The Way of the Cross - Murray Lambert

Mark 8:27-38

Jesus and his disciples went on to the villages around Caesarea Philippi. On the way he asked them, “Who do people say I am?”

They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.”

“But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”

Peter answered, “You are the Messiah.”

Jesus warned them not to tell anyone about him.

He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.

But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. “Get behind me, Satan!” he said. “You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.”

 

....

 

To find out more about The Centre visit;
www.thecentredural.org.au/church/

We meet at 10am every Sunday in person and online at;
www.youtube.com/@centredural 

 

Welcome to The Centre! 
We're a Church in Dural, Sydney who want to
Make Jesus The Centre of our lives, community, and world.

Join us for a time of worship, community and teaching. 
Remember to stay in contact with the church, especially if you or anyone you know is in need.

 

Get Connected: https://www.thecentredural.org.au/church/new/ 

Prayer Requests: https://www.thecentredural.org.au/church/prayer/

Tithing Information: https://www.thecentredural.org.au/church/giving/

Follow "BANTER"; the podcast where we unpack each week's sermon with the pastoral team:

Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/show/6ReaCaCb6U7r4EjdJQdajy?si=11f44dcd078e4707

Apple Podcasts:
https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-centre-dural-podcast/id1035454799

 

....

 

TRANSCRIPT

 

Hey, welcome to the Center podcast. We're a church based in general, Sydney, who loves Jesus. And so want to make him the center of our lives, community and world. We pray that you, blessed by this word and that it reveals God's love for you in a new way.

Morning, church. How are we doing today? Well, the way of the cross. I don't know about you guys.

That's a pretty brutal passage. There's quite a few things that are pretty striking. Challenging. It's not. Maybe the first passage I would point someone towards if I was telling them about Christianity. You want to become a Christian? Pretty much. You've just got to completely give up all of your own ambitions, desires, hopes, dreams. You've got to, you know, take up a cross and follow Jesus.

It's a bit of a hard sell, isn't it? And it's really interesting because the author, Mark, makes a really interesting detail in his gospel. When he tells his story, it says that Jesus spoke plainly. Say, Mark's aware that up until this point, Jesus, a lot of the time has been speaking in parables, in metaphors, in symbols. That isn't really a metaphor for his disciples who is standing there.

It's not going to be a metaphor in one week's time when their rabbi, their teacher, who they've been following for the past three years, is brutally humiliated and tortured on a cross. It's not going to be a metaphor or a symbol. It's going to be a very real thing that they're facing. And I can't help but think that there's a challenge for us here that if we're really going to take this teaching on face value, there's some uncomfortable realities that we need to sort of wrestle with.

Because the reality is, if we were to sell Christianity, if we were to evangelize the good news purely based on Mark eight, it would kind of end up looking somewhat like this. Let's check it out.

I'm associate pastor teacher and we are so excited that you are here today about this revolutionary lifestyle brand from the same time you go eat the Ten Commandments in the highly beloved Old Testament series, introducing Christianity. Let me ask you, if you would like to fulfill the power and control measure comes to you. The thought you might like to be humiliated, ostracized, and physically harmed, even to the youth group, you might like to join the ranks of people who previously been sex attacks, fruits and old demons.

It's well so the lonely parts of your heart, soul, mind and strength. All this could be yours by joining Christianity, all you need is simply deny yourself completely. Take up an ancient torture device which is exclusively being safe for criminals and those who police the government through a middle eastern and whose fingers and clean hands you would say, we look forward to seeing you in church.

This Christianity. It's a way of life and sometimes it.

All right. Who's in? I gotta be honest. That's not how I was sold Christianity when I was 14 years old. I was kind of given more of a Romans ten nine account for all who proclaim that Jesus is God, and that God rose him from the dead will be saved like, great. I can get behind that. That's it.

That's a slightly harder, terms and conditions to sign up for, isn't it? And it's sort of makes us beg the question more like, was I duped? Was I deceived Will? No, I wasn't, because I think that much like Peter and the disciples, I didn't understand the full extent of what it meant to recognize Jesus as my Lord and Savior.

And we see that Jesus actually, when he calls Peter and his brother Andrew and their two friends, James and John as fishermen in Mark 116 to 20 it says, As Jesus was going along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew, the brother of Simon, who's later Peter. So the guy who Jesus rebukes and says, get behind me.

