Fear III: fear of death and failure

Matthew 16.15-17, 21-25

Jesus said to his disciples, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.”…

From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it Lord! This must never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”

This Lent, I have been speaking about fear, especially in the stories leading up to Jesus’ death. I have been reflecting on how walking the path of Lent can mean walking a path into the heart of fear, as we identify with the trauma of Jesus and his disciples as they experience threat, suffering, loss, death, grief and betrayal. Today’s reading confronts us with our primary fears as humans – our fear of death, and of being on the losing side.

In this reading, Simon Peter goes from being top of the class blessed disciple, for his insight into Jesus’ identity, to being called Satan, and a stumbling block by this same Jesus. Jesus warns his disciples about his coming suffering and death, and Peter doesn’t want to hear it. No, Jesus! he says. This is all wrong. You are the Messiah, we’ve just established that. You are going to change this world…you are going to put everything right, bring salvation for our people, lift up the poor and bring down our oppressors. Stop talking about being handed over and killed – it’s demoralising and off message.

And Jesus? Essentially he says to Pete—this is fear talking, stop it. I call you Satan and a stumbling block, because, just like the temptations in the wilderness, your fear wants to pull me off the path that is mine to walk. I need you to see what I’m doing as I see it, which is not from a human view that fears death and fears suffering, but from a God view that knows that death is not the end, and it isn’t failure.

Then Jesus teaches his disciples, saying: I have come to show you the downward path, the upside down reality that in God’s universe you win by losing. You can’t follow me if you are totally attached to your life, and if your sense of self is built on human definitions of what makes a worthwhile life. To follow me is to accept death…not just the reality of physical death, but the death of your story about who you are. As long as you live in fear of death, you are already as good as dead. If you can let go of everything that shores up your identity in this world, including the breath in your body, then you are ready for life…real life that can never be taken from you.

I don’t believe that in this exchange, Jesus is mostly referring to life after death, life in heaven. I remember that when I was at university we used to talk about putting our studies and all our various concerns into an ‘eternal perspective’, meaning to see them in the light of heaven. What this tended to mean was that if attending an evangelistic event meant that we failed our exam, then at least we had our priorities right. I always found it very difficult to put things into an ‘eternal perspective’ because then, and now, I struggle to value or visualise what happens after I die more intensely than what is happening around me in the present moment. Perhaps this is a flaw in me. But also, perhaps, an ‘eternal perspective’ could mean not just that this life is the prelude for another, more real, existence, but that there is a way of being more alive to this life, by experiencing things differently. What if all this living we’re doing here and now isn’t really all that alive after all, because it’s shadowed and crippled by fear? What if our hang ups and our clinging mean that, in fact, we’re living a kind of death already?

I think that there were at least three things going on for Peter when he took Jesus aside and said ‘Lord, these things must never happen to you.’ I think that he was afraid for Jesus’ life, and by implication, for his own life and that of his friends. I think that he was afraid of being bereaved – he loved Jesus, and didn’t want him to die. And, I think that he was afraid of the failure and loss of the dream that he’d been given the chance to live for the previous few years in Jesus’ company. Huge and significant reasons to want to prevent the kind of ending to the story that Jesus was hinting at. I think many of us in his situation would make the same call.

In our own Western world today, fear of death and bereavement is powerful – even though we have much better life expectancy than at any other time in human history that we’re aware of. We have become very good at delaying death – our ability to cure disease and repair body degeneration is beyond what any generation has known. However, with all these advances, our emotional and spiritual relationship with mortality doesn’t seem to have matured. Perhaps it’s even been stunted in our quest for physical life at all costs. I am totally in favour of our medical technologies advancing, and for us to fight disease and to save lives where we can. I certainly don’t want to die sooner than I have to, and the thought of losing those closest to me fills me with dread. The fear of having to go through that kind of grief is natural.

But I also think that we need to learn to come to terms with death as a continuing reality of our human existence, and also need to submit to a certain amount of suffering and loss in order to learn the lessons that pain has to teach us. When we run from death and pain, rather than accepting them as part of life, we have to block off and deny profound truths at the heart of our reality. As long as we fear death, we will not really be living, because a part of us will always be trying to protect ourselves. I wonder if part of our culture’s failure to value our elderly people is partly to do with our drive to avoid old age in ourselves, and the way aging people remind us of mortality and incapacity? And I wonder whether terrorism, and the wars to defeat terrorism, would have any kind of foothold if we didn’t fear death…either of our physical persons, or of the society that we are familiar with. If terrorism doesn’t invoke terror does it exist?

The hospice movement aside, I don’t think that our culture has done enough work on the idea of what a good death might be. We’re so driven to be healthy and to live longer and to cure illness that we do not dwell as we might, on what readiness for death might be, and what a life lived in the light of death could look like. The words from Jesus, that ‘those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who will lose their life for my sake will find it’ provide a striking alternative to our ‘stay alive at all costs’ mentality.

These words, and Jesus’ own example, say that there are things that are more important than having more days or years of physical existence. And, that death, while it is a finality when we see it from this side, may not be the end point of our ongoing story.

