Suffering Is Not A Surprise

Summary

I am not hip, not even tragically hip. I am less than fashion forward, although I have gained the ability to fall forward well.
A number of years ago, though, I felt hip. I was listening to a young artist, Amy Winehouse. She was current, popular. Her music was a bit of R and B, jazz, hip hop, or so I am told. What distinguished her music was not important to me. I liked it. And I felt hip.
I called my brother who is hip. Jim knows a lot about music, and the music scene. He’s even met Ellen, Ellen DeGeneres, that is. So he has street cred. I expressed to Jim how much I liked the music of Amy Winehouse. This was a big moment for me. Jim and I would converse as peers, exchanging insightful comments about a current artist.
The conversation was a bit of a bust. After expressing my interest, his response was, “Enjoy her while you can.” When I asked why there was such a limitation, Jim said, “She will be dead within a year.”
After we hung up, I remember being a bit disappointed that the conversation took such a dark turn. But then I also felt a strange sense of foreboding. The foreboding was true. Sure enough, Amy Winehouse died within the year.
Looking back, it was not a crystal ball my brother possessed to make such a prediction. Jim knew how the story of Amy Winehouse ends because he had heard the story so many times. Young, brilliant and talented meets success, money, and fame, which unleashes a torrent of demons, drugs, alcohol and bad decisions. These factors equal a life cut short. Winehouse had all these markers at a very high level. Hence the prediction.

This is not to demean his prophetic vision. I didn’t see it; I just liked the music. What would have been surprising, a wilder prediction, would have been: she goes to rehab, she makes it out alive, and lives to see grandchildren. Now that would have been a wild prediction. Self-destruction, it turns out, is highly predictable.
There is a great book on heroin and the opioid crisis that makes this point. The book is called Dreamland. It is truly worth a read. What the book chronicles so well is the inevitable collision of two trains out of control. One train is the drug industry that developed a highly addictive very enjoyable narcotic. This industry had tremendous sway over healthcare, insurance, government agencies, so much sway that they could rewrite a century of best practice by saying, this opioid is not addictive. So people who got a new knee also got a bucket of oxycodone. To everyone’s dismay addictions ensued.
The other train was Mexican drug cartels who developed a very cheap, very powerful, and very transportable drug that took over where the oxycodone stopped. This was coupled with a brilliant distribution and sales strategy. These two trains were moving at enormous speed at each other and crashed head on about twenty years ago.
Now 7000 people die every year, or 200 a day, from heroin overdose in the United States. From the vantage of the street, the hospital, the bathroom medicine cabinet maybe it was hard to see how this could happen. Maybe it was hard to see in the moment. Yet, it is not a mystery. Greed and addiction combined equals disaster. How could greed and addiction not end well?
Our reading today from Mark is a prediction, known as a passion prediction. This is a prediction of the suffering of the Son of Man. And there certainly was suffering. Beating, spitting, crucifying, dying: lots of suffering here. And Jesus says it is going to happen, so there is a prediction of suffering. Yet, in the end, it is not much of a prediction. In fact it is more of an inevitability than a prediction.
Jesus is a Galilean peasant who has just annoyed, then infuriated, and finally humiliated the religious authorities of the day. And these religious authorities have great power in the culture of ancient Palestine. The religious leader is part priest, part lawyer, and part judge. You don’t really mess with these folks. Indeed, Jesus always told the people he healed to go and present themselves to the religious authorities so they may be deemed acceptable in society. That is a lot of power.
Jesus angered and caused these folks tremendous anxiety: this is enough to make the potential of his demise not so much a mystery but a foregone conclusion. You just don’t poke the bear without consequence.
Add to this Jesus was causing a disruption in the market, in the tax system, in the sex trade: he was messing with the money, feeding the poor, healing the sick. You don’t mess with money and not have blowback.
Hence, when he says, hey, I am a Galilean peasant who just enraged all the powers to be and threatened their livelihood, guess what, they are going to hurt me, when he says this, we should answer by saying, “you think?” Of course you are going to suffer and die. And die swiftly. From the time of his arrest to the time of his being nailed to a cross was a bit less than 12 hours. Jesus is betrayed and arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane very late on Thursday, by Friday at noon he is dead.
I say this because his passion prediction is not a long, involved sense of something maybe happening at some point. The passage we are reading today is about a week from his death. He is walking to Jericho and from Jericho to Jerusalem and he will die five days after he arrives.
I want to lift up three things about our reading today; three things to help us see it more clearly. First, you may never have heard this passage. This is not in the lectionary per se. You might have heard this prediction if you sat through a Good Friday service or if you had a pastor who was foolish enough to preach the passion story on Palm Sunday. But this reading may sound strangely unfamiliar.
Secondly, Jesus repeats this passion prediction three times. In the gospels Jesus rarely repeats himself. In fact, this is the only thing Jesus repeats in Mark. This being the only thing that Jesus says over and over means we should really seek to understand this. Jesus can say, “Hey, I told you three times.”
And this repetition is highlighted by how the disciples never get this. Jesus says this three times and they never understand. This is important to reading Mark. He wants us, the church, to hear our confusion, to see our lack of understanding, to be aware that maybe our ideas about Jesus and life and each other are not as sure as we believe.
Lastly, and this is the most important, this is not a passion prediction so much as it is a prediction of rising from the dead. That a peasant who caused problems in ancient Palestine was put to death, not a mystery. That such a person would rise and go ahead of them to Galilee, that is highly unexpected.
Rising is the real prediction, a really wild claim.
After many years of being a pastor, I have no confidence I have seen it all. Just 10 weeks in Jersey has made it clear to me that there are parts of life yet unknown to me. Yet, I have seen enough of life to form some basic assumptions. I cannot predict the future, but I can make a pretty educated guess of what might happen. This is especially true with suffering.
On many, many occasions I have sat with friends after a terrible diagnosis. Sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes the news is marked with tears, with a deep sense of sadness. There is also a deep breath of courage, a resolve to live the life that remains in dignity and joy. Sorrow and grief are well worn grooves whose path is rather clear.
Death, pain, suffering, not really a mystery. We will all suffer at some point in life. What I find mysterious, what I don’t know, what begs the need of prediction is this: will you live unto joy; will we rise?
Young couple gets married, has a couple of kids, struggles to find their way in life. We are not surprised about the struggle. We don’t wonder if there will be hard times. But, will they make it to joy? That is a mystery. Will they find peace together and deep abiding friendship that overcomes the demons and darkness of life? Will they do this together? Now that is an unknown.
Raise a child, enjoy the child, see him or her off to college. Great success. What happens now? Here we are into real mystery. Raising children is a well-worn path. Watching a child live life is the great unknown.
The passion predictions of Jesus are not all that mysterious. Suffering is not surprising. The predictions of rising? Those are mysterious. How is it that one is reborn to life, born to live again? Will this happen?
For many years now, I experienced this question in the conflict of a father with his three daughters. Sitting with the father and listening to him talk about his daughters always reminded me of the Shakespeare tragedy, King Lear. You never want to remind people of a Shakespearean tragedy. Just not a good thing.

