The Bishop of Beverley - Sermon for the Northern Provincial Festival

Sermon Preached in Durham Cathedral 17 September 06

‘And you,’ He asked. ‘Who do you say that I am?’ Mark 8 v29.

Like many of us here this morning, I would guess, I am not too sure as to when I first made a decision for Christ. I know that, in a very real sense, that decision was made for me when my parents brought me to be baptised just two months after my birth. I cannot remember ever having doubted as a young Sunday school attender where my ultimate religious loyalty belonged. As a seven or eight year old, then attending the local Plymouth Brethren weekday Bible Club, I found no difficulty in making a conscious decision for Jesus. As I am sure it was for many of us, my confirmation at fifteen was certainly a decision for Christ. Perhaps, even more so, was my decision before that great event to make my first sacramental confession. So I could go on. Accepting a call to ordination or to undertake various tasks within the life of the Church. We all make such choices. All of them, we would trust, stem from a decision we have made positively to respond to Christ.

We all make our choices. Truth be told, many of them are not half as difficult as we like to make out. We are offered the chance to opt for the job that will bring us greater fulfilment, a larger income and more time with our family. We jump at it. That old canard about the vicar in his study, praying for guidance as to whether or not to accept the offer of a new job, while upstairs his wife is already packing, has more than a ring of truth about it for most of us whatever our circumstances.

S Mark’s Gospel tells us in the first part of its story of how the disciples follow Jesus while all around them person after person is puzzled as to who exactly Jesus is. Now, in today’s Gospel reading, it is Make Your Mind Up Time. Jesus demands of His disciples:

Who do you say that I am?

Peter, ever the mouthpiece for the Church, tells Jesus that He is the Christ. One would think that Jesus would be delighted. Here is the apparent endorsement of His ministry. Jesus is recognised as the Messiah, the Christ, by those people whom He has called into His most intimate inner circle. Yet today’s Gospel tells us that Jesus shuts them up. He immediately begins to instruct his disciples about the necessity for Him suffer. And, as if that is not enough, Jesus sees off the protests to the very notion that He must suffer by telling His disciples that anyone who would follow after Him must do so by taking up a cross. Roman execution by crucifixion usually required the victim to carry part of the wood on which eventually he would be nailed, to the place where the awful deed was to take place. That is the stark invitation that the Jesus of S Mark’s Gospel offers to those who would want to follow after Him.

You and I make our decisions for Christ. We chose to follow Him. We do so even by the very act of being present here in this cathedral for worship this morning. Jesus, for His part, speaks out from the Scriptures, questioning us, as once He did to His disciples at Caesarea Phillippi:

Who do you say that I am?

It is always so much easier to declare for Jesus when He seems to be just the sort of person we want Him to be; when He seems to be just the kind of Messiah who would give us what we want and on our own terms.

In the time of Jesus, whatever hopes of the Messiah were held by those who longed for His coming, there was no getting away from the fact that people expected the Christ, the Anointed One, to have all the cards in His hand. The Messiah was someone would come in power. He would take control from those who blatantly misruled the world. To chose for the Messiah would at least mean being on the right side in that decisive struggle and so, in consequence, reaping all the comfortable rewards. You and I are not so different. We continually seek for the coming of God who fits tidily into our understanding of Him, who reflects the values that we think that God ought to display. We so often seek God as someone who treats His friends in a comforting and reassuring way, even if, at the same time, He is gentleman enough not to be too hard on those who have resisted Him. By contrast, Jesus warns us at Caesarea Phillippi that the more we recognise and welcome His coming, so the more we will discover just how different He is from our presuppositions; how much He challenges us to change even as we are reassured by His coming. Perhaps that is why, however often we make a decision for Christ, you and I find that we have to do it again and again at ever-deepening levels. There is a very real sense in which you and I only find our fulfilment every time we consciously chose to carry that cross just one more step and refuse to discard it.

As S Mark’s Gospel tells the story, Jesus speaks no explanation to His disciples as to the necessity of taking up the cross. There is never a completely tidy answer whenever the question is asked as to why suffering is a necessary part of the human condition. How much more is that true of the Son of God, incarnate among us. Jesus displays a willingness to take whatever the world will throw at Him as He demonstrates the consistency of God’s love and its ultimate capacity to overcome the darkness of this world. So it is that in the darkness of Nine Eleven or of Seven Seven, at the bedside of a loved one dying of cancer, or wherever and however we encounter suffering, we know He is there feeling the pain. Those of us who want to share in Jesus’ life can ask nothing more of Him if we, in our turn, are to be part of His victory over evil by displaying self-giving love.

It is recorded of Saint Francis of Assisi that, as he became more and more overwhelmed by the self-giving love that Jesus had poured out on this world, so Francis sought to be more and more united with Jesus in paying the cost of that love. The result was to be that Francis came to bear in his own hands and side the wounds of Christ’s passion, what we know as the Stigmata. By a happy coincidence, as you and I reflect this Sunday on Christ’s invitation to us to take up the cross and follow him, Franciscans throughout the world mark this very day as the festival of the Stigmata of Saint Francis, the day when Francis received those awesome wounds. Jesus Christ offers us those same wounds to be carried deep within us as He renews his call of discipleship this morning. In that challenging title of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s great work, there will be, for all who would follow Christ, The Cost of Discipleship. Jesus who issues to us the invitation to bear that cost, here, in this Eucharist, comes among us as the one who supremely bears the cost for us and with us. Here, once again, you and I choose Jesus who has so freely chosen us and by His grace seek to follow Him more nearly, day by day.