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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.
I don’t really have any kind of statistical data or facts to back up what I’m about to say, but I think if you were to take a poll or a survey of a group of people, a group of unbelievers, and you asked them the question, “Why don’t you believe in the triune God?” I think one of the most prevalent answers that you would receive is, “Well, I just can’t believe in a God who allows people to suffer.”
And I think probably also if you asked a group of people who claim and profess to have once believed and now don’t, you’d likely discover that for many of these people, they stopped believing because they had encountered some type of trouble or struggle within their life, and at some point they blame God for it. Which doesn’t really make a lot of sense if you think about it. If you blame God for something, then you obviously believe in him; they just don’t like what he put on it.
Likewise, I think if you were to ask a group of Christians, if you gave them an opportunity to have one question answered about faith, I think right up there with that question, “Will I see my dog in heaven?” would be, “Why does God allow suffering?” In particular, why does God allow the Christian to suffer?
I think this is just simply because we can’t wrap our brains around why, if God professes to love the world so much, if we have confessed faith in Christ, why he doesn’t just stop punishing us? Why he doesn’t remove suffering from our life? That, in and of itself, assumes that suffering is some kind of punishment for something we have either done or we have failed to do. And yet our Heavenly Father tells us something completely different about suffering, and if we would only listen to his word, maybe we can understand it. The suffering is actually for our own good.
I know that that sounds pretty outlandish to most people. It sounds crazy. Like maybe you remember when you were a kid and you got in trouble, and your father or mother, whatever the punishment was, they always added the disqualifier, “I’m doing this for your own good.” Yeah, right. Now, we may think of suffering as punishment because, but really, it’s just part of discipline. It is discipline.
Discipline is something that is used to shape our behavior. It is used to keep us on a path going somewhere, or in this instance, in our case, oriented on someone. We also have to remember that everyone suffers. And yet, the Christian suffers in a much different way and for a much different reason than the unbeliever does.
In doing so, in suffering the way of the Christian, the Christian is going to come to experience a joy that the unbeliever will never have. I feel like we’re in good company with our inability to understand this, to question it, to doubt, to have uncertainty about why we suffer, and really what it means to be a follower of Christ in some instances.
In our gospel lesson from St. Luke, we hear this confession of St. Peter, that Peter, that Jesus is the Christ; he is the Messiah. And this is, of course, it’s a breakthrough. It’s the first confession that anyone has said about Jesus, about who Jesus truly is. But I don’t really want us to focus on that, on the confession part of that, because although it’s important, it’s also what Jesus says afterwards that’s really what we know and understand about what it means to confess Christ.
Because in this moment, Peter and the rest of the disciples and the multitude of the crowd that Jesus will pull into there, they’re about to learn this true lesson about what it means to be in the kingdom of God and what it means to be a disciple. In doing so, this gives us what we should expect as the life of a Christian.
Now we do have to talk a little bit about Peter’s confession, and it is this remarkable confession, and one of the remarkable things about it is it doesn’t happen in a synagogue, it doesn’t happen in the temple, it doesn’t happen in Jerusalem. It doesn’t happen even in the confines of Judea. It happens way up there north in this kind of, you know, mostly Gentile, mostly pagan area of Caesarea Philippi.
As we heard a couple of weeks ago with the Sermon on the Transfiguration, Jesus was up there kind of out of the area where he could go and spend some time alone with his disciples to teach them and to train them. For the disciples, this teaching moment first comes on the heels of this reproof that Jesus has to give to Peter, for Peter’s own rebuke of Christ about his words, about his pending passion.
And of course, to be sure we know, this had to shock the disciples that they heard this; that they’ve heard this revelation of what Jesus’ fate is really going to be, because Mark tells us today that Jesus said it plainly. He wasn’t, at least he wasn’t in this time, speaking in a parable, he wasn’t mincing words; he was speaking clear terms about what was going to occur.
Peter, as we know, is often impetuous, he’s often quick to say things, and so he sort of blurts out this rebuke to Jesus. Mark doesn’t tell us what Peter said; Matthew does. He says, to the effect of, “Far be it from you, Lord, this is not going to happen to you.” And no sooner than he got the words out, Jesus gives his rebuke, and I’m sure Peter was reaching to grab the words and bring them back into his mouth.
