The Path of Descent

 “The path of descent”

Matthew 16:21-28

Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

March 10, 2024

Even though wise friends and my doctor had warned me that taking antidepressants might be rough at first, I still wasn’t prepared for how much worse I felt before I began to feel better. I thought I was a pro at living with anxiety, but the level of panic I felt when I started taking medication was more intense than I had expected. Luckily, my doctor had the foresight to prescribe a second med I could use to get through the rough patches until things evened out. So I gritted my teeth and pushed through, hopeful things would be better on the other side. Within a few weeks, I felt emotionally better than I had ever felt in my life. Yay for the miracle of science! 

(Please note: every body is different and you should, in no way, extrapolate that your medical experiences would be anything like mine. I’m just telling you what my experience was like.)

In my situation, things had to get significantly worse before they could get better. I had to descend before I could come back up for air. But once I made it through, what awaited me on the other side was worth every bit of the struggle. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t carrying around constant anxiety and when I did have anxious thoughts I could not only recognize them as irrational but actually let them go. Amazing. 

Sometimes this is just how it goes, right? Things have to get worse before they get better. You have to sink pretty low before you’re able to rise again. It really can be darkest before the dawn. 

This seems to be what Jesus was trying to impart to his disciples in today’s passage. Peter has just proclaimed Jesus “the Messiah, son of the living God,” and Jesus has named Peter “the rock on which I will build my community.” After this warm and uplifting interchange, we are told that Jesus “sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.”

Why the secrecy? Well, I’m guessing it had something to do with what comes next: “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.”

From our vantage point, centuries later we’re like, “Yeah, yeah, that’s what’s happening. I’ve heard this story before.” But try to put yourself in Peter’s shoes. His dear friend, his beloved, his teacher, his hope, his spiritual leader is telling him he’s about to be killed. No one would want to hear that from a friend. Especially if you think the friend is leading a movement. Especially if you think the friend is sent from God to bring liberation and salvation. Death is not supposed to be the endgame here, right? That’s not how this ends.

Perhaps he is so caught up in the fear of Jesus dying, Peter misses the part about resurrection. Or perhaps he hears it but writes it off because, as one of my favorite preachers, the Rev. Dr. Anna Carter Florence says, “If there’s one thing that’s certain in life, it’s that the dead stay dead.” Resurrection would have been so far out of the realm of possibility that Peter may have just glossed over it completely, responding only to the first part of Jesus’s statement - that he would be dying a painful death.

I have to say, of all the things that are said in this passage, Peter’s response to Jesus’s statement feels like one of the more rational things. “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” Wouldn’t you say the same to a friend? I know I would. 

But Jesus is displeased with Peter’s response. Well, “displeased” is an understatement. Although just a few short sentences ago he named Peter the “rock,” the solid foundation on which the church would be built. Peter is now a “stumbling block” put in place to trip Jesus up. Jesus chastises Peter for taking a human perspective rather than a godly perspective. 

I’ve often heard this passage interpreted through the lens of what it means to be a Messiah. Sometimes preachers oversimplify it by saying, “Peter was expecting a militaristic Messiah to come and fight the Romans because that’s what Jews thought the Messiah would be,” so when Jesus came as a spiritual leader, not a warrior, Peter was confused. The problem with this interpretation is that there’s nothing in this text that supports it. Jews were NOT all expecting a warrior Messiah. That much we know. So there’s no reason to assume that’s what was in Peter’s mind. Peter simply says, “God, please don’t let this be true. Please don’t ever let this happen to Jesus.” 

If you take out the “what kind of Messiah was Peter expecting” question and just focus on what’s actually being said here, Jesus’s statement about Peter focusing on human/worldly/earthly things rather than godly/heavenly/spiritual things isn’t about whether Jesus is a “spiritual” Messiah or “earthly” one. Instead, I hear Jesus telling Peter that what is about to happen - this descent into chaos and pain, followed by the overcoming and rising - is holy. It is the way of God. 

Sometimes things have to get a lot worse before they can get better. Sometimes you have to sink pretty low before you rise again. Sometimes it really is darkest before the dawn. 