Fear of failure, and of being associated with failure, is also a primary driving force in our culture. We undergo sorting and assessment processes from the moment we arrive in this world. Depending on your background and age, success might be measured by academic performance, or physical athleticisim, or having a pink princess backpack, or ideological righteousness, or a good job, or the best birthday party, or owning a good house in a good street, or by being attractive, or famous, or by having a big family, by being able to fight, by being dangerous, by being a leader, or by being seen to do good works – whatever it is…there’s a sense that there are standards, and that our life either does or doesn’t measure up. We learn early on that not measuring up makes us feel bad, and we learn to fear events and people and associations that have the potential to drag us down from whatever ranks we’re climbing, whether that progress is up the social ladder or the hierarchy of a criminal gang.

The Christian gospel, however, tells us that there is no performance good enough, on any axis of virtue whether religious or otherwise, that can make us worthy. It’s not that we are worthless in ourselves, but that we have no idea how to skirt the blind spots and shadow of our lives in order to become whole people. And no level of effort or work or measuring up is going to take us there. Only our surrender to the gracious, healing, indwelling of God within us has the possibility of yielding the reality of who we are meant to be. That surrender asks us to let go of all the ways in which we want to protect and promote ourselves and our wellbeing.

Peter clearly had an internal story going on about how he wanted the Jesus story to pan out, in order to maintain his own need for success. He had a huge investment in it. Like the others, he had given up livelihood, home and family to launch out on this crazy quest after this miracle-doing Rabbi. Throughout the Gospels we see the disciples arguing among themselves about who is going to be the greatest in this new kingdom, and wondering what they’re going to get in return for all that they have given up. They are following Jesus, but internally, they’re still involved in a complex process of redefining their ‘success-o-meter’ to include life on the road with him.

When Peter identifies Jesus as the Messiah and Jesus confirms it, Peter probably thought, ‘yes! We are on the winning team.’ So when Jesus starts talking of being handed over, and of suffering and dying, how that must have clanged and jarred. We understand, out the other side of the resurrection, what the disciples couldn’t understand at the time…that for Jesus, dying and rising again were crucial elements in the wider story he was enacting on our behalf, and that Jesus’ whole life and message were about overturning assumptions about who’s in and who’s out, who’s up and who’s down, who’s last and who’s first.

How is your ‘success-o-meter’ configured? What is the story about yourself that you most cherish? What is the picture that you want others to have of you? Do you want to think of yourself as good? Do you want other people to see you as knowledgeable, or as friendly, or creative, or interesting, or empathetic, or fun, or worthy of respect? Does following Jesus have anything to say to your measures of success, or your feeling of either success or failure?

Failure – however we define it internally, and whether it’s in our own eyes or public - is a kind of non-physical death. It is a death of the person we want to be, and the person we want to be perceived as being. It destroys whatever we had clung to and desired in order to feel like a worthwhile person on our own terms.

We can experience this in lots of tiny ways, not just large scale experiences of failure. Do you know that feeling when you have a misunderstanding or a miscommunicaiton and you come away from the interaction feeling really angsty? More often than not, for me, that angst has to do with feeling like the other person has ended up with a picture of me that doesn’t match my view of myself. I might like to think I’m kind, so if someone else gets the impression of me as unkind, even if they’ve got the wrong end of the stick, then I’m left troubled. The impulse to sort it out is often to do with ‘correcting’ their possibly false impression. Of course, what is ridiculous about this impulse is that I have no way of knowing or controlling what anyone thinks of me at any time, and also, my own internal picture of myself probably has very little connection with the truth about me anyway.

When Jesus says to his followers: ‘those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it’ he is completely derailing this whole mentality of holding on to a version of success, and a version of self, that we must protect at all costs. Failure and success, Jesus says, and life and death, in my kingdom, are completely other than what you have come to think. And it’s only by seeing how I see, Jesus says, that you get the vision to be able to see what success and life and self-hood really are. Then, you will be released to live, to really live. That is a genuinely ‘eternal perspective.’

And it starts with freedom from fear. When we can come to realise in our deepest self, that who we are goes beyond death, and that who we are has nothing to do with how the rest of the world perceives us then there is no need to fear either death or failure. It is this realisation that meditation and contemplative prayer are able to form in us. Meditation allows us for a moment to simply ‘be’, to dis-identify briefly from the story of our life that we tell ourselves or that others tell us. And it leads, eventually (I am told), to glimpse from within a self that is eternal – the place within us that will not die, the place that is in union with Christ and lives in him.

So, when we are confronted with an unavoidable unpleasantness – a moment of descent, or humiliation – instead of reacting like Peter and simply saying ‘no, this cannot be’ and fighting it on all fronts, we can choose to accept it and learn from it by staying with the unpleasantness, whatever form it takes. I am not saying that we should accept everything bad that happens to us and others, and not resist those things it is possible to resist. But I am saying that it is also part of our journey to learn what we can and can’t control, what we can and can’t change, and to learn not to act or react out of fear. There is nothing to be gained by clinging on fearfully to life as we imagined or wanted it to be. There is everything to be gained from facing whatever there is to be faced and searching within the sorrow and loss for Jesus who comes to us from beyond the grave.