Devils Make Deals, God Gives Gifts

It’s not just faith that lets us carry the cross, but carrying the cross that grows our faith

Feb 26, 2024

Second Sunday in Lent

Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.

But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

Mark 8:31-34

If you thought I couldn’t get lower after I confessed my vice of excessive online chess last week, you’ll be more disappointed in me this week. Late last year, I was a Deal or No Deal fiend. Binging every free episode from the 15-year-old game show made available through Amazon, things quickly got dark. While I first soaked in every contestant’s story and family of support, it wasn’t long before I was skipping through episodes to see the numbers fly off the board, mainlining case after case, even skipping the playful banter between the models and the contestants. Only Howie Mandel acting as a medium for the Banker, that Adversary, could sometimes hold my attention by jostling taunts amid offers.

Thankfully, I cured my addiction by figuring out I just wanted to see someone win the million. This made me realize I could just Google that and watch those handfuls of episodes, neutralizing the pregnant “Will they do it this time??” wonderings that capture audiences.

Well, pray for me friends, because Satan himself must have thought my Lent was too easy: tomorrow is the debut of Deal or No Deal Island, hosted by Joe Manganiello.

In truth, and by grace, I have absolutely no craving to watch this new show. The desperate melding of Survivor with the original Deal (with not even Mandel this time) feels like we’ve profaned something that was already not that sacred to begin with. But it did strike me as on point for this Sunday in Lent’s theme which both unpacks the nature of God’s covenant (this week with Abraham) alongside Jesus’ famous call for his disciples to deny themselves and pick up their cross.

While being asked to take up our cross and suffer with Christ may sound like God offering a deal, we must be clear that everything about our covenantal life with God is a gift. Whether it’s the Old Testament (which means Old Covenant) or the New One, God’s covenant with us—his fundamental relationship with us—is gifting. The Law, Torah, is a gift, and the cross is also a gift. Devils make deals, but God gives gifts. Yet as a preacher’s Facebook friend said, “We’re always trying to turn a gift into a deal.”

It just makes me sad that I’m not a youth pastor because I’m missing out on hosting the cringeiest Christian remake of the show, Gift or No Gift, with each model disciple slowly opening a scroll to reveal in amazement that every single thing is a gift.

Get behind me, Joe Manganiello!

Faith Into Faith

As we walk in Lent, we are slowly learning, along with the disciples, the full nature of the new covenant and what it means to carry our cross.

In our story today, Jesus drops his famous, “Get behind me Satan!” after Peter denies Christ’s prophecy of his suffering, death, and resurrection (forgive Peter, he hadn’t had much practice at denial yet). Christ’s counter-rebuke is so strong because Peter’s thoughts are not essentially Peter’s, even if they are human. Like Howie and the Banker (okay, last reference), Peter is just a medium for the kind of thoughts that the Tempter uses so well: the desire to avoid necessary suffering, which in turn, avoids the Gift.

Since I’m going through the sayings of the Desert Fathers this Lent, here’s one that is directly related to this, again courtesy of Thomas McKenzie:

A disciple said to Abba Poemen, “There are many dangerous thoughts which come into my mind.” Abba Poemen said, “Spread out your cloak and capture some wind for me.”
“It's not possible,” the disciple replied.
Poemen said, “Neither is it possible to prevent all kinds of thoughts coming in to your mind. What you can do is resist them.”

What the monk is trying to say is just like we can’t “capture the wind” with our cloak, we also can’t prevent thoughts that urge us in all kinds of wrong directions. But as the monk says, we don’t have to surrender to them, resisting them like Jesus resists Satan, and like resistance weight training, strengthening our faith.

And now here’s where this snake tail flips backs around: while our faith can grow in resisting sin, it also can grow by not resisting the suffering that comes from sin resistance. Because in Christ, finding ways to embrace suffering as a gift leads to a greater embracing of his total Gift.

As James’ letter reads:

My brothers and sisters, whenever you face various trials, consider it all joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance complete its work, so that you may be complete and whole, lacking in nothing.
James 1:2-4

With any meditation, and maybe without any, this is radical to take seriously: in the midst of our hardships, we should “consider [them] pure joy.” Maybe that’s easy for an ex-Marine to say about waking up to work out, but can we really say “thank you” to the hardest times of our lives? The stuff of nightmares, humiliations, failures, and coldest showers of reality? Well, yeah, we can. It may not be easy, and our impulse rarely bends that way, but the compass of faith points us to joy even as our faith feels strained, because faith knows that it is the trials of faith that strengthen faith into a persevering faith, an enduring faith.

And so if there is one point I want to make about Jesus’ call for us to carry our cross and follow him, it’s still a part of a covenant relationship; a gifting relationship. Jesus does not ask us to carry our cross as a deal with him, but as a gift to us. Because it’s not just faith that lets us carry the cross, but carrying the cross that grows our faith. Faith grows into faith. That’s part of the Gift.

Three Dangers of Cross-Walking

Any good discussion of carrying our cross needs caveats and warnings. Here’s just three:

1. Don’t endure the wrong things to produce faith in the wrong things

Walking with our cross doesn’t mean we endure pointless suffering to prove to ourselves how tough we are. Nor is following Jesus becoming martyrs to win public praise. Nor is it suffering as part of a strategic plan to climb the career ladder. And it is especially not embracing suffering to win spiritual pride. We can all end up a Prodigal Brother or a Martha, taking up a false cross into inflation while missing the real Gift. These are all poorly chosen objects of our endurance.

