(A series of posts about Friendship with Jesus: An Imaginative Prayer Journey)
Whenever I hear people waxing eloquent about how amazing Jesus is, I often wonder if they have forgotten what Jesus actually says. “Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me.” This is fundamental to Jesus' call but it does not resonate very well with the spirit of the age in our day. Denying oneself and laying down one's life are hardly the messages one hears in today's media. Jesus' message of self-denial seems, well, ridiculous. Why would anyone be attracted to a message like that?
This is Paul’s point precisely at the beginning of 1 Corinthians – the message of Jesus is “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks” (1 Cor 1:24). The reality of the cross is a scandal. Who would choose it? We want our God to be Strong and Victorious, and In Control or we lean toward a God who is Intelligent, Wise, and Sophisticated. We are not much different than the Jews and the Greeks in Paul’s day. We want a God who wins.
No one wants a cross. Who would choose a way of weakness, suffering and death as a means to save the world?
A Way Down
As I was writing the book, I was aware that a developing friendship with Jesus would inevitably lead us to a pivotal moment where Jesus would tell us what a friendship with him would ultimately mean. He has befriended us, asked us to follow him and trust him. We have given our hearts to him. Then the turn happens. The chapters "Surrendering to Jesus" and "Dying with Jesus" are my attempts to reflect on this turn.
I see Mark 8, the center of Mark’s Gospel, as a turning point in Jesus’ relationship with his disciples. Jesus asks them about the word on the street – what are people saying about him? He then asks them directly, “What about you? Who do you say that I am?” Peter pipes up with the correct answer but then Jesus “began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things… and that he must be killed and after three days rise again” (Mark 8:31). Peter doesn’t like this. This is not the way to mount a revolution. All Peter’s instincts coalesce around taking more ground, persuading more people, gaining more adherents to the movement and taking over, by use of power if need be, to regain what his people had lost, and even, to put the most righteous spin on it, to save the world. That all sounds eerily familiar to the world and instincts that we live with today.
The beauty of entering into Jesus’ life in the Gospels in prayer is that we are able to see with our own eyes a human being living a very different life, a life that is open and vulnerable, poured out for others and fully reliant upon his Father. And to feel viscerally our response to such a person. If this way of living was given to us as an idea about the nature of the good life I doubt I would believe it. But when I see it being lived out in front of me, in prayer, it moves me to imagine that this kind of life is actually possible. I am a long way from living it, but the vision is placed before me, the possibility is there.
And what I see in Jesus' life is God’s character being lived in human form. The One who has created life itself knows what life is and how it is meant to be lived. In the book I quote Jonathan Wilson, from his book God's Good World, who explicates this beautifully:
Just as God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit live in continual self-giving and self-receiving, so also do all created things live . . . At the present time, this giving and receiving in order to be living has been upended in the world, which is in rebellion against God’s rule and God’s way of life. The world is now ruled not by giving and receiving but by taking and keeping. The word for taking and keeping is death . . . When we take and keep we are not living but dying. (p.98-99)
To “take and keep” explains well our propensity to seek control, strength, and victory in our lives. I will often see in myself the desire to have more, to grasp control, to gain and hoard power. At some level within me I believe this will save me, this will bring me the kind of life I want. But Jesus, as a friend, offers another way. His life is one of “giving and receiving.” His is a life that is open and vulnerable . . . and free.
Jesus as Life
It is difficult enough to grasp that Jesus is not interested in power and wisdom the way we conceive of those things. His power is weakness to us. His wisdom is foolishness to us. What makes the story of Jesus so compelling and true for me is that we humans would never think this way of living was the way of living. It goes against everything in us.
By walking away from God, as we did in the Garden of Eden, we were left to imagine what God and, therefore, life itself was like on our own. We see this time and again throughout the Hebrew scriptures - the people want a God who is strong and powerful, a God who will overpower their enemies and lead them to victory and peace. We want that, too. Then Jesus comes along and upends all our preconceptions. He reveals life, God’s life, as a life that is characterized not by taking power and wielding it, but by surrender, by laying down his life for others, by giving and receiving, by love and compassion, by vulnerability and a willingness to suffer. As beautiful as this sounds, this is often not the God we want. We want a God who wins, a God who is "powerful" and "strong," not a God who hangs on a cross and dies.
Jesus looks at us, at you, at me, as he reveals this surrendering way as the way to find life and asks, “Do you trust me? Will you follow me?”
I write in the book:
When Jesus asks us to let go of ourselves and follow him to the cross we discover that we are not in need of a re-education plan, or a behaviour modification scheme, but rather a total renewal of our hearts. The prophet Ezekiel expresses it this way: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26). (p.114)
Given all this, it begins to make sense that Jesus, as a way of loving us and longing for our freedom, would invite us to deny our death-leaning, control-obsessed way of life, take up his way of living, including an openness to a cross-shaped life, and follow him.
How do I do that, you ask? Well, that’s a good prayer. Let’s struggle with that one together.
You may want to spend some time gazing upon Jesus on the cross as a way to pray with this. The prayer exercise, Chapter Nine - Mary at the Cross, may help you do that. It is on the podcast page. Here is the link:
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