucified. To the usual human mentality based on law and common sense, not grace and faith, the gospel of Christ crucified can only sound like a bad deal with bad odds. But that is just the point. To come to faith, our mentality has to be changed – to a mind set not on human but on divine things. Paul explains this change in mentality by reminding the Romans of father Abraham: For the promise that Abraham would inherit the world did not come to him or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. If law, faith is null and the promise is void. See what a total contrast Paul makes here? It is a basic alternative between two ways of thinking and living: the mentality of law, performance, reward or punishment or the mentality of grace, promise and faith. The contrast is at root very simple: the law gives us what we deserve on the basis of works we have done, visible for all to see, something to boast about it. But the promise gives us what we do not deserve on the basis of God’s promise of what he will do, not visible until he fulfills his promise, thus something present only in faith which through the Holy Spirit grew strong, Paul says, as Abraham gives glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised -- setting his mind not on human but divine things.
But how are we to get this new mentality? Aren’t we all just like Peter who takes offense at the counterintuitive wisdom of God? Paul tells us that Abraham, at least, did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah's womb. Where does his new mentality come from? How did Abraham get that faith, Paul calls it, hoping against hope meaning that it was not worldly optimism based on a rational calculation that things will work out well, but hope in God, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Where does this conviction come from, that beyond all my own possibilities, beyond all possibilities in the world that I can see or imagine, with God nothing is impossible, with God new possibilities are given, with God not even death ends the story, with God new worlds come into being???
Friends such faith with its new way of thinking is not a human work. Faith is not a human work at all. That would make faith into life under the law all over again, a human act which is my part of a bargain with God. Then faith would be focused on me all over again. Do I waver, do I doubt, do I want it purely, earnestly, sufficiently? Do I pray enough, suffer enough, deny myself enough, worry enough? Then faith would be something I could boast about, and the gift of God would become the reward I merit. No, no, no. We get this new mind of repentance and faith in hope against hope as God the Holy Spirit works out the cross and resurrection of Jesus in our lives, putting that legalistic old Adam to death and raising up in his place the new person in Christ, with the new mind full of faith, hope and love. Talk about a change in mentality!
How did Abraham get that faith? The LORD appeared to Abram, and said to him, "I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you…” The Word of God comes and lays claim on Abraham. How does Paul get that faith? The gospel Word of God came to him on the road to Damascus and laid its claim on him telling of Jesus who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification. The Word of God is spoken and elicits faith, true faith which puts the focus on the Lord, no longer own ourselves, so that we being changed give God the glory for all his rich mercy in Christ, trusting him to bring his promises to pass, taking up the cross to follow Jesus through the cross to the promised life of the resurrection.
The Holy Spirit works repentance and bestows faith by the preaching of Christ crucified! When we hear indeed that out of unfathomable love for us innocent, holy Jesus, setting his mind on divine things, walked the way alone to death for our trespasses; when we hear how God the Father, seeing that total love of Jesus to the bitter end for us as his very own, raised him for our justification, the human mind is turned upside down and inside out and all; its rational calculations of reward and punishment based on what is visibly performed fall to pieces. For Almighty God in reckless, extravagant grace hides all his glory under suffering and shame to reach us, trapped as we are in our petty, legalistic mentalities, full of envy, greed, strife, jealousy, contempt, pride. For the law brings wrath. But astonishing grace brings the end of that old mentality when it tells of the humble Son of God who is given into the hands, yet also for the sake, of the proud creature and just so delivers even us to the clean, fresh air of faith.
Though we stumble on the way of faith, though we be not heroes of faith like never wavering Abraham, though we often wander, still by baptism we share Abraham’s faith, which "was reckoned to him as righteousness." So Paul quickly adds that the same righteousness will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. For in either case it is really all about God who makes all things new. Bad deal? Yes, for that old Adam faithless, hopeless, loveless it is the worst of deals! It’s a death sentence! Bad odds? No, not for the new person in Christ, full of faith, hope and love who has experienced a downpayment of that promised future spiritually in dying at the hands of the Holy Spirit and rising with Christ. In any case, you can’t have a resurrection without first a death.
That’s what our Lenten season of self-examination is about: not giving up candy or something trivial like that, but giving up that old person figured in Peter who rebuked the Lord, instead taking up our own cross – this means whatever trouble, adversity, handicap, burden laid on you in life, like Abraham’s old body or Sarah’s barren womb, whatever it is that afflicts you—taking up the cross in active faith, as new people who do not yet see but nevertheless trust, as new people who do not lash out but rather turn out-ward to others in need to form the caring community of Christ’s people, as new people who hold one another up in life difficulties and hold out in hope against hope for a new world in which all affliction, oppression and violence shall cease, as new people with new minds formed by grace, promise and faith, as new people who give God all the glory for all his rich mercy in Christ. A bad deal? The best of news!