Lent 2 B (1)

Mark 8: 31-38

Twenty -five years ago this spring, I made my first trip to Europe. It was wonderful in many ways, not least because it was an extended exercise in the unexpected. I spent six weeks in Milan as part of a tour for the musical group and, as luck would have it, came down with the flu in the only city in Italy without an English-speaking doctor. I went to see Da Vinci's The Last Supper, only to find it covered with scaffolding and under renovation. The highlight, as it turned out, was the Duomo, the Renaissance cathedral in the center of the city, which was so crowded with breathtaking statuary and frescoes that, once inside, I wished I was able to see in about four directions at once.

The same is true of living into our lectionary tradition: it compels us to try to look in several ways at the same time. We have heard just a few weeks ago about Jesus speaking on a mountaintop with Moses and Elijah, the two central figures from the Hebrew scriptures. In the passage immediately before the one we have just heard, Peter has just confessed to Jesus' own identity as the Messiah, the Son of God. Between the confession and the manifestation of the identity of Jesus, he turns and rebukes his disciples for being more concerned with things of this world than for things of the kingdom that are happening around them, with the assurance that the way to the kingdom will include suffering, not only for him but for all who take their cross to follow him.

But first, he turns and looks at them. There is so little detail in Mark, especially about the about the relationship between Jesus and those closest to him, but it is easy to feel the intensity of the moment, the seconds going by as he looks at these men who want so deeply to believe in this stranger among them, who has healed the lame and the paralyzed, exorcised demons, one whose personal power and authority appears without limits. What they have not heard is about suffering, the suffering of all of us that is made holy by his engagement in our condition, one who sees power not through the things of this world but through the events of our lives. In this central scene of Mark's gospel, he turns and looks at them before predicting their suffering, which will echo his own, the cross that is at the heart of their discipleship. In looking at them, before he has said a word, his face has been set towards Jerusalem, towards a mystery that engages us all.

Lent is a time we give towards turning, when if we allow it, our lives are taken apart and reassembled, piece by piece, through a God who sees us and knows us more deeply than we know ourselves. To turn and to look is is where we find our identities as disciples and the interior work to which we are all summoned this season. At the same time, we are invited to carry that work into the world, to look not only vertically at our relationship with God but horizontally, to see and to give ourselves to the work of God in the lives of those around us.

The French mystic Simone Weil, who gave her life to the idea of looking, especially to those she felt were on the cross, had an unusual way of expressing our encounter with God in the lives of others. “Sin,” she says, “is not a matter of distance from God; it is turning our gaze in the wrong direction.” For her, the ability to look, to really look at moments of human dereliction was a miracle. I was reminded of this thought last week when our family was looking at pictures of children from Uganda to sponsor. The looks of the children from the pictures on the back of the laminate sheets hardly made necessary the biographies printed on the other side, stories of parents lost to war and AIDS, families separated, kids going through more in a few short years than most of us will experience in a lifetime. They all begged the question that Weil asks of the afflicted, that the love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him, “What are you going through?”. It is this question that is at the heart of Jesus' idea of the cross, that part of what we bear is the awareness of the burdens that others around us are carrying, that the paradox of a life saved for the sake of the gospel means the willingness to offer our attention to those whose own suffering is great.

I remember another trip to another cathedral many years later in 2003, this time to St. John the Divine in upper Manhattan. It was after the fire they had had two years before, and half the the church was closed for restoration; the high altar was obscured, and all that was really visible were the niches on either side and a large sheet in the middle of the nave, with chairs for daily mass positioned in front of a makeshift altar. The elaborately-carved niches and side chapels near the main altar were unavailable that day, but what I could see was a small,very unassuming chapel on my left, one given to the victims of what had happened on a September morning in another part of that city the year of the fire. There were clothes, letters to the families of the victims. And there were pictures, some with names at the bottom, even a few with phone numbers asking if anyone had seen their brother or husband or sister. And all I or anyone else could do was look, to look and only imagine what the cross meant to the people who put those items there.

To turn our gaze in the right direction, to give ourselves to the work of asking, “What are you going through,” is only possible because of the presence of a suffering Messiah at the center of our lives. Like Peter and the rest, we have a hard time seeing our discipleship through the lens of the cross, that contained in the moments of our own dereliction is the promise of our salvation, ours and the world we encounter every day. And it is a miracle indeed, because if we keep our eyes open, moment-by moment, the promise is that we will see the living Christ looking back at us.