I read a great book yesterday: Margo’s Got Money Troubles, by Rufi Thorpe. It’s hilarious, heartfelt, and involves a teen mom scraping by with the help of her dad (a recently-divorced, retired pro wrestler struggling with heroin addiction) and an unexpectedly lucrative OnlyFans account. (If you don’t know what OnlyFans is, maybe find out before you decide if this book is for you.)
The author does hilariously intentional noodling with point of view in the novel, switching between first and third person, giving this 19 year old an uncannily insightful view of herself in the process. I love Margo. And I love how she treats all the funny, messed-up, complicated people in her life. Toward the end of the book, she has this (first person!) revelation that I fell asleep wondering about last night:
“Love was not something, I realized, that came to you from outside. I had always thought that love was supposed to come from other people, and somehow, I was failing to catch the crumbs of it, failing to eat them, and I went around belly empty and desperate. I didn’t know that love was supposed to come from within me, and that as long as I loved others, the strength and warmth of that love would fill me, make me strong.”
I don’t know many 19 year olds who could articulate such an ancient, 500-level spiritual truth with that kind of clarity, but of course Rufi Thorpe, the author who wrote that sentence, is not 19. She’s a middle-aged mom with an MFA and a PEN/Faulkner finalist novel under her belt already. And Rufi Thorpe has preached this week’s sermon for you, if you’ve got Mark 8 queued up.
Chapter 8 is the hinge point in Mark’s gospel, when Jesus turns from traveling around healing people and exorcising demons to traveling around talking about the suffering he will soon endure and explaining what it means to be his disciple. Chapters 8, 9 and 10 all include this pattern: Jesus tells the disciples that he will suffer, die and rise again; the disciples act dumb and misinterpret what he’s saying; Jesus explains that this is the way of the Messiah and that they have stuff to do, too.
Here in Chapter 8, Jesus tells his disciples, “quite openly,” that “the Son of Man” (Jesus: noodling with point of view before any postmodern poet even imagined it) must undergo great suffering and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes and be killed and after three days rise again.
Peter gets mad, because that’s not what happens to Messiahs - they ride in on a high horse with a giant army and WIN WARS, Jesus, not suffer and die! And then Jesus gets mad at Peter, because of COURSE he would rather WIN than DIE, but he’s trying to follow the divine plan put in motion before his very birth, thankyouverymuch, and being reminded that he has cosmic powers available to him to do pretty much whatever he wants is an awful, heart-rending temptation.
“Get behind me, Satan!” Jesus yells at Peter, because Peter is sounding an awful lot like the actual Satan who tempted Jesus up on the mountain not so long ago, and Jesus is, as we’ve already established, human in addition to being divine, and so those temptations - to VANQUISH all the WEAK and TOPPLE all the TYRANTS - are huge and looming.
And then Jesus calls everybody - the whole crowd and his disciples - together and says: “If you want to follow me, then you’ve got to take up your cross. Not your sword, not your AR-15s, not your bombs and jets and not your strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world, but a cross. And follow me. Because anybody who spends their life trying to defend themselves will lose their life entirely, but the people who hold their lives lightly, who are willing to lose what they’ve got for the sake of something new, who forego the fortified bunkers and reinforced ramparts in favor of openness, mercy, vulnerability, connection, curiosity, a willingness to be changed…in favor of love: those people save their own lives.”
“For what will it profit them,” he asks, “to win the whole world, but forfeit their lives?”
Like Margo, who learns not to crawl after the crumbs of love in order to build up her bulwarks, but to build strength by loving, herself.
I know an awful lot of people who are choosing to respond to the chaos of our world by building higher and higher barricades around themselves, scrambling on the ground for a few crumbs of other peoples’ care that they can claim and hoard. I do it myself pretty regularly. It looks like locking my car door when I pull up next to someone begging for food on the median. Or hoarding my income to make myself feel “financially stable” instead of sharing it when someone asks. Or continuing to seek validation from systems that I know are warped and harmful. Or joining campaigns for toppling tyrants that ignore the humanity and well-being of actual human neighbors. I could go on and on.
I suspect that you are also struggling, in some way, with this instruction from Jesus to lose your life. It’s kind of counter-intuitive: a suffering Messiah doesn’t make a lot of sense. A dead savior doesn’t exactly paint the picture of victory Peter was invested in. Even Jesus struggled with it, sweating blood, crying out for it to be different, switching back and forth between first- and third-person in an attempt to get his head around who he was and what he meant. If we weren’t wrestling, we probably wouldn’t be alive at all.
Spoiler alert: Margo comes out all right, in the end. Nothing earth-shattering happens, she just figures out ways to love all the weird people around her in ways that weave webs of connection and support and love across divides that we might assume were uncrossable. She just acts, intuitively, as if her life is bound to theirs, as if it only makes sense to move forward together. As if an unbarricaded heart, willing to suffer and die, is the only way through.
What will it profit us to gain the whole world, if we have to forfeit our tender hearts to do it?
Your article today was like a well-aimed arrow into my struggling heart.
Welcome back from Alaska! I really appreciate your insight into the biblical text. As those who attempt to follow Jesus, it really does become quite counter-cultural.