"Get a Life!" people say nowadays. They mean: "What you're doing is BORING! You need some spice, some excitement, some adventure in your existence. Do something daring and fun - go get a life." But "Get a life" is a good slogan for us to adopt on the threshold of Lent - only, not the way folks usually think of it.
"Get a life" is the call of the Church to all people. It's a recognition of the fact that we can be alive and breathing, and still not be living - not living LIFE like God wants us to live. But when the Church calls to us: "Get a life!" she doesn't mean any life. She means the life of Christ. Here's life that's real life. To miss out on this Life, not to have this Life as your own, is to miss out on what you're here for. So "get a life."
But today's Gospel sounds more like "lose a life," doesn't it? Jesus says: "Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and all things that are written by the prophets concerning the Son of man will be accomplished. For He will be delivered to the gentiles and will be mocked and insulted and spit upon. They will scourge Him and kill Him; And the third day He will rise again." Get a life?
Jesus speaks about suffering, torture, death, and then finally vindication. Get a life?
He knew that life was in the Father and that all of His being flowed from the Father as gift. And so he didn't have to worry about keeping his life - that was His Father's job, not his. His job was to do the Father's bidding - a plan laid out by the Father in the prophets. His job was to suffer, and then to die for us, and to do so in the complete confidence that His Father would not abandon the Innocent Sufferer, that His Father would raise Him from the dead on the third day to be the well-spring of eternal life!
But He was talking to deaf ears. His disciples, His 12, His chosen friends. they just didn't get it. Three times Luke tells us that: "But they understood none of these things; this saying was hidden from them; and they did not know the things which were spoken." As though Luke said: Dumb, dumber and dumbest. They didn't get it. Why?
Because that's not how any of us think about "getting a life." It's the exact opposite. Look at our hospitals. They've been called the temples of our culture, where we expend awesome amounts of money and skill to try to cheat death for a few more minutes, a few more days. That we understand. But willingly walking into suffering and death and trusting that God will not abandon us to this in the end, that we just don't get.
Our eyes are as blind as the disciples' were. But look what happens next! Jesus nears Jericho, and a blind man hears the crowd and all the commotion and wants to know what's up. They tell him that Jesus is passing by. It's his chance for life.
He cries out: "Jesus, Son of David, have pity on me!" "Would you shut up," the folks around him say. "Son of David, have pity on me!" he screams all the louder. Jesus is on his own way through Jericho to Jerusalem to that suffering and death he has just spoken of. But he stops at the cry of this man. Tells them to bring him to him. And asks: What do you want me to do for you?"
"Lord, that I may receive my sight!" he begs. Jesus says: "Receive your sight. Your faith has made you well." And instantly, the beggar saw again. Saw the face of his healer. And this is all important: What did he do then?
"He followed Him [that is, Jesus] glorifying God." He followed Jesus as Jesus takes the Jerusalem road. He followed with open eyes and songs of praise and thanks to the One who had given sight. "Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened" - then when? "When God comes to save you!" Jesus is on the way to do the great saving work. He is God in the flesh, and He has come to rescue and save, to give life to a people who are bound for death. To do so by suffering and dying for us. To do so by rising again in victory over the grave.
"Get a life!" the Church cries to her children as they enter Lent. Let the Lord Jesus open your eyes to see what it means that He goes to Jerusalem. And then with eyes wide open, follow Him up the road to His city. Join the crowds that throng Him on Palm Sunday. Sit with Him at His Eucharist where He bequeaths a Kingdom. Pray with Him in the garden, "Not my will, but thine be done." Follow Him to judgment, suffering, to execution. But don't leave Him there. Go with Him all the way to Easter, to His appearing to His disciples in the breaking of bread after their hearts have been warmed by His teaching from the Word. Listen to Him as He bestows the gift of life.
And all along this road with your eyes wide open to what He is doing for you, let the songs of praise rise from your lips, as you follow Him through suffering and death to resurrection and life eternal. And as you walk this road with Him, you will come to the joyful recognition, that He walks this road with you - and this is how He gives you life. That just as His Father did not abandon Him to suffering and the grave, neither will He abandon you to these.
"Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up, does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, endures all things. Love never fails."
That's what was in the Lord Jesus as He walked the road to Jerusalem. And that love is REAL life. And that is what He would plant within us as we walk the road with Him: His life, within us as real life. This life that He gives us in the water, at the table, in the Word. Real life.
"Get a life" this Lent. The life of Christ!
Amen.
