When I was much younger a popular way of expressing sadness at hearing bad news was to say, “That’s a downer.” Yes, I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s. People didn’t like feeling sad, or down. Thus all the drug use and sexual experimentation. They never learned the value of sadness. It was to be avoided at all cost. Pain was something to be medicated away. Delay of gratification was intolerable. Now you know where those in power learned to put our nation 90 Trillion dollars in debt! There was no tomorrow. The nuclear war could start at any moment, so now was all there was. Why not lived life stoned?
This inability to accept bad news, no matter how slight, is a horrible social plight. Most of the time we just brush aside any bad news and ignore it. We click and the bad news goes away, replaced by a funny or cute video. And then when we can’t get rid of the pain, we blame someone else for our situation and demand that they fix it, and that they pay for it too. Nothing is ever our fault, our responsibility, our bed in which we have chosen to lay.
But these feelings are not new to the Baby Boomers. The disciples had problems hearing bad news. In fact, they had problems hearing good news also. Jesus had asked them to give them the results of an informal survey about His identity. Peter had declared that they believed He was the Messiah. And then Jesus begins to reshape their thinking about what the Messiah’s character and role will actually be. Peter doesn’t like the pain portion of that description and so tries to get Jesus to ‘click’ onto a happier subject. Jesus refuses to leave the subject insisting that they must deal with it.
After this confrontation Jesus announces that some will get to experience an encounter with Heaven itself. Remember, they had only heard the suffering portion of Jesus accounting of the things to come. They had missed the Resurrection news. So Jesus wants to wake some out of this narrow understanding of God’s role in the world through the Messiah. He wants to give them a taste of the joys of heaven even while they are stuck here on earth.
What I find amazing is that for the three disciples who get to experience this glimpse into heaven, it didn’t seem to cure their short-sightedness. They still did not ‘get’ the betrayal, the suffering, and the death of the Master, Jesus. They had heard the news Jesus had delivered, and all they heard was the ‘downer’ side of things. They missed the ‘rise again’ news.
In our attempts to avoid pain, hardship and disruption, what have we missed about the Gospel? What are we not hearing because we are pushing back against the pain, hardship and disruption, unwilling to go through even a little for the sake of the Kingdom? Isn’t it time we allowed Jesus to speak fully into our lives. We might hear such great news that will carry us through the ‘downers’ of life. If we allow ourselves to experience both the heights of ecstasy and the depths of despair, our lives will be richer than we could ever imagine.
The Arnold Journey 