Strange Rewards

Even in denominations like my own Presbyterian Church, which emphasizes salvation by God's grace and not human effort, it is hard to get away from the notion of punishment or reward based on how we live our lives. The phrase, "There's a special place in hell for people who..." speaks to this expectation that people should get what they deserve.

Despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, we like to think this about the success and good fortune in our daily lives. People who are successful tend to think they earned it. And there is a companion tendency to think people are responsible for their own bad predicaments. Not that personal initiative and effort don't count, but they are hardly the only variables involved. Working hard and doing the right thing do not always lead to rewards as we tend to think of them.

Take John the baptizer (that's what Mark's gospel calls him) in today's gospel reading. John's reward for doing just as God wants him to do is arrest and then execution. In Mark's gospel, this clearly foreshadows what will happen with Jesus, and no doubt there were people who said of both men, "Well when you go around challenging powerful people all the time, you can't be too surprised when they take offense and do something about it."

Jesus expects that those who follow him will run into many of the same problems he and John did. We will be rejected, hated, and will suffer. But that is the rarest of experiences for American Christians. If anything, we tend to think that church membership gives us an air of respectability. And though not as common as it once was, politicians and business people still join churches to gain contacts and project the right image.

The interesting question for me is, "What changed?" Did the world change so much that Jesus' message is no longer problematic or offensive? Or did we change Jesus' message to make it more compatible with the world? The answer likely includes some of both, but clearly there's been a great deal of domesticating and ignoring some things Jesus said. We keep trying to squeeze Jesus into our view of how the world works or should work. We keep trying to squeeze Jesus into our notions of reward and punishment. To lesser or greater degrees, we all do this because, to lesser or greater degrees, we all put ourselves and our direct interests at the very center of our lives.

Jesus puts God there, and he calls us to do the same. But look where that got Jesus.

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