The Hour
Mark 14:32-42
Click here to view the full sermon video, titled "The Hour"
Today we embark on a seasonal departure from the cycle of shared readings that we usually draw from in Sunday worship. Maybe you’ve had the experience of talking to a friend who goes to a Catholic, or Methodist, or Lutheran church about the reading from a particular Sunday and they share that they heard the same scripture at their church. It isn’t an accident, or happenstance. It’s something called the Revised Common Lectionary. We’ve talked about this before . After the second Vatican council of the 1960’s gave rise to the ecumenical movement, in which we looked past some of the differences of Christian practice to see all that we have in common, the three-year common lectionary, or cycle of readings was created. For the most part it has served us well. Not only does lectionary preaching force preachers and those who listen to them to consider a broader sample of scripture than they might otherwise, it has the added bonus of putting Christians of many traditions on the same page- literally.
The downside of this practice is that even a three-year cycle that includes a reading from Hebrew scripture, a reading from the letters to the early church, and a reading from the Gospels, doesn’t come close to covering the whole of scripture in Sunday worship. The other downside is that sometimes the lectionary avoids hard texts, texts that challenge our faith in a good and loving God. And there may be no harder text to hear and consider than the narrative of what is known as the Passion. That is, the story of Jesus’ last 24 hours alive on earth, particularly the last 12. As much as forty percent of Mark’s Gospel has to do with the last week of Jesus’ life, and yet very little of that rather essential story gets heard in Sunday worship. The closest we come is a lengthy reading of the whole thing on one Sunday; a reading so vast that to say anything about it requires we do so from 30,000 feet, high enough to take in the breadth of the whole thing.
I suspect this omission is by design. There’s a lyric from the musical Hadestown that offers a helpful corrective to this aversion. Hadestown is a stylized telling of the Greek myth about Orpheus and Eurydice in the underworld. At the outset, the narrator who happens to the messenger god Hermes, sings how it’s a sad song, it’s a tragedy, it’s an old song from way back when but we’re gonna sing it again. Well, the story that leads to Jesus’ crucifixion upon a Roman cross is also a sad old song. And this Lent we’re gonna sing it, or hear it precisely because it is in our nature, or our instinct to turn away from it. It’s too hard. It’s too painful to bear. And while the season of Lent is many things, it is most certainly a season for telling sometimes uncomfortable truths about ourselves. We would love to wash our hands like Pilate and pretend that Jesus’ death is someone else’s fault, that Jesus was killed by someone other than us. But he wasn’t. That’s what makes it such a sad song. The God of Love came in the flesh to open our eyes to this present and powerful grace and mercy that is all around us, to change the way we see ourselves, our homes, our institutions, and this world of God’s making in the light of this powerful love. And we couldn’t take it. We had to kill him for it. It’s a old song. It’s an old sad song. And we’re going to sing it again this Lent.
The last week of Jesus’ life begins with his entry into Jerusalem. We’ll get back to that later, on Palm Sunday. For now, we pick things up in the garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus goes to pray with his disciples after sharing his last meal with them in an upper room. He goes to pray because he knows that it’s all coming to a head and he’s distressed and agitated. Last week we talked about how Jesus understood that the path he was on as God’s own beloved was going to end badly, with suffering, rejection and his own death. At that time he was more upset with Peter’s response to this prediction than by the prediction itself. But then, it’s way easier to talk about the prospect of something than it is to face its reality. It’s one thing to talk about betrayal, it’s another thing to see someone you ate with and slept beside, and walked alongside, and called a friend, it’s another thing to see that person walk out into the night knowing that all of that will soon be betrayed. “I am deeply grieved,” he tells Peter, James and John. The same three who went up the mountain with him. The same three who caught a glimpse of who he truly was in the company of Moses and Elijah. “Even to death,” he says. And then he asks that they stay with him and keep awake.
One of the more unhelpful and unattractive things that people of faith have a habit of doing is passing judgement on who is or isn’t a “real’ Christian. This behavior isn’t unique to the realm of religious identity. I’ve witnessed sports enthusiasts opine on whether or not someone is a true fan of their team based on how supportive they are or are not in any given scenario. The purveyors of partisan politics find they can score easy points by calling into question a rival’s commitment to the platform, or the party leader. Or better yet, if they’re a real American. I did a little poking around on the web and found the website of a self-identified speaker, missionary, podcaster and blogger who suggested that a person shouldn’t call themselves Christian if they don’t consider the Bible to be the infallible Word of God and our final guide for living. Infallible? Really? In what way? Infallible scientifically? Because it’s a document that at its youngest is 1900 years old. And a final guide for living in what way? In the way of ancient near-eastern cultures in which having multiple wives was an accepted practice? Or in the way of first-century Greek culture that had its own system of human slavery? Now, to be fair, I’ve heard these kinds of judgements come from very liberal believers as well. How can you call yourself a Christian, they demand, if you don’t support this justice issue, or oppose that government policy? I’ve heard people say, “How can you be pro-choice and call yourself a Christian?’ and, “how can you be anti-immigration?” “How can you be or accept someone who is gay? How can you support someone who is a bigot? All this conjecture, all of this judgement conveniently forgets this story. Because all of that other stuff aside, how can one call themselves a disciple of Jesus when the Lord himself in his distress practically begs them to stay with him and keep awake only to fall asleep?
Jesus begs God for another outcome- let the hour pass, remove this cup of destiny- and then returns only to find the people he trusts the most asleep. He even calls Peter out on it, reverting to the name he went by before meeting Jesus, Simon. Again, he urges him to keep awake and pray for a different outcome. But Peter can’t do it. He can’t do it the first time, and he can’t do it the second time. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. If ever there was a phrase for what the season of Lent is about, what the season of Lent demonstrates is that the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. That is what we learn first-hand by fasting, by seeking to remove certain things, certain habits, certain hungers from our lives. I want to be clear about this. Eating chocolate is not a sin. Consuming anything with some sense of moderation is not a sin any more than sleeping is. In fact both eating and sleeping are essential. But we can recognize in our hunger and appetites and sleepiness something of our own nature, or to use the word Jesus uses something in our own flesh, that is weak. Something that is vulnerable to the whispers, fatigue and temptations that try us and cause us to fall short. And we can no more remove sin from our lives than God can remove this cup from Jesus.
Friends, I know this story sounds like bad news. I know it does. The passion doesn’t just catalogue the physical suffering endured by Jesus at the hands of his enemies, it details the emotional and existential betrayal that he experiences at the hands of his friends- even his closest and most trusted friends. It’s a sad song. It’s an old sad song. But it is also good news. Because the failure of discipleship is no obstacle to what the love of God can and will do nonetheless. The point of it isn’t to make us hang our heads and fill us with shame. The point is to assure us that we do not put our faith, we do not put our trust in ourselves. We put our faith in the power of God’s love to overcome and transcend both our success and our failure, our strength and our weakness. To do what God will do not because we were able to stay awake, or if we have fallen asleep, but because God’s love is bigger than all of it. When the hour comes. When it all goes south and we are unable to rise to the challenge, that is the good news. Again, and again, and again.