Where He Leads Me, I will Follow

Did Jesus really die? When I was a dean, I often ate my brown-bag lunch at a table in my office. During Lent, as often as I could, after I was finished eating, I would close my door and take a little time to pray and write in my spiritual journal. One year it was Good Friday. As I sat in my office after lunch, I began to meditate on the passion story. Much as we did in the session on Ignatian prayer last Wednesday, I put myself into the story, taking the role of Mary. Then I began to feel the story as if I were watching my own son being cruelly executed for a crime he did not commit. In that moment, I felt the stab in my own heart, and I understood the painful reality of Jesus’ death in a new way.

Every church has a cross in one form or another. For most of us, the cross has lost its power to shock us, the way a representation of a gallows or electric chair would – or should. In most Roman Catholic churches, the crucifix, the cross with Jesus’ body on it, overshadows the altar. Seeing the crucifix, you can’t forget that Jesus died. By contrast, most Orthodox churches depict Christ in glory, often surrounded by saints and angels. Most Protestant churches, including this one, have a plain cross. Gathering here, we are reminded neither of Jesus’ death, nor his return to heavenly realms. Certainly, you will say, we hear the Passion stories, on Palm Sunday, complete with dramatic reading, and again on Good Friday. But, in a liturgical setting, do we really get it that Jesus died? It’s still so easy to forget that Jesus was a flesh and blood human being, who enjoyed life just as we do, and that he was tragically executed by the state for no discernible crime. That is not the story we want to hear. It is so easy to overlook Jesus’ death!

We’ve come to a turning point in Mark’s story. Jesus was baptized by John. Having retreated into the wilderness, Jesus discerned his vocation. He has preached the good news, taught, and healed. He has called some close friends into his inner circle. He has drawn crowds and has caught the attention of the authorities. Probing how much his friends understood of his mission, he asked, “Who do people say that I am?” More pointedly, he asked his friends, “But who do you say that I am?” Hothead Peter blurted out, “You are the messiah. You are God’s anointed one.”

Now Jesus must explain the meaning of being God’s anointed one and remind his followers what their commitment to him might mean for them. So Jesus says quite plainly – not in parables but plainly – what the plan is: that Jesus will be rejected by the religious leadership, and that the political authorities will execute him. Jesus will be a messiah who will lead through suffering, weakness, and death. This is clearly not the messiah that Peter had in mind: Peter expected Jesus to be another David, able to drive the hated Romans out of Israel. “Nope, you’ve got it wrong,” Jesus says, “God’s plan is different.”

And then, to be absolutely plain and open – no false advertising here – Jesus spells it out for all his friends and hangers-on. “I will be executed,” he says. “If you want to really be one of my followers, you’d better be prepared to die also. That’s what following me involves. If you’re one of mine, you don’t lord it over others, you don’t cling as tightly as you can to your possessions and wealth, you don’t expect to get your own way in everything that you do. Ultimately, you let go of everything that is important to you, including your very life – for my sake. Despite what you might think,” he says, “the way of the Cross isn’t contrary to God’s will, it is God’s will.”

Don’t you shudder at least a little when you hear those words? Who wants to give up everything for Jesus? Actually, Jesus’ message – and this is just the first of three times in Mark’s gospel that Jesus predicts his execution – would have resonated with the first hearers of this Gospel. They were Gentile believers who were suffering and dying at the hands of the Roman Empire. They knew what oppressive systems did to people, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. In these words of Jesus, they would have heard encouragement. They would have understood that by faithfully enduring persecution they were sharing in Christ’s sufferings. African Americans in this country took strength and courage from Jesus’ death on a tree, even as they watched members of their own community being tortured and lynched. Surely today’s besieged Christians, in Egypt, Pakistan, Iraq, or Palestine also identify with Jesus and understand their own sufferings as part of their call to follow him. In Juba, in southern Sudan, where Christians were a minority community, the faithful often sang, “With the cross before me and the world behind me, I will follow wherever he leads me, I will follow wherever he leads me. There’s no turning back, no turning back.”1

But what of us privileged North American Christians? Aren’t we faithful followers of Jesus? What does it mean for us to take up our cross and follow him? Where and to what are we following him? Surely not to persecution or execution? One kind of answer comes as we look around at our churches. Historic church communities in Europe and North America are shrinking. In the UK, the home of our mother church, average church attendance stands at about 6% of the population. The same is true on the Continent. Average attendance in North America is higher, but we too are seeing our communities shrink in size, we too are closing buildings, and we too are contracting our ministries. Some years ago, Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall wrote The Cross in our Context, a book that continues to attract a wide readership. Hall begins by reminding his readers that, like Jesus, the church began in weakness. Christians only became powerful and influential in the fourth century, when the emperor Constantine declared Christianity to be the religion of the Roman Empire. Now we are seeing what Hall calls the “disestablishment” of Christianity, as the institutional church grows weaker and the church ceases to be a major cultural force. And yet, contrary to what we might think, in losing its power, prestige, and wealth, in again becoming dissociated from the social and political rulers, the church is – finally – following more closely in the footsteps of its founder.

And what of ourselves? Where is Jesus leading us? How do we take up our cross and follow him? In Falling Upward, Richard Rohr, a Franciscan writer whose work I admire greatly, suggests that, in the first half of our lives, our task is to create a strong self-identity. We immerse ourselves in finding our vocations, our life partners, our preferred religious communities, our ethical systems, and our places in the world. But there comes a time, for most people as they approach the second half of life, when we must endure what Rohr calls “necessary suffering.”2 We come to realize that the life we have fashioned for ourselves is insufficient and shallow. We can try to duplicate or strengthen our old lives – an effort that is exhausting and ultimately futile. Or we can let ourselves be pruned by God. Pruning is surely painful for trees and for us. But, with Jesus, we can embrace our losses, gratefully let go of what has been, and open ourselves to becoming the larger person that God has created us to be. We can let God enable us to give up our self-centeredness, embrace weakness, and begin giving ourselves freely in service of others. We can give up all that we thought we knew or were and let ourselves be transformed by God into something very different.

For that is exactly the good news in Jesus’ explanation of what being his disciple means. Did you hear that last phrase in Jesus’ teaching? “Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” Perhaps nobody really heard that part of Jesus’ teaching. Certainly, as we watch the behavior of Jesus’ first disciples, as Mark portrays them, it is clear that they did not understand what Jesus was saying. We are on the other side of Easter, yet we too most likely miss Jesus’ promise that death must always give way to new life. Many church historians believe that the church is not merely declining but is beginning to arise in new forms. Just as those who lived through the Reformation could not see what the outcome of that great movement would be, we do not as yet know what the church will look like a hundred years from now. We only know it will be reborn and different. It is the same for us. God willing, as we continue to let God do God’s work within us, as we let go of old certainties and embrace new uncertainties, we can be sure that, by God’s grace, we are becoming the people God created us to be.

Following Jesus is the work of a lifetime. There will be pain, there will be pruning, there will be the death of much of what we hold dear. We have been forewarned. Only let our prayer continue to be, “Where he leads me I will follow, I’ll go with Him, with Him, all the way.”

1. Marsha Snulligan Haney, “Pastoral Perspective,” Feasting on the Gospels, Mark, Cynthia A. Jarvis and Elizabeth Johnson, eds. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2014), 250.
2. Richard Rohr, Falling Upward (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011), 11, quoted in Thomas R. Steagald, “Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Gospels, op.cit., 253.