Jesus the Brave

“Jesus the Brave”—Mark 14:41-42

[Jesus] came a third time and said to them, “Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? Enough! The hour has come; the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Get up, let us be going. See, my betrayer is at hand.” [Mark 14:41-42]

Jesus doesn't run.  Neither does Jesus fight.  Jesus does the hardest thing of all when faced with betrayal from a friend and confrontation with the police and the angry crowd: he heads into the danger, into their hatred, and into their smug self-satisfaction thinking they've "got" him, and he faces it with courage and love.

Sometimes I don't think we give Jesus enough credit for that courage.  We are used to hearing people wax eloquently (or preach long-windedly) about the love of Jesus.  But we often overlook how much that love is made possible by the courage Jesus summons to keep his feet planted rather than fighting back in bitter anger or running away in fear.  Jesus is brave.

In his book The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard observes that confessing “‘Jesus is Lord’ can mean little in practice for anyone who hesitates before saying Jesus is smart.”  In other words, you miss something crucial about Jesus if you treat him just as a distant heavenly object of worship or a sacrificial placeholder for the rest of us, but fail to actually listen to his words or see the brilliance in his way of living. Something is out of whack if we think we can confess Jesus is Lord without also recognizing that he actually knows what he is talking about when he speaks.

I would like to add a corollary to Willard’s observation:  that you cannot truly confess Jesus as Savior without also recognizing that Jesus is brave.  Jesus is courageous.  We forget, sometimes, that the one who went to a cross for us didn’t have a death-wish.  He wasn’t trying to throw his life away or destroy himself, even though Jesus knew what was coming.  The fact that Jesus didn’t run away from the danger of death doesn’t mean that he was suicidal—it means that he was, and is, courageous.  

Sure, Jesus went to the cross because he loved us.  But love that is not galvanized with courage often just hems and haws and stares at the floor wishing it could do more.  Jesus’ kind of love is willing to do the hard thing, the difficult thing, because Jesus’ love is not merely sentimental emotion.  It has been fired with courage like in a kiln.  

It is that courage that allows Jesus to head directly in to the events of his Passion. As all the Gospel writers tell it, Jesus knows what is coming.  He can see--he has seen it long before any of his disciples could see--that there is a final showdown looming, and there is a cross waiting for Jesus, where Jesus will lose everything--his friends, his dignity, his life. And yet notice that as Jesus sees it all on the horizon, he does not turn away from them or run the other way.  He doesn’t say to his disciples, “Get up.  Let us be going away from here because my betrayer is at hand.”  He doesn’t say, “Stay put, and maybe if we’re quiet they won’t find us.” And neither does he say, "Lock and load, boys, because our lives are more important than theirs--let's kill as many of 'em as we can before they get to us!"  Jesus' courage is what allows him even here, even in the Garden, to love those who are actively trying to do him in.  Jesus' courage doesn't run from death--not by killing, and not by hiding.  Jesus' courage stares down death and takes the worst it has to offer. Jesus isn’t trying to get himself killed, but he doesn’t hide from what is coming, either.  In fact, when the betrayer (Judas) is off in the distance, Jesus gathers up his remaining disciples to meet them face to face.  So he can look Judas in the eye, even if Judas will not do the same for Jesus.  That is courage.

Jesus doesn’t want it to be this way (you might recall that just a few verses earlier in this story, Jesus had been praying in the garden, “remove this cup from me… yet not what I want but what you want…”).  But that is precisely what makes this a moment to see Jesus’ courage.  Courage isn’t about doing something brash and foolhardy without thinking first, or without being afraid.  Courage is about doing the hard thing, the difficult thing, precisely when you don’t want to have to do it, and in spite of the fact that you are afraid.  That is Jesus' courage for our sake--and at the same time, that is a picture of the courage Jesus challenges us to live into as well.  

Because there is really no way around it: Jesus challenges us to be brave like him.  Jesus challenges us to step into his kind of courage, the kind that that neither runs away (out of self-preservation) nor attacks back (again, out of self-preservation).  Jesus challenges us to be so grounded in his love and his power for life even through death that we no longer have to put our own survival first--and when that happens, we find a new kind of courage that enables us to face anything.  

We find the courage to welcome the stranger--without the crippling fear of "What if there are bad guys somewhere in the mix of people God calls us to show hospitality to?"  

We find the courage to give generously--without the self-interest that says, "But I have to put ME and MY needs first!"

We find the courage to share someone else's suffering--without the fearful voice that says, "But it might be hard to have to go through it with them--let's just watch TV instead!"

We find the courage to respond to cruelty, bitterness, or rudeness--without the need to lash back out, to respond with rottenness back at the other person, or to call names and lob insults back.

This is what we are summoned into when Jesus challenges us to have his kind of courage.

That's why it is worth spending a moment considering the courage of Jesus: not only to help us get a deeper sense of what Jesus did for us in his Passion and death, but also so that we can recognize moments for courage in the ordinary and day-by-day stuff of life.  We are used to associating courage with battlefields and burning buildings.  We think of soldiers staring down their enemies in war as courageous.  We think of the lone student in Tiananmen Square standing before the tanks as brave.  We picture firefighters rushing out of an inferno carrying a child. And these are surely true places you will find courage.  But it is possible, too, that in the ordinary stuff of this day, you and I will be given moments to practice small (to the naked eye) acts of courage that echo Jesus’ courage all the same. 

Sometimes the courage here in the Garden of Gethsemane gets overshadowed by the cross.  Sometimes we jump right to the theological significance of Calvary—talk of atonement and redemption and paying for sins and reconciliation with God—that we forget this all starts with a conscious act of courage on Jesus’ part not to run away when it would have been easier to head the other direction, and not to break out the swords and fight back.  That is, at least to the casual observer, a small action.  In fact, for a moment, it barely looked like an action at all—it would have looked like Jesus standing there, rather than running away or raising a sword.  But that small action was a monumentally courageous choice, and it is what made Jesus’ love go the distance. 

Today, you and I will have many small chances to do the difficult thing, the hard thing, the thing we would not have chosen if it were up to us.  We will have the choice to stare into face of conflict, and the possibility that people will not always like us, or that we will take criticism, or that we will suffer loss, or to run away from them because we are afraid.  We will have the choice to let fear rule the day, or to act in spite of that fear.  It may happen in moments that look very small and insignificant—a conversation you were putting off, a decision you did not want to have to make, a commitment you don’t particularly like carrying through.  But such small moments of courage are often what galvanizes love.  They are moments that allow the Spirit to form the image of Christ in us.  And if we are going to be made to be reflections of Jesus, it will mean that the Spirit brings out the bravery in us.  Jesus, after all, is an awfully brave savior.

Lord Jesus, give us your courage today, so that we can act with strong love where we are.