Father Richard Rohr calls this “the descending way” - the notion that we have to descend in order to rise. [1] We don’t know what it feels like to be “up” if we’ve never been “down.” In fact, he says, this is precisely what Jesus was talking about a few chapters back when he told some other religious leaders about the “sign of Jonah.” When asked for a sign, Jesus says the only sign they’ll get is the sign of Jonah - three days in the dark, nasty belly of a fish. Jonah only rose after he descended. The same is true for Jesus. [2] 

And Rohr says the same is true for followers of Jesus, too. Rohr speaks about ascending and descending paths in religion. Ascending is when we want to get higher, be better, more perfect, more holy. Rohr says we naturally gravitate towards this idea. We want to be on the moral high ground. And we often want to feel morally superior to others. That’s why there have been so many religious wars. 

But there is also the descending path, which Jesus teaches and shows more often. The descending way is about letting go, forgiving, emptying ourselves, getting low, being simple, aligning ourselves with the poor and marginalized, living in solidarity with others rather than trying to make ourselves superior. You can see this pathway absolutely everywhere in the Bible, not just in the words and actions of Jesus. 

Jonah in the belly of the whale. 

Elijah on the run, miserable and afraid.

Ruth and Naomi: impoverished and alone. 

Jeremiah, Joseph, Daniel: all literally sent down into pits before rising up again

And then, of course, Jesus. The one who speaks of a world turned upside down. Blessed are the poor, the meek, the persecuted, the mourning. Blessed are those who are down in the depths, lower than low. 

Jesus’s entire life and ministry followed this spiral of descent. The only way up for him was down and through. There was no avoiding it. 

Poet Luci Shaw speaks beautifully of this in her poem about the Jesus’s birth. The name of the poem is actually “Descent.” She writes:

Down he came from up,
and in from out,
and here from there.
A long leap,
an incandescent fall
from magnificent
to naked, frail, small,
through space,
between stars,
into our chill night air,
shrunk, in infant grace,
to our damp, cramped
earthy place
among all
the shivering sheep.

Jesus at the beginning of his life walking the path of descent. And now, Jesus near the end of his life doing the same. The way of descent. Or as Glennon Doyle says so succinctly, “First the pain, then the rising.”

Peter only thinks of things from a human perspective, and he only sees what makes sense: pain and suffering. But Jesus invites the disciples into a way of living that doesn’t try to avoid the pain. “Take up your cross and follow me,” he says. 

Like Peter, we usually only hear the first part of what Jesus said, “Take up your cross.” No, thanks, Jesus. You’ve just told us where that leads. And we don’t want to go. We don’t want to see you descend into pain and we don’t want to go there either. We want to avoid suffering and pain. We don’t want to descend. We want to skip to the good part. 

And there’s nothing wrong with the good part - at all. Rohr says it’s not bad to want to continue to grow and seek higher spiritual ground. But the way there isn’t up, it’s down. 

Often, allowing ourselves to experience the pain of this world helps us find gratitude for the absence of pain. Often, the way up is down. Some of the most spiritually enlightened people I’ve ever known are people who have been through the absolute worst of it. And I’m not saying that they would have ever wished for that and I’m certainly not saying God sent it their way, but I AM saying that their experiences carrying the crosses that came their way led them to a place of transcendence. 

Please don’t go out looking for a cross to bear. Our crosses will find us. And I also want to say that it’s not a cross if it can be avoided. God never desires for us to stay in an abusive relationship, for example. That’s not a cross to bear, even though church leaders have shamefully used this verse to encourage people to suffer through terrible situations when they should have been helping people get free. 

But when the absolutely unavoidable suffering of life comes our way, as it sometimes does, we, like Peter, can cling to the words of Jesus: “Take it up and follow me,” he says. Not “take it up” alone. But “take it up and FOLLOW ME.” 

The way of descent isn’t easy. And no one ever said following Jesus was easy. Jesus himself is certainly saying otherwise here. But we do not travel the path of descent alone. 

As Father Rohr reminds us: despite our desire to climb, we sometimes hit a point in our lives where we find ourselves right back at the bottom again. When we get tired of trying to “be a saint,” we give up and learn to be ordinary and simple. We learn to descend. And in that moment of release, Rohr says that we realize that “there’s no climbing necessary. You’re there already. All you have to do is let go and trust that someone else is leading. Frankly, because you don’t always know how to lead. And neither do I. But if you let go, you’ll discover someone else is leading quite well.” [3] 

May it be so. Amen. 

NOTES:

[1] https://cac.org/daily-meditations/the-descending-path-2023-02-24/

[2] https://cac.org/daily-meditations/the-sign-of-jonah-2022-08-19/ 

[3]  https://cachomilies.blogspot.com/2019/08/ascending-religions-and-descending.html