Stress? What stress?

Not long after we came to Wilshire, Kim went to a doctor to see why she was having chronic cricks in her neck and pain in her shoulders and upper back. She had tried all the over-the-counter remedies, and I was tired of pretending to be a Swedish masseur, although there were things I liked about that, don’t you know?! Well, anyway, the doctor asked her about the stress in her life. I don’t have any stress, she said. “Tell me about your family,” he said. “Hmm. Three young children? And you say you don’t work outside of the home, but what does your husband do?” He’s a Baptist pastor. “I see,” said he. “You have a new house, three young children, you are the wife of a Baptist pastor, and you say you have no stress in your life? Hello?”

Stress is a fact of life for all of us. If you are alive, you have stress. And the more alive you are, the more stress you are likely to have. Stress is the pressure of external forces that strain against your internal strength. Think of a submarine. The deeper it dives, the greater to pressure from the outside, and thus the more the sub must pressurize inside in order to match it. Psychologically, too much stress working upon us compared to our capacity to cope and we will feel overwhelmed and despondent at the prospect of being crushed by life. Too little stress compared to our ability to handle it and we will feel bored and despondent at the prospect of being unchallenged by life.

Stress comes in many forms. Physical stress tests measure the heart’s ability to handle pressure from increased exercise; emotional stress tests measure the capacity to handle pressure from increased challenges financially, relationally, socially, or spiritually. Some of you are under great stress right now due to marital conflicts, deaths in the family, serious illnesses, work or money concerns, or simply changes in any situation. Others of you probably overestimate the stress in your life because you haven’t had to struggle much to this point.

We were on vacation recently and Kim was sitting on a lounge chair at the pool. Four young well-to-do-looking women, probably in their late 20s, were loudly chatting up the area with conversation shallow and silly, reading People and InStyle magazines, and soaking up the sun while their husbands played golf. One girl was talking about heading to the spa, and another said she has to get a stone massage—whatever that is—once a week. I just have to, she said, to deal with all the stress in my life. I saw this woman myself, after I got back from playing golf and joining my young well-to-do, well-massaged wife. Forgive my judgmentalism here, but something tells me the young woman’s stress might not rise to the level of a single mother living in Section 8 housing, making minimum wage, with a junior high boy she prays every day will stay out of gangs, out of trouble, and in school. Somehow it might not rise to the level of Christians in Iraq who are worried every time they gather to worship that a bomb might take them or their children to heaven before the benediction. Maybe they need a massage. Sorry, but stress is relative; and sometimes relatives cause the stress. But the problem with us is often not the amount of stress we have but the spiritual resources we have to rely on as we face them.

One of the surprises to me in our text today is to realize the amount of stress Jesus felt himself under. I have to admit that even though I know better, I tend to picture Jesus more like a tranquil Buddhist monk than the maligned messiah of Israel and the Suffering Savior of the world. Buddhism says that suffering is the result of desire, and if you can rid yourself of desire by achieving a measure of detachment from the world, then you will move through life with a surplus of inner peace. Or, to change the image a bit, I think of Jesus handling stress and managing conflict with the enemy a bit like Col. Hogan of Hogan’s Heroes. No matter the threat, Hogan could make his enemies look like fools, he could undermine them with ease, defeat them with cleverness, keep a sense of humor, and always get the girl. Okay, so maybe the last part isn’t like Jesus, although that Mary Magdalene … well, we’ll leave that to the fiction writers like Dan Brown to tease out.

Jesus does not ride above life or offer us a philosophy for how to do that ourselves. He is engaged in life, not disengaged from it. He does not rid himself of desire; you can’t love without desire, and loves enough to desire the will of God be done in and through him to complete the purpose of his life. And this desire competes in him—the way it does with us—with the desire not to suffer. When Jesus says what stress I am under until it is completed, the word for stress could also be translated as something that has a hold on him, something that has seized him and controls him. In other words, Jesus feels the burden of the love of God in him as the overriding mission that must be carried out, not matter the personal cost.

Listen again to what he says: I came bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! Most of us think Jesus came to bring water to put out the fires of earth. Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. The old King James says not peace but a sword. Doesn’t that surprise you? Isn’t Jesus the Prince of Peace? Didn’t the angels announce peace on earth at his birth? Didn’t he say he was leaving peace to his disciples, a peace that St. Paul says passes all human understanding? Well, yes, but Jesus knows that the peace he will accomplish is hard-won, that there is real conflict with the powers of this world that must be defeated in order that peace may prevail.