Satan saw them casting a net into the sea for the fishermen. And Jesus said to them, follow me, and I will have you become fishers of people. Immediately they left their nets and followed him, and going on a little farther, he saw James, the son of Zebedee, and his brother John, who were also in the boat mending the nets, and immediately he called them.

And they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men, and went away to follow them. Nothing really about denying yourself. I mean, maybe they, you know, left their job and their friends, and I mean James and John, I guess, left the family business, but it sort of suggests that they had some hired hands, and maybe it wasn't that big of a deal.

I mean, at this point, things are pretty exciting. In the following chapters. Jesus is healing people from physical disease and illness. He's casting demons out of people. He's on a lake where he's a wild storm, and by the very command of his words, he stops the waves in the wind and the disciples go, who is this? Who commands even nature?

It's pretty exciting. They're starting to go, I think that we've, you know, kind of hitched our wagon to the right horse and then suddenly we get to the passage that we're looking at today, Mark eight. And things take a bit of a dramatic turn. I take a bit of a dramatic turn. If we look at the structure of Mark's gospel in the next slide, we see that this moment is a lynchpin, a hinge, a turning point in Mark's entire gospel.

The first seven chapters are all about Jesus showing his authority as the Messiah through amazing teaching that is beyond anybody has ever heard before. And through undeniable acts of power, miracles, wonders, signs. And then suddenly, Mark slows his entire gospel right down the first half of Mark's gospel, he uses this word you use this immediately, all the time.

Immediately. Jesus did this immediately he did that. He did this, he did that. He did this. He did that. The first seven chapters are almost three years of Jesus's ministry. And then it slows right down the chapter right? Peter recognizes Jesus. You are the Messiah. Jesus starts telling them about what that expectation of a messiah actually means. And the back half of the gospel of Mark is the final wake of Jesus's life.

Mark is trying to say, let's just slow down for a second. There's something really important going on here, and ultimately you can kind of imagine it, can't you? You can kind of imagine it that, you know, Jesus goes, well, you know, you guys have been following me around for three years now. You've been my apprentices. First of all, let's let's do a bit of a, you know, public canvasing.

What about the people saying that I'm like and they go, well, some people say John the Baptist, some people say Elijah, some people say one of the other prophets. And he goes like, hey, well, who do you say I am? And you can imagine at this point, you know, these, these 12 Jewish men who've been, who've been brought up with this expectation of this Jewish king who would come and liberate Israel from slavery, from oppression, a kind of thinking, I think he's the Messiah.

And Peter kind of steps up and goes, you the Messiah. And Jesus says, yes. And you can kind of imagine the disciples are kind of slapping each other as I told you, it's through this desire. It's happening. It's really going to happen. And then Jesus immediately says, but what do you understand the Messiah to be? What do we understand when we're saying that Jesus is our Lord and Savior?

Let's check out this second and last video just about the expectation of the Messiah.

Gospel of Mark of the book in the Bible about the life of Jesus and the earliest reliable tradition tells us that it was written by a guy named John Mark. And now Mark didn't just grab a bunch of random stories about Jesus and throw them together.

He's designed this book to address really specific questions about whether or not Jesus was the Jewish Messiah. So let's stop right there, because that's a term a lot of people like me are very familiar with. Yeah. So the Messiah was a royal figure, sometimes called the Son of God. That Israel was expecting to come and set up a kingdom here on earth.

And around the time of Jesus, Israel was occupied by Rome. And so many Jews were hoping that the Messiah would come and overthrow the Romans and rule as king. But Jesus didn't overthrow the Romans. In fact, he was killed by them. And that brings us to the very issues Mark is trying to get at in this book. So in the first half he focuses on who Jesus is.

Is he really the Messiah? And then in the second half, he's addressing how Jesus became the messianic king. And then right here in the middle of the book is this pivotal story that brings the two halves together. And Jesus answers both of these questions. Okay, so let's talk about the first half of the book, who Jesus is. So Mark makes his beliefs about Jesus very clear from the first line of the book, the beginning of the good news about Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of God.

One of the next stories is Jesus getting baptized and God's voice announces from heaven, this is my son. So what could be more clear? It's presenting Jesus as the Messiah. Yes, but as you're reading through this first half of Mark, you'll notice something really interesting start to happen. Jesus is going about healing all these different people, and he's constantly telling them to keep quiet about it.

And this happens so many times in Mark's account. It's very.

I am the Son of God. But then something new happens because Jesus starts explaining to them how he's going to become the messianic Kingdom, and it is not what they expected. He says he's going to suffer and die and rule by becoming a servant. Or in his words, the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to become a servant and to give his life as a ransom.

