Against The Grain
Anyone with a television, cell phone, or newspaper knows the chilling hand of death is all around us. Stories of death and destruction fill the headlines. Stories that feel too close to home.
They didn’t have televisions in the ancient world. But there were stories about real life events that everybody talked about. When Jesus’ grandparents were children, Alexander Jannaeus—the Judaean king and high priest—rounded up 800 Pharisees who opposed him, strapped them to giant two-by-fours known as crosses, and had them crucified. Don’t think that wasn’t talked about among his teachers at Temple.
65 years before his birth (like 1960 is to us), Spartacus led a slave revolt against the Romans. As punishment, the Romans crucified 6,000 of them, stretched meters apart along the 100 mile road between Capua and Rome known as the Appian Way. Surely that was in his high-school textbook.
If that wasn’t, perhaps this was. When Jesus was just 2 years old (4 B.C.), Herod the Great died, and a group of Jews revolted, claiming to follow a Messiah figure among them. The Roman general Varus swiftly took action, crucifying 2,000 of Jesus’ fellow Jews.
This practice continued throughout his life. Picture a teenage Jesus, walking the roads leading out of the city of Nazareth, looking up every few miles to see the hanging body of dying man, with armed guard standing nearby.
All of this tells me that when Jesus said “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me” (Mk 8:34), nobody would have heard that as a metaphor.
During the final week in his earthly life, Jesus of Nazareth taught a small band of loyal disciples a way of life that doesn’t make a lot of common sense. He taught that the best way to ensure that others enjoy life is to prepare each and every day to give up our own.
For the church that reads this message, the called-out people of God, those who have agreed to be baptized with the baptism of suffering which Christ himself was baptized with, the call is not an easy one:
“Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My father will honor the one who serves me” (John 12:24-26).
The Lord Jesus Christ calls you and me to a surprising goal. We are called to join a group that spends its time preparing each other to die.
It’s a fact of life that whether you join a movement and die for a cause or choose a life entirely devoted to yourself, we all will have our rendezvous with death. What will get us in the end is not known. We will die from something. But there is another astonishing truth: we all die for something.
Can you see the early church? No, they aren’t there in a comfortable building at noon in the center of town, under a steeple that stretches clear into the sky. There they are…early in the morning, huddled in the corner of a cave on the outskirts of the city, surrounded by rocks and dirt, belting out the praises of Christ in total darkness. Walk between them, and I’ll tell you what you won’t find. You won’t find many nobles among them. You probably won’t find enough money all taken together to warrant a thief to waste his time. You won’t find armed guards at the door. And you won’t find fear of death. For this is why they came in the first place. These are sowers…sowers for the Lord. And the seed…is themselves.
The cross is our every-day reminder that avoiding death only delays it. But, as Andrew Lincoln once put it, choosing to lay down our lives, our ambitions, our relentless pursuit of happiness is the only way to truly keep it. To live our lives as if we owned them is a recipe doomed to failure; because life is a gift from God. We all are wheat, and it’s God’s field. But to lose our lives—to surrender them to the Master in service to God and others—means we will end up with lives of abundance, lived with meaning and purpose, and ending with untold fruit. And that is because if we surrender now, our suffering and sacrifice can produce a harvest of righteousness, as the story of the cross is told and retold in the telling and retelling of our own lives.
Paul knows this. That’s why he uses the same illustration Jesus does, not about death, but about resurrection.
“What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat…But God gives it a body…The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body” (1 Cor 15:36-44 NIV).
On this week of reminder of both death and resurrection, may be find both the joy in the challenge, and the challenge in the joy.
“When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory’” (1 Cor 15:54 NIV).
-Nathan Guy