To gain one’s very life
"But who do you say that I am?" Luke 9.20
You can tell a person you love them. You can say it with conviction, with statistics, with charts and graphs. You can tell someone you love them as they head out the door and into their car and down the driveway, the love of your life as they go wherever they go and your heart unravels as they drive away, a great ball of yarn in your chest tied to their little finger. But to tell someone you love them and to show them it is so, are quite different things altogether.
Another person now, they are like many of us poker players with our emotions. Some terrible thing has happened in their lives, or just some terrible season, a pit they feel opening beneath their feet slowly. They carry with them every burden in the world. They have heavy responsibilities at work, they are doing their very best to meet unreasonable expectations. Their days are spent delicately adding straws to their burden; it is an art form, understanding the difference between complete mental breakdown and peak efficiency. And in the middle of their great burden bearing you are just certain they are going to collapse. Despite their poker face you ask them how they’re doing and they deflect. You know it is the slightest peak of a great and troubling iceberg. You put your hand on their shoulder and squeeze it and tell them that you know they're weighed down. And something in your presence, something honest in your eyes; they are an over-full glass of water and your touch breaks the surface tension. Your touch is like the breaking of the miniscus lipping a glass of overfull water. And they weep.
This is partly what I think of when Jesus says to a weary group of do-gooders: but who do you say that I am? In other words, why do you think I’m here? Who am I to you? I am your beloved, your Christ of crosses. The disciples are, we have already seen, enchanted by Jesus but not always quick to understand who he is. They are no doubt hopeful of being good disciples, good workers, good theologians, good examples, good traveling companions. They are hopeful of being approved, as we all are. Their theological education requires a hand on their shoulder in order to be complete. They have to understand that it is not a theological truth that will have to suffer and be rejected, but a person. An earthly kingdom, and power, cannot bleed, only flesh and blood can bleed. It may be easier to hide from Jesus behind our deficiencies or our good deeds, but our Lord won’t let us look away - he is the one that bears crosses. A philosophy, a movement, zeal cannot carry a cross. Flesh and blood carries a cross. Someone with a name, the Christ of God.
"Who do you say that I am," sad ones, brilliant ones, buyers and sellers, workers and lookers-for-work? Jesus is the Christ of God. Truth in flesh, like tenon and mortise, something strong to bear us up. There’s a little hiccup in the greek here, a little wink, when the Bible says like Jesus we must take up our cross. It’s nearly the same word as “crucify,” one is a noun and the other a verb. To see the cross is to be crossed, ourselves. He who would gain his life will lose it, Jesus says. He who would look away from the crucifixion will lose the cross. If we see him we will see his cross. If we follow him, we will feel his cross. We will love neighbors and enemies to the very end. There is no way to life that avoids being crossed up by our belief in Jesus. Could there be anything more important to think about at this very moment?
T.S. Eliot has one of my favorite statements of truth about the flesh of Christ and really about the mystery of our own flesh, a mystery we keep missing as we devour one another in indifference, political theater, pornography, poverty. He said that the Incarnation, the coming of God in the flesh, was “the hint half guessed, the gift half understood.” The painting above is Makoto Fujimura’s interpretation of that poem. We are in the dark, it seems, even more than in Eliot’s day. How we need to see not only the flesh of Jesus, and his cross, but one another’s holiness in the flesh, too. If we do not take one another more seriously, if we lose each other from our prayers we will lose our mind for God, too. This is how he has made his world.
One thinks of Peter. Of all the missteps he does seem to understand more than the others who Jesus is, and when he fails for fear outside Jesus’ trial, it is a flesh and blood savior that restores him. I dearly hope that in eternity Jesus shows us the Bible in living color, those powerful moments broadcast in the skies for all to see, and that we will find Jesus put his hand on Peter’s shoulder the third time he asked him, “do you love me,” following his resurrection. And I hope we will get to see the tears gather in Peter’s eyes and know that like us, he has a moment when the dam breaks too. That moment must be ours, where theological abstraction and law-living weariness melts into the flesh and blood answer to the most important question we’ll ever be asked: Who do we say that He is?
(Artwork: “Between Two Waves” Makoto Fujimura)