Jesus calls us to serve Him by the way of obscurity and misunderstanding, and He has shown us what that kind of service looks like. On the day He died, He was the only one who understood what was actually happening.
The day He died His followers saw catastrophe, and His enemies saw triumph. All of them saw the end of something, they had no way of knowing it was really the beginning of something completely new in the world. On that day only He knew what His death really meant. Part of His suffering was His willingness to be ridiculed as a buffoon or pitied as a martyr.
It is this suffering Jesus who has called us to follow Him, to serve Him in this same way, with this same willingness to be misunderstood.
This kind of suffering is not easy. There is a kind of glory in suffering while people are cheering us on, but that is the privilege of the home team. Christians are not competing in a home game; we know we are in enemy-occupied territory.
Christ-followers must be willing to suffer, in addition to everything else, the embarrassment of being misunderstood. But we would not be the first Christians to be called fools.
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