Saint Matthew 16:21-28
Back in the early 1950's when “baby boomers” were being born, the suburbs were expanding, and churches we full even on a Labour Day weekend there was a preacher in New York who was about to become famous worldwide for a book called The Power of Positive Thinking.
His name was Norman Vincent Peale and he was the Senior Minister of the Marble Collegiate Church. Peale was a favourite of the former president but was despised by my preaching professor Dr. Ernest T. Campbell, who was the Senior Minister of the Riverside Church also in New York.
In addition to their theological differences, which were mammoth, Dr. Campbell always disliked that Peale always made himself the hero of his own sermons. In an almost perfect impersonation of Peale, Dr. Cambell would belt out in Peale’s voice.
“I saw a man about to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge and I stopped my car and went over to him. I said, ‘You know son, you don’t have to end it all ‘God loves you and has a plan for your life.’ And instead of leaping that man took a leap of faith and fell into my arms.” Then, as if that wasn’t enough, Peale would continue, “And that man is a leader of a top Fortune five hundred company today.”
Outside of the implausibility of such stories Dr. Campbell was amazed at the number of times wonderful, life-changing moments like this happened in Peale’s lifetime, saying. “If everything happened to Norman Vincent Peale that he says happened to him, Dr. Campbell observed, “he would be 312 years old.”
In the interest of full disclosure, and I am sure much to my late preaching professor’s chagrin, that when I visit New York or if I lived there, Marble Collegiate would be my church of choice. The music is outstanding and their current Senior Minister, Dr. Michael Bos preaches sound, biblically based, relevant, sermons.
Peale was a forerunner to Robert Schuller’s Possibility Thinking and Joel Osteen’s preaching in at his mega-church in Houston. Brent Orwell, writing on the mostly political website, The Bulwark, summed up this “positive thinking” theology.
Norman Vincent Peale, {and his ilk} recommend visualizing success, drowning out negative thinking, and minimizing obstacles. The purpose of these psychological and spiritual practices is to free individuals from self-doubt and feelings of inferiority and help them to become the people God truly intends them to be happy, wealthy, popular, and professionally successful.
Peale was exceptional for cutting the flock some spiritual slack, encouraging them to look for the sunny side and conquer their inferiority complexes. In his world, you can have the economic gains minus the guilt, which seems perfectly suited to the American sensibility. {In Peale’s day the} public {had} access to few effective mental health treatments—lithium had just come onto the market as a mood stabilizer in 1948—and weighed down by the demands of extroverted Americanism, The Power of Positive Thinking must have been a like a tonic, or perhaps a gin and tonic, something to soothe the wired, weary, worried soul.1
No matter how rosy a picture some paint the events of almost every day tell us that there is a cross in there somewhere.
We can’t wish it away, we can’t hope it away, we can’t even push it away with all of our might. We know this when even the long-standing counterclaim that “Every day in every way things are getting better and better” doesn’t always seem to ring true anymore.
Yet, in light of all the evidence to the contrary we still are slow to embrace the cross as central symbol of our faith. But don’t feel bad. Even the great Saint Peter wasn’t so excited by the prospect when it finally dawned on him that Jesus was serious about this cross business.
In last week’s gospel Peter was being praised for confessing Christ.
“Who do you say I am?” Jesus asked. Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church...”2
As Father David Schlaffer observed of this moment in a commentary.
In Matthew’s telling, Peter goes from being blessed for divinely granted insight to being berated as Satan; from bring designated as a foundation stone to being depicted as a stumbling stone. Jesus seems to take him on a hairpin turn at breakneck speed. Peter might be pardoned for saying: “I never saw this coming!”3.
And poor Peter gets no small amount of flack for his response.
Jesus has just told his followers that this whole enterprise just might get him killed and who among us would want to hear a friend talk like that? Peter doesn’t for Jesus means too much to him.
