Radical Honesty
Psalm 22:23-31
Mark 8:31-38
Anna Blaedel, Pastoral Intern
Epworth United Methodist Church


Two Sundays ago I was in New York, at the United Nations for the Commission on the Status of Women. I met women from around the world, Zimbabwe and Australia, Lebanon and the Philippines, the Sudan and Sweden, Pakistan and Venezuela, gathered to participate in truth telling about daily realities of violence and domination, sharing glimpses of hope and healing. Women, carrying crosses, bearing burdens. Revealing reality and unmasking mystery, speaking truth to each other and to systems and structures of power. Sharing suffering in community. With this radical honesty, I watched as pain became prophetic, and crosses became transformative.

This morning’s reading from Mark begins with Jesus teaching the gathered disciples about the suffering and rejection that awaits him in the unfolding passion narrative. The text makes a point of letting us know that Jesus is saying all of this openly. Quite openly. This is significant radical totally unexpected and out of character in the context of Mark’s narrative. Before this part of the story, Jesus heals a blind man, and then tells him not even to think about returning to his village and proclaiming the good new of his healing. Jesus heals in mystery. Then Jesus asks the disciples who people are saying he is how he is being identified how the disciples identify him. When they call him the Messiah, the text tells us Jesus sternly orders them not to tell anyone. Jesus wears a mask.

You see, this theme runs throughout Mark’s account, identified by scholars as “the Messianic secret.” Jesus seeking to conceal reality and mask identity. Jesus, who never says ANYTHING quite openly, who speaks in parables and heals people only to tell them to stay silent, when it comes to this scary stuff of suffering and violence and pain, Jesus teaches us that this is the stuff calling for radical honesty. When we get to this text, to this first of many passion predictions, we find Jesus “talking quite openly” with his disciplines, the people he is close to, his community. Jesus chooses to show up and speak out, to share his suffering, and to share it openly.

So I invite you to journey with me as I explore this text openly, quite openly, because this text scares me. It has become fertile ground for bad theology, dangerous theology of the cross that perpetuates powerlessness and poverty, that diminishes human pain and suffering, that complies with systems that violate and dominate.

The central message lifted out of this morning’s gospel reading is far too often one of submission and obedience, a call to carry the cross, bear the burden, and suffer in silence. I do not believe, however, that violence justified or domination legitimated is the meaning of the passion, the message of the cross, or the call to follow in Jesus’ footsteps. I believe the message of this text, the potential transformation at the cross, lies in the invitation to truth telling, radical honesty in community, sharing each others suffering.

The classic call of discipleship often excavated from this text is one of denying the self and taking up the cross. Within this text, I see another vision of discipleship. A way of following Jesus that has more to do with speaking out against rather than submitting to silent suffering or vindicated violence. And in this text, I think Jesus teaches us that we cannot do this alone.

In the Roman world, the cross was a symbol of power the power of the empire, the power of armies, the power to dominate, the power to silence dissent. In this season of Lent when the cross looms large, we are reminded that the same forces, ideologies, powers and principalities that ignored, laughed at, tortured, and killed Jesus are alive and well in our world today. Jesus was placed on the cross not just because of the Romans, but because he refused to be silenced, refused to stop speaking against the corruption and greed and violence surrounding him. Taking up this cross means looking hard at and talking honestly about power.

To take up this cross is not about submitting to selflessness, but about truth telling, not about bearing pain in isolation, but about sharing burdens in community. This calls for radical honesty, courageous vulnerability, with each other, and with God. To take up this cross means that if we are to share in the good news, the anticipation and stubborn celebration of emerging hope and new life, we must also share in the suffering with each other, and in solidarity with sisters and brothers around the world.

The power of the cross calls us to radical honesty about suffering, and it calls us to radical honesty about hope, the radical hope of the gospel that foretells the cross only as it promises an empty tomb, foretells deepest sorrow only as it promises God’s healing presence. The cross is powerful only when it calls us and carries us into new and renewed life.

This discipleship of radical honesty means talking about the mass rape and murder in Darfur, devastation in Baghdad, flat out failure of FEMA in New Orleans, mutilation in Guantanamo, state sanctioned crucifixion in San Quinton, and even the personal suffering in this community.

This discipleship of radical honesty also means talking about the proposed tobacco tax that would enable universal health care for our community’s children, about the organizing among workers for living wages and safe working conditions, about creating safe spaces for education and empowerment, about defying exclusion with open door communion. And it means talking about our own journeys with depression, addiction, violence, spiritual wrestlings and religious awakenings.

For this text to offer redemption, for it to proclaim good news, I believe we must shift the focus from picking up the cross, to naming the crosses that people, that we, bear, and to seek ways to lighten this burden in community. We must shift the focus from giving our lives, to enabling abundant life for all of God’s creation. Perhaps Jesus is teaching us that discipleship is less about silent submission and suffering, and more about revealing reality, telling the truth of our lives and our experiences of God in the context of community, so that the burdens we do bear, the pain we do carry, is not kept in isolation.

Suffering is part of our human experience, and in our pain we can connect with God and with each other. Illnesses and deaths and broken relationships. If we try to carry crosses in isolation, however, it is hard to find hope. Suffering is also part of our gospel call, not suffering from submission or selflessness, but from speaking truth to power and truth in love. A modern day prophet and peace activist, 89 years old, recently told me, “You don’t have to look for ways to carry the cross. Just choose love, truth and justice, and suffering will come.” When I sat at the UN and heard story after story of torture, rape, extreme poverty, ravaging disease and warfare, I struggled to find hope, to expect transformation. Then I saw women connecting with one another in their pain, gathered around one another like the disciples were gathered around Jesus, reality revealed, violence named, suffering shared. Pain neither denied nor mystified, but poured out. Connecting, not isolating. Healing, not hurting. But this can only happen when we speak out, when we accompany rather than abandon each other. The cross is bearable only when it is carried in community, and when it calls us to care for each other and opens us to receive care from God.