But Jesus takes this opportunity not just to rebuke Peter; that’s not what this is about. He wants to use his words as a teaching moment. So he doesn’t even entertain the doubt in Peter’s mind. He doesn’t say, “Well, Peter, I don’t understand,” or, “Peter, what do you mean by that?” He doesn’t even do that. Instead, he says, “Get thee behind me, Satan.”
Then he turns around to the disciples, and he sees the crowd, and he calls them to join into this discussion because these words aren’t going to be just for the disciples; they’re going to be for everyone, as they are for us today. Of course, Jesus knows that even though these disciples have been with him for some time, and now, you know, kind of under this captaincy of Peter, they have all confessed him as the Christ, they still don’t really know what that confession means, and they really won’t get it until they’re in the upper room with Jesus after his resurrection.
As I said, they don’t really know what this confession implies. They don’t know why Jesus has told them to not tell anyone, but the reason that he told them not to tell anyone about him is he doesn’t want them to spread these false ideas that they have about what his mission and his work really is. He doesn’t want them to feed into the people’s desire to have this Messiah who will rule over an earthly kingdom, and so that’s why he brings the crowd into this discussion.
We’ve heard these words of Jesus many, many times: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” And we think, well, that sounds pretty easy. That is until we realize what self-denial and cross-bearing really are, and they’re not what we thought they would be.
Self-denial is more than, oh perhaps committing to some type of Lenten fast, which generally usually we’re not very good at keeping anyway. No, taking up your cross is more than just putting up with some type of minor inconvenience or doing something we don’t want to do. Self-denial and cross-bearing mean suffering for the sake of Christ and for the gospel. It could mean various things. It could mean being shunned in your social circle. It could mean losing a friend who now wants nothing to do with you because you don’t condone their lifestyle. It could be estrangement from your family because your faith conflicts with their social or political views. It could mean leaving or, God forbid, losing your job because of your beliefs.
And really, ultimately, these are trivial sufferings because we know, as Christians in the other parts of the world know, that many of them are killed by the enemies of the gospel for their faith. Now, honestly, the likelihood that we are going to be asked to give up our mortal life for our faith is pretty minuscule. And though Jesus tells the disciples many times that they will be persecuted, they will be beaten, they will even be killed for his namesake, here, Jesus is not talking about their mortal lives. He’s talking about spiritual death. He’s talking about the forfeiture of their souls.
This is what Jesus means when he says, “Whoever would save his life will lose it,” for to gain the whole world is to desire those things that the world offers: money, wealth, power, knowledge, security, comfort. To seek acceptance in a world hostile to the gospel means that you are now willing to give your life over to the same world, to deny this way of Christ rather than to deny yourself.
“No,” Jesus says. Instead, we must be ready to suffer. We must expect that we will suffer. But St. Paul tells us that because we are now righteous, because we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. And that word peace, to mean that we now have peace, implies that at one time we were hostile to God. We were part of this rebellion. We were enemies of God. We were the ungodly. And yet, even in our state of rebellion, in our state of unbelief, Christ died for us—the righteous for the unrighteous. He suffered for us, though we esteemed him not.
Now, Paul says here, “We’ll barely suffer for somebody we like, much less die for them.” It may be only if we think they deserve it. But in this depth of love that God has for us, he became man to die for us, to turn away his very own wrath and save us in our own unworthiness. So through Christ, God has reconciled us to himself.
This reconciliation, as Paul says, is the peace that God’s wrath has now put away, and this relationship that we had prior to the fall has been restored. This sounds crazy. Paul says that because we are now in this state of grace, we can rejoice in suffering. And that is foolishness to the world. “You want me to suffer on purpose for no good reason? No, thank you.”
But earlier I said that Christian suffering looks different than the suffering of the unbeliever. Our suffering doesn’t mean God is angry with us. It doesn’t mean he’s embarrassed by something we did. It doesn’t mean that he’s turned his back on us. It doesn’t mean that he’s refusing to hear us. No, we are being disciplined in our suffering.