The conflict was over confession. The father believed his daughters must confess the name of Jesus in order to escape the flames of hell; each must speak with praise the name of Jesus. Two of his daughters where church goers so they were fine. One was not. Month after month, year after year, I listened to the deep angst the father had that he was unsure his non-church going daughter was vouchsafed for heaven. He was trying to predict her eternal life. Month after month, year after year, I suggested that his question and concern, while not novel, was above our pay grade. Love her, pray for her was my best counsel.
The irony of this conflict is that I knew all the daughters; I knew their love and joy and spirit. They were all rising. They were all living unto joy. The need to have their lives fit into his, to have his ideas be their own, this was the conflict. Each of them has faced the hard moments of life and walked unto new life. The only deep grief was that he was not able to enjoy them as they were. And like King Lear, love demanded is love denied.
You don’t need me or anyone else for that matter to say, life can be hard. We don’t need to know: things fall apart. We know this already; this is not a surprise. Yet, will our children find the joy we have found? Will faith and mercy guide them? If someone we love stumbles, will they rise up? If we have lost our love in life, will love return? If we have broken ourselves, will we be restored? This is mysterious.
We could say that Jesus predicted his suffering three times. But it is not much of a prediction. There is much more power, much more hope, to say: He predicted his rising three times. That was the truly unimaginable, the unknown future.
Suffering is not a surprise. The surprising unknown is whether or not we will rise. Will we be born anew? Will we live unto hope of captives freed? Will we find the abiding peace of life lived in faith? Will our children live unto joy? In Jesus Christ there is a path to take, a life to live, a firm and certain hope that we will rise. We all fall. In Jesus Christ we can all rise to new life. Keep to him; keep rising. Amen.