Pentecost 15                                  Matt. 16:21-28                                              8/28/05

                                           “Jesus Can Just Be So Demanding”

Whenever I read this Gospel lesson I cringe.  Jesus can just be so demanding.  He expects way too much from us, even from pastors.  Deny myself?  Take up my cross?  Lose my life?  It sounds like discipleship is all about – only about! – sacrifice. 

Ewww, makes me want to run home and turn the TV to one of those feel good, God exists to do for you type, televangelists!

I have a mind-blowing revelation for you today.  Jesus is not talking about harsh self-discipline, living in self-imposed misery or painful martyrdom.  Following Jesus in the way described in Matthew does take making a conscious decision and over-coming some difficulties, but it is not the back-breaking discipline that it has often been painted to be.

Okay, let’s deal with the hard part first.  Yes, we do have to make a decision.  I don’t mean by this, a decision to follow Christ and be saved.  That’s decision theology and has nothing to do with the discipleship Jesus desires.  The writer of Matthew is addressing a community of believers, so this following Jesus has nothing to do with being saved or even staying saved.  Salvation is entirely by grace.  It is a gift, pure and simple.  Nothing is required of us to receive this gift and nothing we do can get it.

Salvation does put us into a relationship with God.  It makes it possible for us to experience God’s love and to serve Him in love – as a response to His love.  To just accept God’s gift of grace with a, “Thanks, but now leave me alone to live as I please.  I’ll call you if I need you.”  would be what Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran theologian killed by Hitler during World War II, called “Cheap Grace”.

Bonhoeffer wrote, “Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without contrition.  Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the Cross, grace without Christ.”

Let’s be clear, God’s grace shown in the death of Jesus Christ on the cross was not cheap.  It cost God His only Son.  And God felt that loss just as deeply as anyone of us would.  But, God made that sacrifice out of love for us.  And Jesus can be just so demanding that He says to us don’t slap my Father in the face by treating this gift of His grace like it was cheap.

Therefore, the bad news about the Good News is that God does expect us to respond to His grace by being in relationship with Him, sincerely and sorrowfully confessing our sins, making changes in our lives that help us avoid continuing in our favorite sins, and seeking to do God’s will rather than our own to the best of our ability.

Let me comment on each of those points briefly, and then we can go on to the mind-blowing Good News.

God expects us to respond to His grace by being in relationship with Him.  This isn’t having God as an acquaintance, as an eccentric and somewhat tiresome old uncle we make ourselves visit once a year or as a business contact that we call when we want to work a deal that will profit us. 

Having a relationship with God is allowing ourselves to be drawn into a love affair where we are God-minded twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.  It is allowing ourselves to love God as passionately as God loves us.  This isn’t easy.  Discipleship is hard work.  It is making God a part of everything we do and not doing anything that God can’t be part of.  Make no mistake, there’s a lot of room in that last statement to live a very rich, full life.  Jesus is being very demanding in this, but think what it was/is like being passionately in love with your life partner.  That same bliss can be ours tenfold with God.

God also expects us to respond to His grace by sincerely and sorrowfully confessing our sins.  We’d like to meet God on equal footing, not as a penitent.  It’s really hard on the ego to say to another sinner, let alone God, that I have done wrong and don’t deserve to receive love.  Unfortunately, the truth is, we are sinners and we can’t meet God on equal footing.  If we try to meet Him as an equal we just add to our sin and engage in a kind of denial that separates us from Him.  On the other hand, when we sincerely confess even the worst of our sins, God lifts us up, takes us in His arms and tells us He loves us all the more.

Next, God expects us to respond to His grace by making changes in our lives that help us avoid continuing in our favorite sins.  This is really hard.  Aside from the fact that we are still sinners by nature and can’t not sin, some of our sinning we really feel a need to do.  The  shamed person inside us thinks she needs to judge others to alleviate a little of the shame she feels.  The hurting angry person inside us feels compelled to attack and hurt others in order to let out some of his pain.  The deprived person inside us can easily justify any acts that will help us feel filled, even if only for the moment.

But, Jesus calls us to follow Him, to give up the self that leads us into sin.  This is part of the Good News actually.  Jesus is saying, “I’m not really just being so demanding.  What I really want is to give you what will fill your deepest needs.  I want to heal your “self”.

I want to tell you you don’t need to feel shame, that you are precious in my sight no matter what you may have done or what anyone has ever told you.  I want to soothe your pain.  I’ve already taken it onto the cross with me; all you need do is let it go.  I want to replace that deprivation with my love and if you will accept that, you’ll find that your deepest needs are met. 

All you have to do is follow me.  You have to follow me because you need to be with me to receive these gifts and to avoid the lures that would take you back to sin, to resist the voices that want to make you believe the lies the world has told you about yourself.  Follow me so that I can keep telling you how fearfully and wonderfully made you are, how you were made in the image of God, how I rejoice at your smallest achievement and forgive even your worst failures.  Follow me so that I can keep telling you how much I love you.

When we have followed Jesus and opened our ears to all that He would say to us, we learn that Jesus isn’t just so demanding.  Instead He is ever giving.  Then, in response to God’s grace we can take delight in doing God’s will.  We find ourselves less and less telling God what we want and joyfully spending more and more time seeking what He wants.

This is the “losing our lives” that Jesus is “demanding” in vs 25 of the Gospel.  The mind-blowing revelation I want to share with you is that the English word used in this translation is totally misleading.  The Greek word is “psyche” which should be translated “self” or “soul”.  Thus, Jesus is not talking about some painful martyrdom, some life-sapping sacrifice, some kind of social suicide or even some loss of a favorite little pleasure.

Jesus is saying give up all the awful things you do to your ‘self’ – those putdowns, those shaming thoughts, those shaming lies that make you feel terrible, those behaviors that separate you from me.  Turn your “psyche”, your very essence, that inner you over to me and let me give you life.  This is a life Jesus can begin to give us this very moment.  It is life He will give us again and again, no matter how many times we fail and have to confess, recommit and follow.  It is life He will give us right into eternity when it will be perfected and never lost again.

Jesus is just so demanding, but His every demand is a gift of God’s grace to us.  Amen.