Have you heard about Google Goggles yet? I read last week that the computer company, Google, is not far from producing a prototype of special glasses whose lenses are a mini computer screen: put them on, look at something, and nod your head … and maps, weather, and all of the possibilities of the Internet will appear just inches from your eyeball.[1] So you don’t know who that person is who waves to you at the Mall? Just look into the screen of your glasses where face-recognition software will tell you his name! Quarreling with your spouse about when some Louisville landmark was built? Google the answer by talking to your glasses! Lost in a strange city? The route could be right before your eyes. I wonder how it will be when such information technology is literally the lens through which we see the world … when we can instantly know a multitude of facts about everything that we see … when, as one poet writes about this phenomenon, “the actual world [is] merely the consequence of the search terms I supply?”[2] My fear is that this technology will only reinforce our tendency to bury ourselves in facts and to construct a safe reality in which to hide ourselves.
In today’s Gospel lesson, the Apostle Peter is the first to recognize Jesus as the Messiah, the Anointed One of God. Even without access to Wikipedia, Peter’s mind is full of knowledge about the Messiah: he knows that the Messiah is to be a great king like King David, that he will restore the sovereignty and dignity of Israel, that he will crush the Roman oppression, that he will bring peace and prosperity to the land. When Peter names Jesus as the Messiah, the trusty Goggles of the kings and prophets of Israel tell him exactly what to expect. Then, of course, Jesus begins to teach that he is instead a Messiah who is going to undergo great suffering and total rejection and even death—the opposite of what Peter sees through his lenses. No wonder he begins to argue and protest.
I understand Peter’s reaction, because I do exactly the same thing. When confronted with new possibilities, my automatic response is to gather up as much knowledge about what is going to happen as possible, so that I can begin to construct a safe worldview that will reassure me of smooth outcomes. Before moving to a new place, I would scour the Internet to find information about that city until I get a nice, fact-lined image of the future in which I can feel secure. When I or a loved-one have any strange ache or pain, I retreat to the computer to search for information on what that new complaint could be, as if becoming versed in symptoms, diagnoses, and scientific facts could shore me up against destruction. When I was a young mother-to-be, I bought every baby book that I could lay my hands on and read frantically, as if the knowledge that I could absorb about pregnancy and babies would keep me and my child safe. If God had broken into my rosy vision, though, with images of the miscarriages that I would have, the times my children would be close to death, the scares that they would dump on me as teenagers, then I would have protested in horror, “No, that can’t be, not my babies! My children will live ordered, predictable lives just like it says in this book!” We human beings don’t need Google-goggles to construct fact-based forts in the face of an unknown future.
Jesus, however, is not interested in the “human things” that our knowledge of facts and predicted outcomes can create. Jesus opens up a future—and a present—that invite us to look into the depths of God, rather than into the flat screens of our human perceptions. In order to follow Jesus on the path to Life, we must shed our knowledge-soaked lenses and the perceptions of self and world that they create. The only Goggles that we need for that kind of life are the lenses of Scripture, those powerful glasses that fit on every human face and allow us to read God and our world together.[3] When worn correctly, our Scripture Goggles don’t fill us with more information, predictions, and facts. They fill us with a common story that gives a name to hope and thereby renames who we are.
“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me,” Jesus calls out to us. We often tend to hear these words as a call to live ascetic lives, lives without earthly pleasures, barren lives burdened by some misfortune or tragedy that God expects us to haul glumly around on our backs. My father suffered paralysis from a stroke at a fairly young age, and I still remember hearing my mother tell her friends resignedly, with great sadness, “Well, I guess his illness is just the cross that I have to bear …” When a pastor friend told me that my mother was wrong in her assessment, that God did not place that cross on her, I remember being confused, for I could see that cross on her slumping back just as plain as day. My pastor friend was right, though. The word that we translate as “deny” in this verse really means to “renounce.” Jesus is not asking us to deny ourselves the joy and beauty of life. He is actually asking something even more difficult: he is asking us to “renounce ourselves,” to “disown ourselves,” as clearly as Peter disowned Jesus around the fire when the cock crowed three times.[4] He is asking us to take off the glasses of self through which we have been structuring our futures and to walk blindly forward, holding only onto God’s hand.
Moreover, when Jesus asks us to carry our cross, he is not referring to one of the burdens--some heavier than others--that we as human beings all carry throughout our mortal lives: sickness, loneliness, and, yes, the devastation caused by natural disasters such as yesterday’s terrible tornadoes. A cross is not just a heavy load—it is a shameful instrument of execution meant for guilty slaves and criminals. To carry my cross is to carry all that condemns me, all of the unpleasantness of my humanity, including my death, that I normally try to avoid seeing or touching. “Take off your protective goggles,” Jesus says, “yet take up your sin, your human fragility, your human brokenness, your shame, your mortality—all those things that you can’t bear to see within yourselves—and follow me. For I will show you that—with God--death can be life, and loss can be gain.”
We need to take off our real and metaphorical “Google-goggles,” those that are computer-enhanced and those that we cultivate in our souls, in order to look directly at our fragile mortality and at the all-encompassing Love of God surrounding it. A friend of mine just had a granddaughter who was born very premature—at 26 weeks. As I looked at her in the NICU, weighing only a pound and a half, small enough to be held in the palm of her father’s hand, completely covered in tubes and bandages, struggling to breathe, the miraculous fragility of human life never seemed more evident. If I had had a pair of those Google-Goggles, I could have covered over my discomfort by accessing reams of information about medical procedures, statistics about survival rates, and reports of similar babies who have thrived. But in so doing, I would have missed the precious moment where her painfully-obvious mortality reached out to mine, where I realized that we both are but a breath away from death, we both are fragile creatures resting in God’s hands, we both share the victory of the Cross—the victory that says that life is stronger than death, and that love is stronger than loss, and that forgiveness is stronger than any failure. Strangely, in opening myself to watch life struggle within this baby’s beautifully fragile limbs, I am able to renounce the anxious grasp over my own life … and thereby to live. Such is Jesus’ desire for those who choose to follow him. “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 Good News, will save it.”
[1] Steve Henn, “Google Goggles,” found at http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2012/02/24/147364732/googles-goggles-is-the-future-right-before-our-eyes.
[2] Craig Morgan Teicher
[3] Thank you, John Calvin!
[4] Morna D. Hooker, The Gospel According to St. Mark, 208.
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