On Not Laughing with the World

1 Peter 2: 16
16Live as free men, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil; live as servants of God.

“They were on their way up to Jerusalem, with Jesus leading the way, and the disciples were astonished, while those who followed were afraid. Again he took the Twelve aside and told them what was going to happen to him. 33“We are going up to Jerusalem,” he said, “and the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death and will hand him over to the Gentiles, 34who will mock him and spit on him, flog him and kill him. Three days later he will rise.” Mark 10:32-34
A phrase oft repeated in Mark’s Gospel is “on their way.” There is an unmistakable movement in this Gospel. The geography and place names are not just window-dressing for the story. Jesus is really going somewhere and the destination is part of his vital mission. Here in this verse Jesus is going “up to Jerusalem.” This is the key essential destination for Christ. This trip to Jerusalem is the reason why Christ was born.
We also notice that the direction is going up. While we don’t notice the topography of Judea, the writers of Scriptures knew Jerusalem was on higher elevation.

Why were the disciples astonished and the followers of Jesus afraid?
Both responses may have been related to the previous encounter Jesus had with the rich young man, who sadly turned away from following Jesus, because of his wealth. Upon seeing the impossible task of pleasing God on our own, the disciples may have been astonished, and some even afraid.
Another explanation is that the astonishment came with the direction of the journey. In Mark 8:31, while they were in Caesarea Philippi, Jesus told them he would “suffer many things and be rejected by elders, chief priests, and teachers of the law and that he must be killed and after three days rise again.”
Peter, remember, tried to talk Jesus out of this. Peter did not understand that this was the whole purpose of Jesus life. He was going to suffer and die.
The glory of Christ is the Cross. His inauguration and coronation of his kingly rule is his passion. His crown is not the jeweled crown of a monarch, but a crown of thorns. The Roman soldiers did mock Jesus as he foretold. Each aspect of his kingliness was mocked and ridiculed. His throne was to be the rough hewn timbers of a Roman execution. But the mockery of men is the wisdom of God. The way of suffering by the Servant, was the way of his triumph over all his enemies, so that even death was conquered- in three days he rose again.

In pagan lands, far and near, there are ancient customs of dealing with death. In Latin America, there is a festival of the dead, where people dress up in costumes to disguise themselves from the deceased spirits. They believe if they make fun of death, then death will not bother them. There is in these cultures a strong emphasis on death, because they do not have the hope we have in Christ’s Resurrection. As the light of the Gospel loses its grip on our culture, I see the same emphasis upon death. Just look at the amount of decoration and seemingly harmless fun people engage in around Halloween. We see more decorations than on any other holiday and it’s all about death, sorcery and evil. Are we are not moving towards a neo-paganism with the kind of things we see today? As believers in the risen Savior we are moving in a different direction than the rest of the world. The world tries to deal with death by making fun of it. Jesus conquered it and broke its power and those in Christ live in the freedom of that triumph. There is in the Eastern Orthodox Church a tradition known as the Easter laugh. Christians can laugh in joy about Christ’s redemptive victory over sin and death. But, we don’t laugh with the world that lies in the grip of the fear of death and the darkness of sin.