“The Problem with the Disciples”

a sermon by

Dr. William P. Wood

First Presbyterian Church Charlotte, North Carolina

Holy Week April 16, 2003

Text: “All of them deserted him and fled” (Mark 14:50).

There is a riddle in Mark’s gospel, which has to do with the role of Jesus’ disciples. On the one hand, the disciples play a very positive role. The ministry of Jesus begins with the call of the disciples. He goes by the Sea of Galilee where Simon and Andrew are fishing with their nets. Jesus says, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” The same is true with James and John. They left and followed.

Moreover, the disciples stay with Jesus from Galilee, to Caesarea Philippi, to Jerusalem. Peter reminded Jesus of this when he said, “We have left everything and followed you.” And they had.

I.

But in spite of this more positive picture of the disciples, there is yet another one, which is negative in outlook. As Paul Achtemeier puts it in his little book, Mark, “If there is any progression in the picture Mark paints of the disciples, it appears to be from bad to worse.”

This shift in Mark’s gospel is a shift from the misunderstanding of Jesus to a rejection of him. In the early chapters of Mark’s gospel, the disciples don’t seem to understand what this is about. Granted, the demons recognize him as the Son of God (Mark 1:24, 34). Moreover, the crowd that surrounds him recognizes him as one with authority and responds to him in a positive way. The women who follow along with him also respond to him. They are faithful to the end.

The disciples, however, do not get the point. Jesus speaks to them in parables. Over and over again he explains to them in private (4:10; 7:18; 9:28), but they fail to understand what he is saying.

Then there is a dramatic shift that occurs in Mark’s gospel as the disciples move from misunderstanding to rejection. This occurs at Caesarea Philippi. Here Peter says to Jesus, “You are the Christ.” But when Jesus goes on to say that it is necessary for the Christ to suffer, Peter rebukes him and forces Jesus to say, “Get thee behind me Satan.”

Then there begins a massive rejection of Jesus. Judas betrays him. Peter denies him. James and John fall asleep with Jesus in Gethsemane, unable to watch for even one hour. Perhaps the saddest verse in Mark’s gospel is found after Jesus’ arrest in the place of Gethsemane. “And they all forsook him, and fled.”

II.

This, then, is the problem with the disciples. They do not want a messiah that must suffer and die and neither do we. That is why the Gospel of Mark reminds us over and over again that following Jesus inevitably involves us in self-denial, taking up a cross, and coming after Christ.

This is the real scandal of Christ. The disciples will follow a great miracle worker. They will follow a great teacher. They can follow a person who heals people and brings comfort. What they cannot take is a Jesus who turns his face to Jerusalem and invites them to do the same.

That, I think is one of the reasons Mark downplays the resurrection in his gospel. It is not that he does not believe. He does. Nor is it that it is not important for him. It is. Rather, it is that Mark’s mission is to remind his fellow Christians that following Jesus inevitable makes demands on all of us, and that if that is true, then one cannot understand the resurrection apart from Christ’s suffering.

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III.

What was true in Mark’s time is true in our time as well. There is a popular brand of religion on the market these days that is determined to sell the biblical tradition as a religion that works. All that one has to do to avail oneself of this brand of religion is to turn on the radio or television set. On the air one hears and sees bright, attractive, well-dressed people testifying as to what God has done for them, what benefits they have received, or how successful they have become since they became Christians. To be fair, nine times out of ten, the “glory,” if by that you mean the credit is given to God. Rarely does the testifier take credit for anything. Yet underneath the words there is a deceptive egocentricity about this kind of religion, certainly a kind of “quid pro quo” if it were obvious that this religious faith really pays off.

That is the problem with so much preaching today. It is too trite, to glib, and too easy to be true. As John Killinger once pointed out, it is preaching without anguish, without any sense of life’s tragic dimensions. It is preaching that exudes answers without ever having stumbled on the hard questions.

That is why as we come to Holy Week 2003 I want to raise two areas in which our discipleship is being tested. The first has to do with the war in Iraq. As we come to the end of the severe fighting in that nation, we are all aware that we are moving into a new realm of history. Thomas Friedman, writing this week in the New York Times, speaks of three walls that America faces in the Mideast. The first is a 20-foot high dirt berm around Iraq’s southern port of Umm Qasr--the first wall to fall in the liberation of Iraq. It was a sand wall, not much to look at, and it fell quickly before the might of the American military. The second wall is more difficult. It is the wall of the Arab mind, a wall that consists of the terrible animosity that many Arabs feel at what they consider the invasion of Iraq by the Coalition forces. That wall will take time to bring down.

The third wall has to do with the Palestinian/ Israel conflict. It is a wall of cement, fear and barbed wire that has been erected between the Israelis and the Palestinians. If we cannot find a way to break down this wall, then the second wall will continue to stand.

As a nation, we are entering a difficult period in which a great deal is at stake for our community and our nation. There are many walls that have been built in this country and abroad: walls of race, walls of economic privilege, walls of hopelessness and despair. The Apostle Paul, in writing to the church at Ephesus says of Jesus that he is “our peace, and has broken down the walls of hostility that divide us.” Part of the mission of the church is to bring down the walls that divide us. The second area has to do with the question of following Jesus in our own lives. One of the greatest Christian witnesses in our time has been the life of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who for many years before her death worked among the poorest of the poor in the terrible squalor of that city. On October 19, 2003, Mother Teresa of Calcutta will be beatified in Rome. In a time in which the church has been traumatized by scandal after scandal the life of Mother Teresa shines as a beacon of hope.

1st Presbyterian Church Page 3 April 27, 2003 That is why I read with interest excerpts of her life that have been published recently by a Roman Catholic scholar in his book The Soul of Mother Teresa: Hidden Aspects of Her Interior Life. In this book her biographer points to decisive events in her life that occurred throughout the years 1946-1947. In the early part of 1946 she had a profound religious experience in which she experienced the presence of Christ and the call of Christ to her missionary work in Calcutta. Then after that enormously positive experience, she experienced something quite different. Suddenly she confessed to her spiritual adviser that she began to have feelings of doubt, loneliness, and abandonment. God seemed to her absent, heaven was empty, and the bitterest of all, her own suffering seemed to count for nothing.

There is something both comforting and discomforting in Mother Teresa’s “dark night of the soul.” When asked how she managed to continue the difficult work of the Sisters of Mercy in the midst of such spiritual pain, she replied that she was able to convert her feeling of abandonment by God into an act of abandonment to God. It would be, she said, her act of Gethsemane, and her participation in Good Friday.

These are times in which we may be particularly tempted to think we can have Christianity without a cross. But it is times like these when we need to hear again the words of the one who said, “ If anyone will come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me.”

May God keep us from slithering along the path of least resistance. Amen.

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