Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 6, 2008

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Last Tuesday a fellow who attends our men’s group, a very nice guy who is a friend of one of our members and who is a very conservative Christian, got us to watch a video presentation by a Biblicist Christian who styles himself a world-renowned Bible scholar, though in my mind he is no legitimate scholar at all. This very energetic and glib fellow on the video was trying to convince us that God is the author of the Bible. Now, you can believe that as a matter of faith (although if you do, let me give you a copy of Chapter 7 of my forthcoming book); but this man’s arguments, like all logical arguments for the proposition that God wrote the Bible, are convincing only to someone who already accepts that conclusion. Anyone who doesn’t, who has reasonably well-developed critical faculties, and who knows even the most basic conclusions of the higher contemporary Biblical criticisms, will find these arguments specious and transparently false.

One of the arguments that he advanced is the transparently false assertion that the Bible contains no contradictions. The Bible contains so many contradictions that one hardly knows where to begin to list them all. The example this speaker gave, and the way he tried to explain it away, are illustrative of the mental gymnastics that Biblicists go through in their desperate effort to cling to their untenable belief that the Bible contains no contradictions. He pointed out that one version of the death of Judas—something there is good reason not to take literally in the first place—says that he hanged himself. Another version says he threw himself off a cliff and his bowels burst open on the rocks below. A contradiction, you say? Why not at all! Clearly what happened is that he hanged himself on a tree leaning out from a cliff, the tree broke, and Judas crashed to the rocks below. Never mind that neither version of the story says that. We must believe this to be true because otherwise the Bible contains a contradiction, and that we good Biblicists cannot allow. The argument is pure sophistry, but never mind.

That being said, there are in fact some passages in the Bible that at first blush appear to be contradictions that in fact turn out not to be. We’ve got one of those apparent contradictions in our Gospel readings this morning. In Matthew Chapter 10 Jesus says: “Whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” Matthew 10:38-39 In this passage, following Jesus clearly will cost you your life. The life of discipleship is the way of the cross, the way of suffering and death. In this passage, to find your life you have to lose it. These words describe a way that is immensely difficult, a way that is filled with suffering and loss. Yet in the very next chapter of the same Gospel Jesus says: “Come to me…, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you….For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Matthew 11:28-30 We tend to like this one a lot better, don’t we? Here the life of discipleship is easy. The burden is light. There are no great demands. No suffering. No sacrifice. Only promised rest. And we feel like we’re getting whiplash! We’re thrown first in one direction, then in the opposite direction. What are we to do?

We could, of course, simply dismiss these passages as just another contradiction in the Bible and let both of them go. But these passages aren’t about mere facts that don’t matter, like the supposed facts about the suicide of Judas. They are about the nature of the life of Christian discipleship, something that matters a great deal. Neither are they passages from two different authors expressing either differing historical memories or differing theologies. They are both from Matthew, and they’re very close together in Matthew at that. So it seems that we can’t just dismiss them. Or, at least, we have to grapple with them long and hard before we do. So let’s do some grappling.

It seems to me that the way to harmonize these two passages is to find a way in which we can understand the cost of discipleship, i.e., the cross and even dying, as being the same thing as the joy of discipleship, i.e., the rest that Christ promises. We need to find a way in which we can understand the cross and the dying of the first passage as easy, as light, as the rest promised in the second passage.

To do that, I think, we have to understand phrases like “take up the cross” and “those who lose their life for my sake will find it” as metaphors for the life of discipleship rather than as literal demands. But then, around here we say that we take the Bible seriously not literally, so that should be OK. Understood this way, Jesus’ demand is that we die to an old way of being and rise again into a new way of being in Christ. The demand is that we die to the ways of the world, the ways of selfishness, materialism, violence, and idolatry, and rise into the way of Christ, the way of service, spirit, peace, and faith.

Now, that’s not easy. It means giving up much, perhaps most, of what we’ve always been told is the way we’re supposed to live. It means living in a way that the world for the most part rejects, calling it unrealistic, idealistic or even naïve, and ineffective. It means giving up things that are important to us, things like wealth, prestige, acceptance and even the respect of our community. All of that is very difficult indeed.

So how do we get from there to “my yoke is easy and my burden is light”? By doing it, that’s how. It gets easy only when you do it, only when you make the decision, the commitment to do it. Doing it makes it easy because when you make the decision to lose an old way of being, the world’s way of being, you find God. You find Jesus Christ. You find your true self, your true life. Having entered into the cost of discipleship you find the joy. You move from the cross of Matthew 10 to the rest of Matthew 11. You discover nothing less than the joy of dying, the joy of dying to an old, worldly, corrupt way of being and the joy of rising into true being, into being in God.

So in these verses there really is no contradiction, unlike so many other verses in the Bible. Rather, they reflect two sides of the life of discipleship, the cost and the joy. We find the joy only by experiencing the cost. When we do, we discover that the cost really isn’t a cost at all, not looking back at it. What we lose when we take up the cross is only what we need to lose truly to live. That to which we die is only that which is keeping us from life. So welcome to life. It really is worth the cost. Amen.