22nd Sunday

Without trust, truth cannot emerge.

22nd Sunday

Jer. 20.7-9; Rom. 12.1-2; Mt. 16.21-27.

What we have in these three very grim, even menacing readings are intimations of the inherently tragic view of life, of the human condition, that comes out of the Jewish and the Christian heritage. We really don't want to believe it. We want to say, "Ah, well. Tomorrow will be better." "Time heals all wounds." "We can manage." "I'll try hard."

But the word here is "No": I'm not going to be better. And at an absolutely certain, foundational level, we human beings are not going to make it, together. We have Jeremiah in great pain because he has to tell his fellow Jews that they're not making it. That they're failing, failing in their humanity. This is the crucial notion of sin among the Jews. Sin is always deformity. A deformity of one's humanness. A failure to hit the mark of one's humanness.

Paul, late in the letter to the Romans says "Don't be conformed to this world." What is "this world"? The normal world, that is fear-driven, self-seeking. He says avoid it. Then this stunning passage. If you just finish with 16:9, you say : Oh good. We're all fixed up now. We've got this church, the gates of hell are not going to prevail against that. We have all this, and then what happens? The rock crumbles. It doesn't just crumble, it becomes a stumbling block.

So, all this is very hard. This is precisely the crucial place where the gospel runs into all kinds of opposition in the world, in my life, in the church, everywhere else. Because we always want to say that sooner or later we will manage. With enough good will and enough effort, enough intelligence, enough careful planning, we'll bring it off. And the stark and even terrifying message here is... No. We are not going to bring it off. God will bring it off ultimately, but God will bring it off, we can't. I mean this is nothing more than an expose of such statements as "unless you lose your life you will not find your life." Unless you carry your cross you cannot be my disciple. It's this that we resist so earnestly. I know I do. I mean, I want to have some confidence in myself. "Yeah, Trojcak. Just stick with it man and you can carry this off." Uh-uh. Because the psychologists seek to enable us to adopt this attitude, and that anything else is a counsel of despair. You're going to collapse. You're going to be useless. You're not going to have any energy. Well, from the Christian point of view, the matter is anything but that simple.

So what I would like to do today is to go through this passage from Matthew to see what exactly he’s after because I've been talking in generalities so far.

In a word: where does the cross hit? The extraordinary thing about the figure of Jesus as it comes both out of the tradition, out of the lives of the saints, the scriptures, is that He seemed to have been uniquely capable of trusting people. Therefore he entrusted himself to people too because trusting and being trusted are simply the same phenomenon seen from different angles. He trusted people. He trusted Peter with his identity and notice how Peter came to know Jesus’ identity. If you remember from last Sunday's reading, Peter could only know who Jesus was by the grace of God. "Flesh and blood does not reveal this to you but my Father who is in heaven...... " That's what it means. Our vision, our capacity to receive another one, is also the work of the grace of God. Otherwise, we keep slipping by each other or taking the part for the whole, or somehow deforming what we believe is our trust in each other.

So Jesus trusted himself to Peter, and of course, Peter blows it. So here is one instant of our incapacity. To really, receive the other, to fully receive the other is to take them absolutely in their own reality, in the fullness of their reality. Not to filter out those parts that we don't like. This is exactly what Peter did: deny that Jesus was to be a crucified Messiah. No. The Greek word here is extremely strong - rebuke. That is the way you talk to a little kid. "Listen! What's wrong with you? You can't do that!" Peter rebuked Jesus. "What are you? A boob? A bonehead? This is not going to happen." And then Jesus rebukes Peter, calls him Satan.

So, this is the problem. Jesus entrusts himself to Peter and it blows up. Now, Jesus certainly entrusted himself to other people and got killed. That's why he got killed. And so trust is very dangerous, as we all know anyway. To entrust yourself to somebody else.

But apart from all that, there's an enormously telling linguistic connection between the words "trust" and "truth". Linguistically they came from a common root. Without trust, truth cannot emerge. Without trust, truth cannot emerge. The truth of myself. The truth of the other. Who we really are. And that's why T.S. Eliot, who was no mean Christian, could say, in Murder in the Cathedral, that "Human beings can't stand too much reality." And we can't. We live in "Forrest Gump City". As a friend of mine describes London. "Where never is heard a discouraging word and the skies are not cloudy all day." And this is not just true of London, Ontario. This is the world in which we live.

Do not be conformed to this world, we are told. In other words, what these texts are doing is what they always do then push us back into ourselves further than we'd rather go. To see ultimately, our own resourcelessness. "Apart from me you can do nothing"... We hear over this and over in the gospel. in the Bible, God's ways are not my ways. Cut off from me you are useless, feckless. And it's essential for us to hear this because we are constantly tailoring , adjusting this. We're constantly saying... Well, so much. But not all the way. We want to reserve these little corners of ourselves where we don't have to make ourselves absolutely vulnerable to God or to each other. And the starkness, and the terrifying power, yet the beautifying message of these texts, is that it is possible in God. This is a great theme pervading the Bible. For example after Jesus said "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich person to enter the kingdom." Peter asked, "Well, who can be saved?" And Jesus says that with human being this is impossible but with God all things are possible.

So this is tough, but this is the real stuff. And everything else that does not grow out of this stark and tragic vision of human life is ersatz, some terrible delusion. Because we don't live in Forrest Gump City. Nice guys, in fact, don't win ball games. They get nailed to a cross.

My typical response is to blind myself to this and to keep working under some illusion that it will somehow be okay that somehow, I’ll muddle through. This illusion works both on an individual and collective level.

With the churches we call it triumphalism. What's triumphalism? Triumphalism is the belief that we can manage all by ourselves. God can give us an initial nudge and then we're rolling downhill and picking up speed and getting better and better and bigger and bigger and that we're going to manage it.

But faith demands that we ask: is the church ready to lose it's life for the sake of the world, for the sake of its election, by God. Indeed there's a terrible, tension built in here. How can you have a religion that's ready to sacrifice itself? Yet how can you have an institution that's going to call itself religious, if it's not ready to sacrifice itself? It's the same problem for me. How can I be a human being who's fundamental impulse is to self-preservation yet be ready to sacrifice myself?

The only thing that differentiates this from a kind of recipe for neurosis, or worse, is the conviction that we really are loved by God. And being loved by God, all things do become possible. That's the stunning instance of all these men and women, the saints, who make this whole thing credible, plausible. Francis of Assisi. a man who was certainly not interested in institutionalizing his own life, who married lady poverty and was ready to have the whole thing fall apart if need be. And then Brother Elias gets elected after Francis' death... Now, by God, we've got to get organized here. We've got to have brown uniforms for everybody to wear etc, etc.

And so I was really shocked when a Franciscan friend of mine told me, a number of years ago, "I don't care if the order dies." He was right. Because the order is not to exist for itself. The order exists for God. I don't exist for myself. I exist for God. So, here we are at the edge of mystery again. Yet that's the only authentic place for us to be if we say that we are Christians. Everything else is some kind of fakery, and God knows there has been plenty of that around. And still is around. We need to clear our eyes. Clear our minds and our hearts with this astringent Isaiah, Paul, Matthew.......Jesus.

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