In the worst form, we don’t want the endurance of politicians, institutionalists, and Christian leaders who think of endurance in terms of political survival. Once when I was working in a Christian organization, a popular partner organization engaged in a cover-up of abuse. When it was finally revealed in the press, one leader told me in hand-washing words I’ll never forget, “Thank God that abuse happened before we got here so we don’t have to deal with it.” Long after I left, they stood by and deepened their partnership with the popular organization.

We don’t want the self-empowerment of a twisted faith, a faith in what we believe we can get away with. We don’t want a false cross for a false faith that says, “Thank God we got through that scandal.” We don’t want the false faith that says we deserve to keep avoiding suffering to retain the pleasure of our power while others suffer at our expense. Because when we’re enduring something for our selfish gain, to boost faith in ourselves, to boost faith in our plans, our less pure desires, our more selfish goals, we’re not taking up a cross, we’re avoiding it. We’re saying, “You carry this cross.” We’re Pilate washing our hands, or the religious leaders telling Judas they can’t take the blood money they just gave him, wanting all the power and none of the responsibility. That is the world’s silent, hidden, secret faith: faith in the self.

The faith Christ calls us to is an inverted version of that: to embrace the self’s suffering for the sake of one another.

So that’s a heavy caution. Here’s a second cross-carrying caveat:

2. It’s the cross you can carry—not the cross you can’t

Jesus is not calling us into false heroics. It’s not “God doesn’t give you anything you can’t handle” as much as “God won’t ask you to carry something you can’t.”1

Part of growing in cross-carrying faith is remembering that we don’t actually go through it alone. I love the song “Jesus Walked This Lonesome Valley,” but many of us have struggled with the theology of its second-person verses: “You gotta walk this lonesome valley, you gotta walk it by yourself…” On the one hand, maybe it’s just being realistic. There are parts of carrying our cross that are excruciating in their isolation. But in truth, this isolation is an Emmanuel illusion, for God is with us.

And carrying our cross is not saying that when you go through the hardest trials, you shouldn’t ask for help. As a Desert Father told us last week, if all you can pray is “Help, Lord,” that is enough.

3. We don’t pick up our cross to win grace

To me, this is the big one.

We don’t take up our cross because it makes us righteous. We don’t carry our cross because it’s “the deal”, but because it’s a gift if we can recognize it.

Paul teaches in our Romans 4 reading this week2 that Abraham picked up his kind of cross in his own time and way, growing stronger in faith because of how he embraced his suffering. He was still not earning grace. Instead, he witnessed to a faith that transcended earning. It wasn’t part of a deal; devils make deals, God gives gifts. The cross is not a new contract, but a new form of an old promise, a new invitation into an old relationship.

The Biggest Gotcha of Grace

“For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?”

Mark 8:35-38

Sometimes we think we have to have great faith to walk through a huge trial, or at least, to stay on God’s good side while doing it. This is wrong in two ways.

First, this misses that we may have very little faith to start—say, oh I don’t know, a mustard seed—but that going through something awful with God alongside us can give birth to a deeper faith to carry even more weight. A faith that starts without knowing what the heck a “covenant” is can become a faith that would never jeopardize that gift for anything. For “what can they give in return for their life?”

This leads us to the second misconception of cross-carrying faith, and maybe the biggest “gotcha” of grace yet: the new covenant in Jesus Christ and his death and resurrection is not even about whether we do or don’t carry our cross.

If we pay attention, how many of Jesus’ disciples carried their cross and followed him all the way to his grave? You don’t need hands to count them. Just like Israel had done over and over, and just like we still do over and over, when times get tough, we often forget what God has done and stop trusting in what God will do. We are a forgetful people, and Jesus’ disciples would forget who they knew and saw right in front of them. Heck, in this passage in Mark, Peter couldn’t even remember what Jesus had just explained two seconds ago, too irate to listen to the whole story of how Jesus would “be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.”3 Peter is so worried about avoiding the suffering that he misses the good news.

In the end, by grace, his refusal of his cross does not rule the scales of righteousness. As Paul says one chapter later in Romans 5, “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”4 Not while we are righteous. Peter doesn’t carry his cross at first, but on him the Church was built. None of the disciples followed him to the cross, but they became Apostles.

As Fr. Aaron & Marissa Burt say, even in our moral failures, our faith can grow. Even in that failure to pick up the cross, just like Peter’s weeping after denying Christ led to the realization of “I’m just not the hero I thought I was. I can’t carry this cross.” This is actually where Peter’s real faithful discipleship begins. And for us, maybe it’s not just “I’m not a perfect Christian,” it’s, “I just can’t be the spouse I want to be,” “I’m just not the father I thought I’d be, the mother I dreamed of being, just not the perfect son, or a perfect daughter, or even a real good friend.”

Maybe like Peter, we got a look at our cross, said we don’t wanna get a splinter, and just washed our hands instead.

Even then, we still have a chance to open the Gift again.

For even though the disciples ended up not picking up the cross, Jesus wasn’t done with them. Even in our worst times, God’s not done with us. Because the new covenant—the new shape of the old Gift—is not about “did you or didn’t you?” It’s about “Do you now?”

The walking with our cross we want to do through this winter desert of Lent is enduring what God calls us to endure for the sake and love of someone else. In doing so, our faith gives birth to more faith. We may not always feel it in the shadows of this world, but by faith, we can know it’s better than any deal out there.