I have a book on my shelf that people often remark on when they see it, called “The Emotional Intelligence of Jesus,” published about ten years ago.  The term “Emotional Intelligence” gained popularity after the 1995 bestselling book of the same name by Daniel Goleman, who defined EI as the array of skills and characteristics that drive leadership performance.  People with high emotional intelligence can recognize their own emotions and those of others, use emotional information to guide thinking and behavior, discern between different feelings and label them appropriately, and adjust emotions to adapt to environments.

Placing the historical Jesus within a 21^st century construct like this may seem unfair, especially given that Jesus’ emotions are rarely a focus in the gospels.  But what are today considered key EI competencies do appear consistently, and in uncanny ways in Jesus’ behaviour, and his ways of interacting with people.  They are key to walking his way, his new way of love: love of enemy and neighbour, a way that embodies respect, and integrity, and that generates a new kind of community.

We see these qualities when Jesus is confronted by opponents with hostile questions designed to trap him.  Or when he sometimes pauses to doodle in the sand with a stick, before responding to a harsh question with another question, that reframes the whole situation.  We see it when he notices an individual in a vast crowd, a woman who is bleeding, and focuses in on her as if there’s no one else there making her struggle his.  We see it when, faced with a huge crowd, after a long day of speaking and healing people, he can express a concern for the people’s hunger.  Or when he encounters a naked possessed man in a graveyard, a non-Jew, calmly walks up to him, and when the man assumes the voice of the many demons, the multiple personalities within, Jesus doesn’t hesitate – he speaks with their spokesperson, and proceeds to restore the man to wholeness. This is someone who has what we’d call a high EQ, someone who knows themselves thoroughly, and well.

So today, with characteristic brevity, Mark lays out a memorable encounter with the pivotal issue of Jesus’ true identity, and Jesus’ own self-awareness.  The passage is part of a longer chunk of text that begins earlier, when Jesus asks his friends and followers a series of questions.  The final question is, “Do you not yet understand?”  As Mark puts it, “He kept on saying to them, “Do you not yet understand?”  What a question… for us, too.

Peter’s words are a classic example of “knowing but not understanding.”  In effect, through Peter they all say both that Jesus is the Christ, and also that they refuse Jesus’ embrace of the role in terms of suffering and death.  They cannot imagine any other way of confronting violence than with violence itself.  So, for them, the Messiah cannot be weak.  They have been there alongside Jesus, from the beginning, and yet at this moment they are no different than the crowd.  But, what the disciples aren’t understanding is personal – part of a relationship. Because what they are not understanding is Jesus’ identity.

Like that painful moment that comes sometimes in marriages, or between parents and children, when a spouse, or a child, looks at the other and says, “Do you even see me?  Do you even know who I am?”

Jesus’ own friends and followers are unable to imagine one who comes to serve, and to suffer, rather than prevail, violently, if necessary.  They cannot break out of their own understanding of what is powerful and heroic.  They are trapped in their own assumptions and expectations – just as we are trapped, by virtue of living according to our invisible contemporary certainties.  Transforming our understanding, or how we see, is not achieved in one step, or even in two or three. It takes practice, in community with others.

To be clear, following Jesus, and denying ourselves, does not mean denying our true self, our authentic self.  It means living into our full humanity with others.  It means finding the path that will best enable us to find that intersection—that crossing, that cross that Jesus invites us to take up—where the human and the divine meet in fullness.  It’s an invitation to imagine that our self needs the other. Because this is what it’s all about, being human… Belonging.  Relationship.  We can’t be ourselves on our own – and we need to learn, and re-learn, that together. Through practice.

When Jesus says, “take up your cross, and follow,” he is, in effect, inviting each of us to practice.  To follow means to practice.  To practice the Cross.  Which sounds odd.  However, it draws from US poet and activist Wendell Berry’s classic poem, “Manifesto,” with its final line:  “Practice resurrection.”  The call to live an Easter life — to attend to birthing life from death, to pay attention to what is rising around us.  If we can practice resurrection, might it be possible to practice the cross?

Change… is a funny thing.  It’s hard!  And yet it is a constituent part of life – of all of life, the natural world, and each of our cycles of life.  And so too, following Jesus, and the season of Lent in particular, is all about change.  We don’t like it much, but we all have a sense of the role of change in life.  Many of us yearn for change, and we have learned that we can’t do it on our own.

So, we come together, like this – to be more deeply connected to God, to learn what it takes to follow a life-giving way, to act more justly, to figure out how to love our neighbours as ourselves.  We practice.

And we are changed by practice.  As a kid, I was started on piano lessons.  Fights ensued when, on nice days, my mother made me practice the piano when I could hear other kids outside.  Then it started to get interesting.  From piano being a duty, I began to write my own music.  I grew into it.  In a small way, I became a musician.

Practice is the pathway from being someone else’s idea of what is good for us toward embodying something that has become us.  Practice isn’t just something we do, it changes who we are.

Lent is a season of practice.  We practice being better able to see what it was about Jesus that his friends and followers could not yet see – and what churches, and all of us, still struggle to see.  Because it’s hard to see things in that “Jesus” way of seeing.

But why does all this matter so much?  What is it about understanding Jesus’ identity that is so critical – not his identity as one who is “true God and true Man” as it says in the creeds, but as the person who left an incredible impact on people, then and now.

