Today is the second Sunday in Lent, 2021. Last year on this Sunday, I preached a sermon that talked about pilgrimage as a traditional Lenten practice. That was March first, and it was almost the last Sunday before we were all constrained to a level of solitude for which we were little prepared. I remember thinking, in the weeks after that sermon, that it would’ve been better to have preached on the way of the hermit as a Lenten practice. But we do our best, don’t we, given nobody can know the future. Anyway, I don’t know about you, but I feel as if the entire last year has been Lent. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
The Psalter selection today is the second part of Psalm 22. That psalm begins “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus quoted it while hanging on the cross. We’ll be reading the first half of the psalm on Good Friday, in just a few weeks. That’s interesting to me: the editors of the lectionary scheduled the second part of Psalm 22 to be read today and the first part to be read on Good Friday. I think their reversal of the two parts of the psalm is intentional, as if to remind us that the God we see today as victorious will appear in a few weeks in the pit of cruel suffering, isolation, and despair. But the way the psalm appears in the Bible — suffering first and then victory — shows a profound truth that I take to be a foundational Christian teaching, and it’ll be my theme for today: God is mighty not by domination and force but by courageous vulnerability.
This is one of the themes in the story of Abraham and Sarah in Genesis. You probably remember that God makes a covenant with Abram in chapter 15 that he would have an heir from his body and that his descendants would outnumber the stars in the sky and they would eventually possess the land of Canaan(1). In chapter 16, that promise was as yet unfulfilled, so the problem of their childlessness is addressed by Abram and Sarai themselves. In the real world childlessness doesn’t pose so much of a problem, but the dramatic world of the Genesis story demands it. Sarai allows Abram to take her servant Hagar as a second wife, and she bore a son named Ishmael, giving Abram an heir. Problem solved. Here ends Genesis chapter 16.
But then God shows up in our reading from chapter 17 today and gives them both new names, Abram becomes Abraham and Sarai becomes Sarah. God tells Abraham that Ishmael would indeed be great, but he’s not who God has in mind to be the heir. We’re used to thinking of this as the story of Abraham, but in fact it’s probably better understood as the story of Sarah, because it’s all about how she is to be the “mother of nations.” If it were just Abraham’s progeny that mattered, Ishmael would have been enough — as indeed Abraham himself suggests to God. But any solution that renders Sarah unimportant is unacceptable to God. Just after today’s reading, Abraham laughs, anticipating the laughter of Sarah in the next chapter. You probably know that all this laughing is a pun on the name Isaac, which means “he laughs,” but it’s more than that, too. It’s a sign of the level of pain this couple felt that when news of their suffering’s end was announced they could only respond with cynical laughter.
Of course God eventually lives up to his promise and their son Isaac is born. But it isn’t the end of their suffering, as you’ll see if you go on and read up through chapter 24. God’s blessing doesn’t rid them of hardships; if anything God increases them. And yet they endured the pain, as parents everywhere willingly suffer for the sake of their children. The suffering of parents on behalf of their children is in many ways a type of the redemptive love of Christ on the cross.
This brings me to the reading from Mark’s gospel, where we learn that the Divine Way, the way by which Jesus is living His life, is a way that must go through suffering, rejection, and death. Peter tries to convince Jesus that, since He is the Messiah of God, He shouldn’t have to endure these things, that He should be always victorious, always smiling and happy, successful in everything, powerful enough to trample his enemies underfoot. Jesus’ famous response, “Get thee behind me Satan,” goes on to give an explanation for why Peter is wrong: He is setting his mind on human rather than divine things.
But let’s dig into that a bit. This story is sandwiched between two other stories about Peter: (1) his bold answer to Jesus’ question “Who do you say I am?” “You are the Messiah,” he said; and (2) the story of the transfiguration, where Jesus appears as a shining divine being holding council with Moses and Elijah. In both of those stories Peter is a bit clumsy but hardly satanic.