Some even believe that Peter’s response was more of a prayer. “God forbid, Lord!”4 “Nothing like this must happen to you!”5
And we can understand Peter’s response if we remember that “in the time when Jesus and Peter lived, there was absolutely nothing religious about the cross in the first place. “
Rather, there was only one purpose for a cross in the time of the Roman empire: the purpose of execution. The cross was both the symbol and the means of political and military punishment for dissidents and criminals. It was Rome’s version of the electric chair. In Jesus’ day, the cross had no veneer of redemption, no hint of life, and absolutely no connection with the divine. It was an instrument of suffering and death for those hung upon it, as well as an instrument of fear and intimidation for everyone else.6
“In the Roman world, if you picked up your cross, you were on death row, you were walking that green mile toward your execution.”7
This is not the stuff of positive, possibility thinking. This is not “look on the bright side of life.” This is not ““accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, and don’t mess with mister in between.” That’s the stuff of song lyrics and not a messages of Jesus.
Jesus is calling his followers to “‘deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow’ – to lose their lives in order to save them – coupled with the warning that one can gain the whole world and lose one’s own life.”8
Cross-bearing is for “losers” in societies like ours. The “winners” are those who know how to master the game of life and have the goods to prove it. One of those goods might even be a gilded cross hanging around the neck to be displayed to admirers at church services! Winners might explain that the cross represents something that Jesus did for them. The text explains that cross-bearing is what disciples are called to do in Jesus’ name.
Those who have imprisoned themselves in service to oneself have their own reward. Those who have carried crosses of compassionate service to others have not only gained a meaningful life, but have also caught a glimpse of God’s eternal realm.9
Some people might say along with a famous, now infamous man, that they could listen to Peale and his kind “all day” and “be disappointed when it was over.”10
For the rest of us who preach the cross, some of our listeners are glad it’s over. That’s because it is hard to underst and what Dr. Thomas G. Long once pointed out
Cross bearers forfeit the game of power before the first inning: they are never selected “Most Likely to Succeed.” Cross bearers are dropouts in the school of self-promotion. They do not pick up their crosses as means for personal fulfilment, career advancement, or self-expression: rather, they ‘deny themselves” and pick up their crosses, like their Lord, because of the needs of other people.11
So on this warm summer morning let’s embrace the real positive message of the Gospel and use our hearts, our love, and our intelligence to work together to show the rest of the world how humans are supposed to treat each other.
Inspired by the love of Christ let us embrace the real possibilities of the gospel affirming by our walk and witness that Christ is the one under whose reign, not the economy, not our wealth, not our poverty, not our security, not our status, Christ is the one under whose power we live.
Christ alone is the one to whom we belong.
And that means we matter, regardless of what other kinds of things you are told based on our gender, or our race, or our sexual orientation, or the amount we have in the bank.
When we take up our cross we do so as a sign of your protest against those voices that offer less and embrace the possibility that following Jesus with resilience, strength of character, and courage that we can be proclaim the real the truth of the Gospel that has come from the one who showed us how to serve and live the way of the cross, Jesus Christ our Lord.
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1. Brent Orrell, “The Power of Positive Thinking: Too Much and Never Enough,” The Bulwark, August 26, 2020, https://www.thebulwark.com/the-power-of-positive-thinking-too-much-and-never-enough/.
2. St. Matthew 16:16–17. (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version]
3. David J. Schlafer, “Matthew 16:21-28. Connecting the Reading with Scripture,” essay, in Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, vol. 3, Year A (Louisville, KY: Westminister/John Knox Press, 2020), 276–78.
4. St. Matthew 16:22. (CEB) [CEB=Common English Bible]
5. St. Matthew 16:22-23. (PHILLIPS) [PHILLIPS=J. B. Phillips, The New Testament in Modern English [London, ENG: HarperCollins, 2000]]
6. Shannon J. Kershner, “‘Take up Your Cross, the Savior Said...,’” A Fourth Church Sermon , August 31, 2014, https://www.fourthchurch.org/sermons/2014/083114_8am_930am.html.
7. James C. Howell, “What can we say September 3? 14th after Pentecost” James Howell’s Weekly Preaching Notions, January 1, 2023, https://jameshowellsweeklypreachingnotions.blogspot.com/.
8. Schlafer, loc. cit.
9. Richard Ward, “Commentary on Matthew 16:21-28,” Working Preacher , July 25, 2023, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-22/commentary-on-matthew-1621-28-6.
10. Orrell, loc. cit.
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