“But we,” began Peter, “we left everything and have followed you.”
look there has to be an easier way
when we hitched our star to yours
that’s supposed to have value
for us as well as for youif this way is going to be marketable
you’d best figure out
how to sell the comfort angle
without daily attentionheaven sounds like a good outcome
but it keeps having growing pains
every time it is about to come on earth
and we have to open a still larger doorthis is fair warning
back off your stringency
or we’re out of here
raise us or get out of the pot
It is very difficult to get past the suffering and death part of new life. This is something any addict who has given up every other thing for a next fix will affirm.
This falls in the “impossible” realm of what we can do on our own.
It is easy to fall into a binary way of dealing with spiritual matters that divides things into body and soul, into the nothing I can do and the everything G*D can do. This means we need to be careful not to submerge our needed agency into being a pale image cast on some cave wall.
It is easy to claim that one move we made toward health and whatever is beyond that is all that is needed. In this way we insulate ourselves from ever having to make another adjustment. Our life can settle in to “what’s in it for me” and that’s all we need to know.
And we are back again to a previous scene with Peter affirming that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, but one who was exempt from the consequences of such a location. Let’s hear it for Peter whose rockiness, trying to block a river, reveals the impetus of the river with the eddies around its resistance. Such a block helps clarify the underlying gravity that pulls the river on.
If discipleship is primarily a quid pro quo arrangement, the energy needed to be as expansive as its avatar will constrict. This is a basic understanding of the Constantinian conversion of Christ’s way from persecuted to privileged, from non-violence to violence, from invitational to required. Even though it took 300 years to shift, this question is instrumental in continued schisms.