There was a film produced 14 years ago now, by the American director Martin Scorsese. It created a storm when it came out, attracting protests outside cinemas and a number of councils even banned it. The film was ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ and it was controversial because it included scenes of Jesus married to Mary Magdalene and settled down with a family. This is the Last Temptation which comes to him on the cross. Instead of going through with it and dying, an angel appears to take him away with the tantalising words, ‘do you think your Father really expects you to go through with this? You’ve done enough, time to stop and see what you could have instead’. What he could have instead is very much a first century version of the American dream and the film is not without its tacky side.

As we fast forward we find that no Christian Church is founded, the movement doesn’t amount to much and on his death bed the angel appears to him again. This time she reveals her true identity. She is not an angel but the devil in disguise. This was the final temptation and we are taken back to the cross where he rejects it like he rejected the others in the wilderness. He doesn’t marry Mary Magdalene, or anyone else, and goes through with it to the bitter end on the cross. Those who protested should have watched the film to the end.

Our gospel reading gave us a similar scene this morning (Matthew 16:21-28). Peter, not an angel, is horrified at the idea of suffering being the way to salvation. Surely some mistake? Surely the way to salvation comes in acts of great power and taking control? Surely it comes through a surgical removal of everything that is sinful so that we can become good robots? Surely it comes through a vengeance that will let all sorts of people go to some eternal pit without mercy because they don’t measure up? Surely God can choose who to save and who not to, but we of course hope that we are in and not out... it is looking more shaky, where should God draw the line?... Salvation after Peter and the Last Temptation starts to look like no salvation at all! But the cross is not an optional extra in the Christian gospel, it is right at the heart of it.

The cross speaks of a loving God who refuses to restrict freedom. We can choose good and we can choose evil, and we can be affected by others’ choices for good and ill. He seems almost reckless in what he risks in creating a world like this. As one of the characters in Andy Hamilton’s TV series ‘Bedtime’ put it, when he hears of a plan to recreate the universe in a laboratory, “Health and safety would never allow it”. The world could have been different, but any other plan involves us in being less free than we are and any world involving real freedom and not just the appearance of it, involves a cross for someone. We can find ourselves wondering if freedom is truly worth such suffering, the arbitrary death of innocents, be they 10 year old girls in Soham or millions in Africa because of a lack of clean drinking water? If anyone is going to be nailed to a cross, then we may find ourselves thinking surely God deserves it more than most.

One way of looking at the cross is to see it as God taking responsibility for the world he has made. We see God not detached from the brutality of the world, but there in the middle of it, subjecting himself to it, holding it, absorbing it, and through it redemption is opened up for us. We touch profound mystery here, the mystery of a loving God who makes a world where real suffering is a real possibility if not certainty, and yet builds in a capacity to share in nothing less than the divine life.

This mystery begins to open up as we take a closer look at what goes on in this scene in this morning’s gospel. Firstly, after Peter has tried to prevent the cross, to divert Jesus from it, Jesus’ reply is sharp and stinging. “Get behind me, Satan!” As with the devil in the temptations in the wilderness, what Peter is trying to do here is control Jesus and his path rather than follow behind him in ‘the way’. One of the earliest titles for the Jesus movement after the resurrection was ‘The Way’. The call is to be centred on Jesus, centred on his cross. Peter is told to fall in line, to get behind him, to come after him as he was invited to do when he was first called.

Then we are told that to be a follower of Jesus involves denying ourselves. This is not some shallow diet, giving up biscuits, but another layer to the call to follow, another layer to ‘the way’. It is to submit to the will of God, to refuse the false securities of this transitory world. This self-denying, this call to follow, this submission to the will of God is at the heart of what the cross is about. It is at the heart of what makes the universe tick and the desire from the God who creates and recreates is that we share in it, not as toys, but as fully conscious and freely consenting grown up children. There is here a love that will go to extra-ordinary lengths in pursuit of the beloved - that is you and me.

When that sounds odd, we can think of the great heroic acts of self-sacrifice, the self-denying love that transform the world around us. Acts of heroism in risking everything to save someone from a burning building. Acts of self-giving love from a parent in poverty who goes without so that their child can be fed or can have what they need. Acts of self-giving love when a pilot stays in a plane and dies when it crashes in order to ensure that it misses a playground. In the Gospels we find people overcoming great obstacles of pride to ask for help, for healing. Crosses of different kinds. In and through these we discover that life finds its meaning through letting go of our own security and control. It comes through not trying to design our lives to the finest detail, and then being neurotic when it doesn’t go to plan, but through letting self-giving love direct and shape us. This reveals one of the lies of our glossy-page age that we can design life differently to how it really is. We have to let go to find, to be found, to love and experience being loved.

There is nothing cosy about using crucifixion as the image for this. It is a horrible instrument of execution devised by some very sadistic minds. The pain and suffering should make us wince whenever it is mentioned. But we don’t look at it as the end. We look at it from the other side of the resurrection and therefore the redemption, the restoring grace that holds us all in life and death.

The Last Temptation with its American Dream packaging is a delusion. It is the fantasy of happily ever after, without further suffering, pain or passion. And pain and passion are linked. There is a desire, a passion, that leads to the Passion, the cross. Without desire, without a love that will not let us go, there would be no Cross of Jesus because a God who doesn’t care wouldn’t bother to be present when the fantasy turns brutal. It is not without good reason that we use the word ‘Passion’ when referring to the cross, his death and resurrection. A God who makes a world like this has to be prepared to go to the cross and enter in a self-sacrificial way into the mystery of suffering, into the mystery that is life itself. Without it he would abdicate, as temptation bids him do. With it, there is no darkness where Christ’s light does not shine.

If we want to be followers of Jesus, and I take it that by being here we do, then the call is to fall in line behind him, to follow in the way. That will involve a self-denying love that takes up the cross because its self-sacrifice, whatever guise it takes, is none other than the way of life and truth.

© Ian Black 2002

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