Reliving The Passion #3 - Reliving the Passion

Mark 14:27–28

And Jesus said to them, “You will all fall away; for it is written, ‘I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered.’ But after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.”

Mark 16:6–7

And he said to them, “Do not be amazed; you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen, he is not here; see the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you.”

Twice—near the beginning and then near the end of Jesus’ passion—the same promise is repeated. It receives an emphasis, then, which makes it thematic in the story itself, and so it can teach us how to approach the passion of our Lord.

I will go (he is going) before you to Galilee. That promise is both a call and a consolation.

Surely it’s meant to be factual: the disciples will in fact meet the resurrected Lord in Galilee.

But since Mark is writing his Gospel for disciples of another time and another place (Christians persecuted in Rome in the latter half of the first century, people who would never see a geographic Galilee) there may lurk another, deeper meaning in the word.

“Galilee” for the Roman Christians (and for us) may refer to the place where Jesus initiated his serious ministry—where his conflicts with the hard world first began. In “Galilee” his enemies appeared and criticized him even for healing and doing good. From this “Galilee” Jesus’ itinerary was south to Judah, up to Jerusalem, where enmity hardened into persecution, up Golgotha even to the cross. Jesus’ personal “going,” then, was a trip through suffering and death to resurrection.

If Jesus “will go before” his disciples from Galilee as he had gone before, then this is a call to follow him down the hard road of conflict, criticism, enmity, persecution, suffering and death and resurrection. So the passion story becomes a roadmap for all of Jesus’ followers (who deny themselves and take up their crosses) whether Christians martyred in the first, or Christians bold in the twentieth, centuries.

Read this story, then, as a detailed itinerary of the disciple’s life.

But hear in it as well the constant consolation—not only that he, in “going before us,” is always near us, however hard the persecution; but also that we, in going his way to Galilee, will see him as he told you. The dearest comfort in this promise is that precisely by taking the Way of the Lord, we will meet the Lord himself. In suffering is he revealed! In the experience of our own crosses is he made manifest. Exactly so were the Christian Romans consoled by Mark’s Good News—the story of Jesus. Exactly so ourselves, in our more distant deserts.

“Jesus has many who love His Kingdom in Heaven,” writes Thomas a Kempis in The Imitation of Christ, “but few who bear his Cross. Many follow Jesus to the Breaking of the Bread, but few to the drinking of the Cup of His Passion. They who love Jesus for His own sake, and not for the sake of comfort for themselves, bless Him in every trial and anguish of heart, no less than in the greatest joy.”

Be cross-bearers, then. These are the truer followers.

From Galilee to Golgotha: first we study the map, the Passion; and then—actually traveling the passionate path ourselves, “going” even as we were called—we will see him too, just as he promised we would.

Master,

Grant me, in the study of your story, both love and faith. Love will make me attentive to all you do. Faith will make me bold to follow you. I beg to see you, O my Savior!

Amen.