Amazed and afraid

Oftentimes, I like to commune with “nice Jesus.”  You know him.  He’s always friendly and approachable.   Not a mean bone in his body.  He practically glows with niceness.  But surely I have known many people like that.  Why would anyone feel compelled to kill this person?  Why would millions of people lay down their lives as martyrs for “nice Jesus?”

It is then that I realize I have domesticated Jesus.  I tamed the man who had appeared so subversive, radical, and dangerous Jesus to his contemporaries.  In doing so, I have removed any reason to have faith in or to follow such a person.  Mark reminds me of this today as he describes the disciples following Jesus to Jerusalem.  And as they followed, they were “amazed and afraid.”

Jesus was unlike anyone they had ever met.  Yeah, but that might not be such a big deal.  These were pretty simple folk, fisherman and country people, after all.  It wouldn’t take much to amaze such a simple crowd whose worldly experience had been so narrow.  Yet, they were right – Jesus was not like anyone who came before or anyone who will come after.

He taught and he acted with the authority of God!  He forgave sins, calmed the seas, and he – a carpenter, for Pete’s sake – claimed authority over God’s law.  He fed the five thousand with a mere handful of food, made the deaf hear, the blind see, the sick well.  The disciples were amazed since they rightly sensed – certainly without fully understanding – but still sensed in their souls as many of their more sophisticated and educated contemporaries failed to do, that God was present to them and to the world in a way he had never been present before.  That amazed and astonished them – quite appropriate responses to the presence of God incarnate.

But Jesus also made unusual demands.  He commanded his disciples to love him absolutely, that their love for him was to be greater than their love for mother, father, or children.  He claimed that nothing the earth could offer – family and country, possessions and pleasures, respect and honor, rank and privilege, power and glory – nothing could be greater than what he was offering to those who would love and follow him to the end…and that end was marked by service, rejection, suffering, and death on a cross.

Jesus demands that they – and we – throw away all of these earthly crutches that we have come to depend on, that we are very comfortable with, thank you very much, that we think we cannot live without.  In our minds, they are not crutches at all; they are our life and our salvation.

And that’s the radical and subversive nature of Jesus.  He reveals to us that all these things we have held most dear are, indeed, mere crutches.  While they may help us for a time, while they even may seem to solve all of our problems, they ultimately limit what we can do and constrain how far we can go.  We can only reach true and lasting peace and joy if we let go of the crutches and pick up his cross.

Jesus forces us to choose – to put aside all that we depend on and have faith in him.  There is no middle ground.  We cannot serve two masters.  We cannot carry both the crutch and the cross.  We must choose one or the other.  That’s the scary part.

The disciples were rightly amazed and they were rightly afraid, yet they made the right choice.  They chose to follow Jesus.

Amazed and afraid we also should be.  May we also have the courage of those first disciples to throw down our crutches, pick up our cross, and follow Jesus to an everlasting life of peace and joy.