Peter is startled by this and rebukes Jesus, because there's no way he's going to let Jesus die, and Jesus responds, get behind me! See? Which is really intense. It really is. But it highlights how important it is for Jesus that his disciples come to understand who he really is. And so here now, in this pivotal section, Jesus tries three different times to have this conversation with them, and every time they respond in confusion and even fear.

So throughout the next section, chapters eight, nine, and ten, Jesus reveals to them three times, not just on the Messiah, but this is what it's going to look like. And they're confused. They're not getting it. They're afraid they may be in denial. And he says, okay, well, it seems like you don't get it. So instead of letting me tell you, let me show you what it means to be a suffering Messiah.

It's not an easy teaching to deny yourself, to take up your cross and follow Jesus. And I think that as we look at these three points, we could probably agree that in a culture of excess and instant gratification, there's probably a lot of opportunities to deny our selves. But taking up a cross is really a little bit foreign.

Like Mark, who writes this gospel, the you know, best understanding of who Mark was was he was actually Simon paid his own disciple who had been sitting under his teaching for years and years and years, hearing all of these stories recounted firsthand from Simon Peter's experiences with Jesus. And then suddenly Simon Peter is crucified by the Roman Empire.

And Marcus, we we better start getting some of these oral traditions, these stories which have only been told verbally down. And he's trying to kind of reassure in part the church at that point. Hey, guys. Yeah. Like Simon Peter just got crucified. But don't forget this. This isn't new. This is exactly what happened to Jesus. And this is what Jesus is actually calling us all into.

So for the disciples, some of them who were also crucified along with Jesus after the fact for following his way of life. And so a lot of the early church that this was first written to, like taking up your cross, was still not a metaphor, an analogy, but I understand that maybe when we compare our point in history right now to the last 1700 years of the West, being a Christian nation, that moving into a post Christendom world might feel at times like we're being persecuted and martyred.

But we're not really. When you think about what the original audience were experiencing, like a real situation where they're facing real death and real public humiliation and isolation and alienation, I'm not saying that it's not the I'm not saying it's the easiest thing every single day to be a Christian. But taking up our cross is going to be in Sydney a lot more metaphorical.

So how do we take this teaching and apply it to our lives now? Well, I think John Mark comma gives a really interesting paradigm in his book, Practicing the Way. And he has this beautiful quote. If you remember one thing from this morning, remember this following Jesus, he writes, is an act of subtraction, not of addition. Following Jesus is an act of subtraction, not of addition.

He argues that in our highly overscheduled, busy world.

The most radical thing we can do is to actually subtract from our lives so that we can follow Jesus more faithfully. And he offers this really helpful paradigm. He actually breaks spiritual practices into four different quadrants. And he sort of measures this by whether a spiritual practice is done solo alone or is it done in community, and likewise whether it's done as an act of abstinence, of subtracting, or whether it's done as an act of engagement, of adding, of taking something on, dare we say, taking on our cross.

So that compared to the first raters of Mark, it's not really taking up that cross. But that's the current context we find ourselves in now. There's a whole lot more obviously to denying yourself and taking up your cross, and I'm sure that there's probably people in countries in the world that are persecuted right now that would be probably pretty offended by the suggestion that taking on a spiritual practice is picking up your cross.

But I think reality is the context in which we find ourselves. This is an applicable application. So I just want to preface that when I say that. But if you're thinking about spiritual practices and if you're anything like me, then I would suggest that the first place that you go to is a lone solo. Because we're in individualistic community, we think first and foremost I and in taking something on, in adding something to our plight, we're probably going to lean first and foremost to those areas of a lone engagement.

And those sort of disciplines might be things such as prayer and Bible reading. Any spiritual practices that you're doing by yourself that are adding extra things to your schedule. These are these things which are really helpful and important, but they're only a quarter of the pie. And we miss out on a lot of other really helpful and important stuff.

If we're only ever thinking about solo engagement alone engagement in our spiritual practice. So once we've kind of thought, okay, cool, what things can I add to myself? My spiritual practice personally, that prayer I Bible readings. We're probably then going to go, well, maybe, maybe I'll step into the world of community. Right? So what things could I add to my plate as a spiritual practice in community?

So this would be attending church. This would be joining a small group. This would be partaking in the Lord's Supper. Even you might join a ministry team. You might do an act of justice as a team, as a group of Christians in the community. And again, this is really vital. And that's an important part of the graph. All of these quadrants are equally important.