It’s important because Jesus didn’t ask us to believe in him.  He wanted people, including us today, to follow.  To walk in his way.  And to do that we need to “get” him, so that we embody the healing and renewal and wholeness that he brought to life in the very midst of a broken, stuck, and painful world.  Because walking in Jesus’ way is what helps us to bridge the very contradictions that lie between the world as God always intended it to be, and the world as it is:  the world of Gaza, and Ukraine, and climate disaster, and poverty, homelessness, refugees, and hunger.  In bridging those contradictions there lies hope.

It is that gap – between what God wants (what we want), and what reality consists of – that the US author and educator Parker Palmer calls the “Tragic Gap.”  The yawning gap between what we yearn for, pray for, work towards, and believe in, and the continuing stark reality of what we see, is bridged by spiritual practices… of all kinds, harnessing energy, spirit, and discernment, and transformation, to reach across… It is in following, rather than believing in Jesus, that we bridge that gap, as well as the gap in understanding between Jesus and his friends and followers (and us!), about who he is, and what that means.

Because it is practice, not going through the motions, but developing spiritual muscle memory, that will make sense of the paradoxes involved in being followers of Jesus…. Jesus, who says that we need to die in order to really live. That we need to say no to ourselves to be able to hear God’s resounding “Yes!” to us.  That we need to let go of everything we have to receive everything we could possibly want, and more.

It is, in fact, Jesus’ “theory of everything,” and it shows up throughout the gospels, typically being met with a response of complete bewilderment, including from his closest followers, and… truth be told, most of us!

Jesus’ theory of everything is, in many ways, the ultimate paradox, setting in sharp relief the things of faith when seen against the so-called “real” world.  After all, we are told to protect our own first.  Jesus said to give yourself away.  We are told to save ourselves first.  Jesus compels us to risk our life to save another.  It’s like a flight attendant telling you to put the oxygen mask on your neighbours first, and then put your own on.

This was as counter-intuitive to the first followers of Jesus as it is to us.  They too sought achievement, success, and prosperity.  They wanted Jesus’ movement to prevail, for people to be free, and didn’t want more suffering.  But Jesus would have none of it.  Still today, most of his followers look to Jesus to come and make everything okay.  But that’s not what his way means.  It’s about relationship.  We are not asked to just believe in Jesus – not by him, anyway – we’re asked to follow…

Most of us are not going to be asked to give up our life for another.  We live pretty safely and comfortably.  So, what does that look like to bear our cross?  Sing, forgive, do justice.  Love your enemies, turn the other cheek, keep Sabbath.  Offer hospitality, serve the poor, care for the planet.  The more we practice, the more we become the person God created us to be – living a meaningful life for the sake of the world.  Faith deepens us.  We become givers, prayers, those content with simplicity, makers of music, agents of justice, able to embrace all people, generous, hospitable, and stewards of this good earth, our beautiful home.  It’s not easy.  We make mistakes.  But we also value the integrity of acting out in public what we practice in private.  And as we hang out with others who are doing the same, we practice together.

Jesus’ theory of everything doesn’t just work for us, it works for the church.  For the “us” of Bloor Street, and the “us” of St. Matthew’s.  It’s why I find this time of such uncertainty for faith communities in society so hopeful and exciting for churches like ours – we are learning that in losing life as we’ve known it, we’re finding new life.  We’re learning that we can die in order to live, and can discover who we are by welcoming the stranger.  We’re learning what it’s like to be met with abundance, even as we give everything away!  The church is, you know, the only organization that exists primarily for the benefit of its non-members!

Jesus’ theory of everything is deeply, deeply rooted in an understanding and experience of God as a game-changer.  At the start it seemed that Jesus only called for some small changes to the rules.  He would heal on the Sabbath.  He would lighten up on some of the dietary restrictions.  He would talk publicly and freely, and value the perspectives and wisdom of women!  But then things came into clearer focus.  This rabbi was playing a whole new game.  Rather than pursuing personal purity by following a set of laws, he sought communal well-being and justice.  Rather than moral perfection, he yearned for compassion, forgiveness, and grace.

And, bit by bit he moved closer to his destination.  “I’m going to the cross.”  It’s how it had to be.  Jesus’ God wasn’t just a rule-changer, God was and is a game-changer…

Peter had been waiting for a messiah his entire life.  The people had been promised the messiah would come to rule with justice and might, would reward their faithfulness, and chase out their enemies.  And now Peter has seen the Messiah.  His prayers have been answered.  And the Messiah says to him, “I am going to suffer, and die.”  God the game-changer at work.

Where are the game-changers in the world today… Because those are the places where we look for God’s Spirit at work, dancing new life into being.  God is not done with us yet, and if we look around us, there are signs that game-changers are in our midst.  Aid and international development organizations have exploded the myth that some members of the human family must always go hungry.  They have a vision that ending hunger in our lifetime is within reach. Stopping the cycle of child abuse and domestic violence begins with neighbours who respond when they have concerns.  Standing up for LGBTQ+ and gender identity rights begins with becoming allies, and walking alongside them publicly. Political unrest signals a yearning for leaders to change, to start to play an entirely different game.  Climate change is pushing us to change our game as humanity.  And faith communities are emerging with new ways of encountering the holy, and joy, in life.  Not the next life, this one!

When we follow, we practice, and we “get” what Jesus was all about.  And, truth be told, for him – and for us – it’s no game.  May it be so.