I have mentioned before how I grew up with a pack of semi feral free range boys.
Looking back I see we had this pattern of building things and then blowing them up.
I still live with that.
When I can get to the beach I like to build tall spiring sand castles with multiple layers of gothic arches and then watch it melt away in the tide, that is if the children on the beach don’t stomp it flat first.
Order and Disorder.
Harmony and dissonance.
Cosmos and Chaos.
Building up and tearing down.
The birth of a child and the death of a star.
The awesome destructive power of a hurricane and the inspiring creative power of relief agencies , human compassion and human ingenuity.
“She orders all things well”. The final line from the Canticle this morning from the book of Wisdom. “She orders all things well.”
It is a poem about wisdom as a force of divine intention that holds all things together, the counteracting force to the impulses of destruction that destroy the world.
For early Christian’s that ancient wisdom of God, God’s Holy Wisdom, is the Word become flesh, Jesus the Messiah.
Jesus is the way of God in a world of pain that tears itself apart, the wisdom and the word that speaks the world back together.
Peter confesses Jesus as this Anointed power of God present in the world that orders all things well.
Just how does the way of God pull the world back together? Aye there’s the rub. That is what Peter disagreed with Jesus about.
The Cross. The way of God in the world.
Jesus says to pick up the cross, not the sword.
For Mark’s Gospel the Cross is the consequence of living the way of peace, the Way of God, the way of Holy Wisdom. To carry the cross is to accept the consequence of living the way of God in a world that preys on the vulnerable and the weak.
Often we think and speak of carrying the cross as representing suffering in general, like an illness or an injury.
But it is more specific than that. The cross is about how we live with the inevitable suffering that comes from living the way God, living with the divine things, in a world caught up in self destruction.
The lie the world is caught up in is that if we kill all the bad guys then everything will be better.
The way of God is different than that, it endures, it absorbs, it dies living the way of peace.
That is the cross of Jesus, not the Messiah that Peter wanted, the Messiah who killed all the bad guys, but the Messiah who suffers.
This is about more than war and murder and abuse, the things we usually think of when we think of violence and peace. It is about the violence of every day actions, words and thoughts directed against each other and our selves. The festering storm that keeps bursting out of our hearts.
This is not about the abstractions of geo political strategies. This is about the ordinary lives of ordinary people and how we live the way of peace on ordinary days. That is what builds the world back up.
How do we build one another up? How do we tear one another down?
Some people say that the Gospel is about becoming healthy and wealthy if we give God something in return. The Health and Wealth Gospel.
Mark’s Gospel is not that.
Mark is about suffering and what we do with it.
Lash out or build up?
The cross calls us into a crises, to confront the violence that lives in us, that we pass along, to forsake that lie and to gain our souls back.
The cross exposes the lies that we wrap around ourselves.
The resurrection reveals how the world really works, it reveals the way of God, the anointed one, that orders all things well.
It is the Jesus way, and we are the Jesus people.
When the world tears itself apart, we are those who pick up our crosses and build it back.
Jesus is that power entering the world showing that love really does make the world go round.