But what John Mark Comber argues, and what I would kind of agree with, is that there's an uneven influence and weighting on this side of the equation, and when we miss out the other half of the graph, we miss out on a huge amount of wonderful spiritual formation. But on top of that, you might find you might be thinking to yourself, well, I'm in a space right now where I'm pretty good with my personal Bible reading, my daily plan.

Haven't missed a day. You should see my streak on YouVersion. It's out. I'm not saying May. I'm saying you might be saying this. Mine's not very good. You might be saying, hey, like, my prayer is really good at the minute. You might be saying, hey, like, I attend church, you know, let's say 50 weeks of the year.

You know, I'm in a small group, I'm in a ministry team. I'm on a bunch of rosters. Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick. But why am I feeling so exhausted? And maybe it's because we've picked up our cross, but we're still carrying around a bunch of baggage. At the same time, we've done acts of addition without any acts of subtraction.

So probably the first place that's going to be most natural for us to go is solo or alone abstinence. So this looks like acts of, for instance, silence and solitude, fasting, simple living. These are some of the elements, the virtues, the spiritual disciplines that we're exploring through this lent series. And it's these spiritual practices which are actually going to free us up, not just for things below the line in our engagement, but also it's the things that when they're able to enjoy in the space of abstinence and community.

Because when we finally start to think, what does it look like to deny ourselves, to partake in abstinence, we actually start to free ourselves up a little bit. And suddenly this cross that we're carrying, these things that we're doing, aren't as heavy. And finally, we are able to, in that final quadrant of abstinence in community, enjoy things like Sabbath, real rest, enjoy things like being able to be generous and live in a full, giving and receiving community.

And this reality is that we're not able to experience true rest until we have denied some of the activities and events in our calendar that we really want to do, and ruthlessly eliminated them and said, no, actually, I'm going to prioritize rest over, going to the kite festival or whatever it might be. This is a radical way of life.

It seems easy, but there's actually maybe nothing harder to in a society that's always asking if you can be free for that extra second in your day to say no, I'm going to, as John Mark says, ruthlessly eliminate. Hurry. Because it's only when we actually have some extra capacity that we're going to be able to partake in generosity and Sabbath.

It's only when we deny those desires to go to that event, to do that activity, that we're actually going to have space to rest. It's only when we choose not to spend our time, energy and money on those things that maybe we want, that we're able to be generous with those resources for others. If you want to start journeying in this and partaking, this is actually a really fantastic challenge that Mitch has written up for us this week, moving into week two of our lent Challenge.

Because every single week is a new challenge. So don't feel because you didn't sign up to week one that you can't join us for week two. It's actually designed so you could sign up for week six and just do week six. I'd encourage you to sign up for every week, but if you want to sign up this week, coming for week to go ahead, you can get online, click on Church Lent Challenge, get amongst it, because we're going to be focusing on how we can deny ourselves of some things so that we can enjoy better sleep, physical rest.

Because I don't know about you, I'm just gonna speak for myself. I am definitely a lot more Christlike when I've had a good night's sleep. Yeah, sleep. You know, supposedly historians say that we used to have ten hours sleep a night, and then Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. And overnight it went down to eight. Overnight, the light bulb robbed us of two hours sleep.

Most of us are probably sleeping less than we should, or a lot of us would be. So now I ourselves take up that cross, follow Jesus. But the final point following Jesus is really, really important because as I said in the passage desk on Friday, I think that we make a grievous mistake when we think that the cross is the destination.

The cross isn't the destination. The cross is a vital pitstop to get to the resurrection. And this is written into the very fabric of nature. Scripture says that just as a seed must first die in the ground before it sprouts forth into new life and becomes a tree which can bear fruit. So we too must die to ourselves before we can inherit a new resurrection life.

It's written into the very fabric of God's creation, this need for us to die to ourselves. The cross is important, pitstop, but ultimately the destination is resurrection. And you might be thinking to yourself, well, what one of these practices do I want to engage in? I'd really suggest for you to spend some time this week in some real serious just prayer meditation, and consider how can may following Jesus be a radical act of subtraction and not addition this week.

Thanks so much for joining us. Don't forget to write and subscribe to help others discover this channel. Check out the description if you want to find out more or get in touch with us at the center. Gerald. But in the meantime, praying for God's hand over you as you continue to step into everything Jesus has in store for your life.

Be blessed.