Is This Who We Wanted to Follow?
(Passion B: Is. 50:4-9a, Ps. 31:9-16, Phil. 2:5-11, Mk. 14:1-15:47)
And Jesus said to them, “You will all become deserters; for it is written, ‘I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered.’ But after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.”
In this sad and terrifying story, the thing that comforts me the most is the way Jesus tells his disciples: I know that you are all going to desert me. You will. I know.
Jesus says this without anger, without accusation. He’s just stating a fact. You will all become deserters, all of you. You will. They all protest, Oh no, we’re all ready to die with you, we will never deny you. Jesus just shakes his head. Don’t, just don’t. Peter says, All of these guys might desert you, but not me. I will never desert you. And Jesus says, Oh, Peter. You will disown me three times before the cock crows at dawn tomorrow. You will. All of you will. I know.
Jesus had told his disciples more than once: It is inevitable what will happen when we go to Jerusalem. He told them, If you want to be my follower, take up your cross and follow me. And his disciples kept following him, but Jesus knew that it was also inevitable – in the end, they would all desert him. And as it turned out, the only one who actually took up the cross and walked with him was Simon of Cyrene, an unwilling stranger, some random person the Romans drafted. But the people who said they would take up their crosses and follow Jesus, they all deserted him. And he knew they would.
The Romans made crucifixion so terrifying, so humiliating, so dreadful that most rational people would do anything to avoid it. It’s how the Romans built their empire. They had a proverb, often quoted by subsequent empires. In Latin: Oderint, dum metuant – Let them hate, so long as they fear. We’re not looking for love from these conquered peoples; we couldn’t care less what the primitive sort think about us. We want compliance, obedience, order, productivity, and for that we need fear. And there was nothing that produced fear like the threat, and the occasional reality, of crucifixion.
In the end, nobody wanted to carry their cross and be crucified like Jesus, and who can blame them? Do you want to follow Jesus to Golgotha? I don’t. It’s not really about the pain, although crucifixion seems horrible. It’s not even the fact of death, which gets all of us eventually one way or another. But the humiliation. The apparent failure – Jesus had a good ministry going, big crowds, doing lots of good for blind people and lepers and all kinds of people who needed his help, teaching people to grow deeper in the kingdom of God. All gone now. And the abandonment – everyone who was close to him, everyone who claimed to be a friend, everyone who had a stake in what he was doing – they all walked away, every one, and he knew they would. Who would want to follow Jesus there? I know I don’t.
Jesus didn’t want the cross either – Mark describes the distress and anguish of his prayer in Gethsemane, the intensity of his grief. And we might wonder whether Jesus might have avoided the cross – the crowds, for sure, thought that if Jesus was actually the Messiah he would save himself, even at the end. But he didn’t. Because it was God’s will? Yes, but we have to be careful: suffering and death and loss are never pleasing to God. Faith even in the face of suffering and death, yes, but the pain itself is never what God wants. It was human beings who wanted Jesus to die.
Human beings motivated mostly by fear. Fear that led people like Pilate and the Jerusalem elite to crucify others lest they be crucified themselves. Notice in the story we just read how fearful Pilate is – of the crowds, of the many threats to his power and control. Pilate is even willing to release a violent revolutionary rather than Jesus, he’s that afraid of what Jesus represents. And the disciples of Jesus are afraid too, like all of us. Which is why they deserted him.
Jesus told his disciples, You will all become deserters. You will. But. But after I am raised, I will go before you to Galilee. You see, you will all desert me, but I’m not going to desert you.
And I can imagine the disciples, if they are thinking clearly at all at this point, saying: Of course you’re going to desert us. You’ll be dead soon. And then we’ll be on our own. We’ll go back home to Galilee just as afraid as we are now, maybe more. Oh, ye of little faith! How can you be so slow to trust all that God has promised?
In Jesus God shows us what a life of faith looks like – Jesus trusts completely in the goodness and power of God who created the universe out of nothing and raises the dead to life. Jesus experiences a full measure of agony and grief and anguish and humiliation, and death – yet he never stops trusting the Father and so he overcomes the fear of those who crucified him, the fear of all who deserted him.
And he does all of this, not for himself, but for us. For the ones he knew would desert him. You will all become deserters, but after I am raised, I will go before you to Galilee. I will get there even before you do; I’ll be waiting for you there. And then the real work of discipleship begins.
Now we have the chance to also live with trust that God will not ever abandon us, that there is no pit so deep that God cannot rescue us out of it, no stone too large that God cannot roll it back, no abandonment or betrayal that God cannot forgive. Now we are invited to try again, to love a little bit more, to live with a little bit less fear. Now we are invited again to live with the fearless love that comes from a faith in God who raises the dead and is always ready to forgive. Now we are invited to faith, to trust, and to the same freedom from fear that the faith of Jesus promises us.
You will all become deserters. But I will not desert you. I will rise and go ahead of you. And the invitation still stands, and it always will: Take up the cross and follow me.