Jesus knows that fire can purify as well as destroy. This is the kind of fire he brings to the earth—the fire that separates gold from dross, pure from impure. The division he brings is not the sword that kills but the scalpel that cuts away the cancer so that the body can heal, the hatchet that breaks the chains of bondage in order to free. Jesus understands that the gospel he brings brings stress. He will have to endure it himself in order to save us; we will have to endure it in order to be saved. The same suffering that enabled him to save us will enable us to be saved.

I was talking to a man the other day whose wife is in a drug treatment center. He has struggled with their marriage and nearly given up hope. But he realized something in a story about Mahatma Gandhi. Seems a woman brought her young son to the great man, complaining about the boy’s addiction to sweet foods. Tell my son to stop eating sugar, she said. “Come back in two weeks,” he told her. Two weeks later she brought the boy to him and Gandhi said, “Stop eating sugar.” Thank you, the woman said, but why couldn’t you have told him that two weeks ago. “Because two weeks ago, I was still eating sugar myself.” Hearing that story, my friend decided he had to quit drinking before asking his wife to deal with her problem. You can only help someone grow spiritually by an example that urges them upward, not be descending to their level. He did that, and now the family has a chance to get well.

Jesus does not ask us to face anything that he was unwilling to face himself. He endured suffering himself, even to the point of dying on a cross at the hands of those who were not willing to accept the fire he was bringing to earth that would reveal their own spiritual condition.

So part of the story is that Jesus himself was under great stress: he knew it, he felt it, he faced it. And even death was a victory for him over it, because it was a redemptive death, a death that came within a life of faithfulness to God. A friend of mine who is a former Roman Catholic thinks that maybe they understand this a bit better than Protestants. Catholics grow up looking at Jesus on the cross in their crucifixes, while Protestants, eager to celebrate the resurrection, look only at the empty cross. We more easily forget the stress he underwent for us and our salvation.

Because he suffered for us, he can suffer with us even now and give us the power to conquer the stresses of our lives and turn them into opportunities for healing and peace. But we must not run from stress. We must increase our tolerance for pain. The gospel is good for us, but the gospel challenges all the destructive ways we are stuck in patterns of dependency or oppression that keep us from the abundant life God wants to give us.

Accepting Jesus is playing with fire. If he came to bring fire to the earth and we welcome him into our lives, then we can count on opposition from the powers that are threatened by what Jesus is bringing. For instance, if you are part of company that plays loose with business ethics and is willing to take advantage of customers or clients, you will feel the stress that comes when you accept the baptism of fire that judges. If you live in a country that refuses to allow your liberty of conscience and will imprison you or worse for your commitment to Jesus and his way of life, then you are in good company with the saints of old, some of them nameless in our roll call of heroes from the book of Hebrews, of whom the world was not worthy. If you find it hard to stand up to the crowd at school or in your political party or at your country club or in your neighborhood association and suddenly you do so because of Jesus, get ready for division.

You may even find this true from those you love and who love you. Jesus says that on account of him fathers and sons will be divided against one another, as well as mothers and daughters, and in-laws, too. Here again, we have a hard time imagining Jesus saying this. After all, isn’t he the family values candidate? How can he say that he is the cause of broken families? Well, the point is what he has been saying: it’s not that he wants families to be divided; it is that he wants families to find their peace around that same mission and purpose of God that he declares. Family peace and unity can be contrary to the will of God if it is based on what is contrary to the will of God. Mafia families are close, but they put blood loyalty before spiritual righteousness. Blood is not thicker than baptismal water.

Shakespeare’s classic tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, tells the story of star-crossed lovers. Their two families cannot let go of their longstanding feud in order to welcome the love of their children. The teenage lovers are caught in the generational tension between the Montagues and the Capulets. The families would not accept a new possibility for their lives—that love rather than hatred would become the things to keep them together. At the end of the play, with the fatal death scene complete, the prince speaks in judgment of the families: See what a scourge is laid upon your hate,/ That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love;/ And I, for winking at your discords too,/ Have lost a brace of kinsmen: all are punished.

Yes, all are punished by not accepting the love of God that Jesus brings in this present time—now! That love is a fire. It will either consume you because your resistance to it is the fuel it feeds on, or it will inflame you with a passion of love that will make you more alive than you have ever been before. That is the stress of the gospel. It’s a holy stress that redeems. Will you bear it for Christ’s sake? Can you accept that conflicted and conflicting love?