Now I don’t myself believe that there’s a personal Satan, nor do I disbelieve it. Certainly there is evil in the world. True, I’ve never directly encountered Satan (that I know of), but that’s hardly decisive. I’m agnostic about Satan. But Jews and Christians of the first century certainly did think there was a personal Satan. So this story can only be understood if we grant them the right to think their own thoughts and try to understand their story from within their frame of reference.
There are two things to say about Peter being called Satan here: first, both the Hebrew satan and the Greek diabolos (devil, “diabolic”) have ordinary, non-demonic meanings that amount to slander against an innocent person. Maybe Jesus is calling Peter not the proper name Satan, but the generic accuser or slanderer. In this way of understanding Satan in the story, Peter is trying to convince Jesus that the truth as Jesus has proclaimed it is false. The Greek sets up the story by saying that Jesus speaks boldly (παρρησίᾳ), as we’d say “freedom of speech” against the powers and authorities, so Peter isn’t just trying to hush Him up; he’s trying to sweep the conflict between Jesus and the authorities under the rug.
The second thing to say is, for Mark as for much of first-century Jewish and Christian thought, the world was binary(2). There were the powers of this world which were under the dominion of Satan, and there was the God who was at war with them (through exorcisms, healings, truth-telling). When Peter tells Jesus that he will be the victor in this war through His almighty laser-eyes and without anything that smacks of defeat, he is unwittingly choosing the wrong side. Maybe that’s why Jesus calls him Satan.
Whenever we hear it said that Christians are only about blessing and happy thoughts and prosperity, we have to reject that for the lie that it is. In the world of first-century thought, the way to say that is to call it Satanic. Even if you prefer not to use that terminology, the truth of it remains. It’s simply not the case that living a good Christian life removes all suffering from you. For Jesus Himself, as for all of His followers, victory over the dominion of Satan must be accomplished by following Jesus on the via dolorosa, the way of sorrow, the way of the cross.
It’s so easy to thank God for our blessings and paper over our hurts. What we do at a personal level we also do at a societal level. If we think being a Christian allows complicity in the power structures of “might makes right” and “O God, I thank you that I am not like that poor woman,” then we’re part of the problem rather than part of God’s solution. We have to learn to be honest about our pain and the pain of others, not to look the other way or whitewash it, but to face it with our whole selves. It’s only by following Jesus on His way of suffering and self-denial and submission even to a martyr’s death, that we, like Jesus, will be victorious over the snazzy, well marketed liars who want everyone to just be satisfied with the way things are. God’s way is the way of moral vehemence, fighting for the Right not with the power of coercion but with the greater power of self-sacrificial love. What would it profit us to do otherwise, even if we added the whole world to our portfolio?
The way of self-denial and bold self-risking testimony is supposed to be lived all year long, not just during Lent. But what we do in Lent is to remind ourselves by “afflicting our souls” that suffering is redemptive and the only path to restoration of God’s good world. That’s especially true of us comfortably situated people who find ourselves so often succumbing to the temptation to go along with the status quo. We fast in Lent to remind us that most of God’s human beings don’t live so easy. We deliberately walk the way of sorrow as an expression of our devotion, to give us a chance to make our world more just. We engage in Lenten self-denial so we can realize how pampered and selfish we are, sure, but more importantly so that we’ll see how we can live less selfishly through our whole life; to use the goods which God gives us for healing and justice, like we’re supposed to. Following Jesus means denying ourselves and carrying our cross in imitation of our Lord. Let’s really try to do that in Lent, and then keep trying to do it the rest of the year. We will always have pain, but if we endure it for the sake of others that pain is transmuted into profound joy, not by escaping the pain but by absorbing it into the larger context of love.
(1) The narrative of God giving the land to Abraham and his descendants has lately been misappropriated, in my view, by people who equate the descendants of Abraham exclusively with modern Jews, and therefore have a divine right to the land of Palestine. This misreading of Scripture and history has done enormous harm to the Palestinian people who, incidentally, have as strong a claim to Abraham as Zionists do.
(2) Compare the Dead Sea Scroll known as the War Scroll, more fully “The war between the children of light and the children of darkness.”