I don’t want anybody to think that this is discipline as in punishment. It’s discipline as in being trained for something, as in being trained to have a certain kind of outlook or mindset. I like to think about how an athlete trains their mind and body to overcome weakness and pain and fatigue to build stamina. I don’t think that you would just show up to the game or show up to the track meet or whatever one day and expect that you would win if you hadn’t trained, if you hadn’t put in the time.
If you’re an athlete, if you’ve been a member of a team or anything like that, you know that training often means suffering with sweat, pain, and maybe sometimes even a little blood. But the suffering is part of the discipline. It is the discipline. Paul uses similar language here when he says the suffering produces endurance.
So we suffer for the sake of Christ and for our justification in Him. Luther, and Paul is really, you know, basically paraphrasing what Luther said, that the righteous one, the one who is justified because his life is spiritual, he has peace with God, but hostility with the world. And so the unrighteous one, because his life is worldly and carnal, he has peace with the world, but he has hostility with God.
We must remember that since this world is temporal, the peace that the unrighteous man has and the suffering that the righteous man has is temporary, but that the suffering of the unrighteous and the peace of the righteous will be eternal. Christ suffered for us and now he calls us to suffer for his sake. The psalmist writes, “The Lord tests the righteous, and for you, O God, have tested us. You have tried us as silver is tried.”
In testing us, God removes from us our trust in everything but him, so that we look to him alone for our comfort, for our assurance, and of course for our salvation, so that we will draw nearer to him and that we will know that he alone is the one who is in command and charge of our sufferings.
So suffering in and of itself is not good. It is what comes out of suffering that is good. It is this hope of the glory of God that Paul writes about. One more Luther quote. Luther said about this: “Without trials, a person can neither know scripture nor faith, nor can he fear and love God. If he has never suffered, he cannot understand what hope is.” And hope brings joy, but it is not a joy that comes from within ourselves because our flesh is weak. It’s a joy that comes only by the work of the Holy Spirit.
This is the only way, the only way that our suffering makes any kind of sense at all, is that we know that it comes as a gift of faith. But the world says, “No.” The world says, “I don’t need all that.” And sadly, some Christians say the same. They say, “No.” They say, “No, the Christian doesn’t have to suffer, mustn’t suffer, doesn’t need to suffer. God doesn’t want that for you,” and that is this dangerous theology of glory that makes us then look away from the cross? It leads away from the cross.
Peter averted his eyes from the cross when he rebuked Jesus after this confession. He would do it again, as we heard two weeks ago on the Mount of Transfiguration. And of course, he denied his own Savior three times. But Jesus corrected him with love and with this desire to teach Peter what it meant to be a true disciple. We have to know that Peter, he finally got it. He learned this, for he would later write, “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed.”
So brothers and sisters, what does the Christian have to say about suffering? Simply that Jesus suffered for us and for our salvation. In our baptism, we were buried with him so that our suffering is his and his is ours. When we suffer, we have this tendency to want to flee from God. Sometimes it’s out of embarrassment, as I said before, that we think that we have let God down or that he’s angry with us or that he’s somehow punishing us. Sometimes we flee from anger because we’re mad at God; we think we don’t deserve this suffering that we’re getting.
In fact, when suffering comes upon us, we should be doing the very opposite. We should flee for refuge to his infinite mercy, seeking and imploring his grace. We should turn to him in prayer, we should jump headfirst into his Word, we should come to receive his body and blood for the strengthening of our faith and for the forgiveness of our sins.
In our times of suffering, we think on the one who suffered all for us, whose own bitter sufferings and death, even though we were yet sinners, delivered us from our own sin and from the power of death and the devil. When we find ourselves in a time of suffering, we look to the cross for strength and know that Jesus gladly, gladly suffered the shame of that cross and of that death so that we can have eternal life.
So brothers and sisters, you are justified by faith in Christ. Because you are justified, you’re reconciled to God, reconciled and restored through the vicarious work of Christ. Because you are reconciled, you are saved, and you have peace with God.
May this peace, which surpasses all understanding, guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.
