15 September 2024
Mark 8:27-38
27 Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi, and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” 28 And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” 29 He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.”30 And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.
31 Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man 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. 32 He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 33 But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
34 He called the crowd with his disciples and said to them, “If any wish to come[b] after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. 36 For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? 37 Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? 38 Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”
After first asking them the opinions of others, Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” Presumably Jesus doesn’t ask this question to satisfy his curiosity. He forces upon them the necessity of answering that question for themselves.
Peter, characteristically, was the first to respond, and he gives the correct answer: “You are the Messiah”, the Christ. Well done Peter! Then immediatelyJesus begins to teach them that he’s going to die and rise again. So Peter, takes Jesus aside and begins to rebuke him. Not good. The text doesn’t say why Peter did this, but it’s safe to assume that he rebukes Jesus because of the dissonance between the confession he’s just made - You are the Messiah - and what Jesus declares will take place. It makes no sense to be the Messiah and to suffer. Peter, like many then, and many now, has a conception of who the Messiah must be and he insists that Jesus conform to it.
It’s easy to read Peter’s response as full of hubris, but I suspect that he’s responding mostly out of confusion and fear. Peter and the other disciples have left everything to follow Jesus, and they were hoping that he was leading them on an upward trajectory, bound for glory, but now Jesus tells them that the road they’re traveling leads to suffering and death. This is disconcerting. Suddenly Peter is questioning the confession he made, or how it’s possible that, if Jesus is the Messiah, he somehow doesn’t seem to understand how to Messiah. Like a concerned campaign manager, Peter tells his candidate for Christ to get back on message.
If all that were not disconcerting enough, Jesus responds by saying, “Get behind me, Satan!” Yikes. Why does Jesus respond so forcefully? It’s not just that Peter is a bit of a blockhead. The word Satan means simply, “adversary”, and here, in this moment, Peter plays an adversarial role by tempting Jesus to alter course, to be someone else. And the strength of Jesus’ rejection suggests that, in some sense, it was an actual temptation for him. Why drink the cup of suffering when you could just call down legions of angels? Why undergo humiliation when you could so easily humiliate your enemies? Why indeed?
There are a few lessons worth learning here. One is that we should not take our opinions of Jesus secondhand, we should not assume that the crowds’ opinions reflect the truth, but rather we should answer for ourselves, “Who do you say that I am?” Of course, in our day and age this question no longer carries much weight, but presumably you’re here because you think it might be worth answering, and you could say this community exists exactly to give an answer.
Another crucial lesson to learn here is that, like Peter, a person can confess that Jesus’ is the Messiah while having no idea what that means, or worse, while taking it to mean something quite different or even opposed to what it actually means. Not only can you speak true words without grasping that truth, you can even intend something else altogether.
So, those of us who answer Jesus’ question like Peter by saying, “You are the Messiah”, should be alert to the possibility - actually the inevitability - that we don’t understand what these words mean, that we imagine and desire Jesus to be someone and something other than who he actually is, that we must continually put ourselves in the position to be confronted by reality. Which again, is why we’re here, which is why we keep reading the same Scriptures; not because we understand them, but because we do not.
To those who aren’t sure how you’d answer, or who are skeptical that Jesus is who Christians claim he is, consider the possibility that the Jesus you find uncertain or even the one you’ve rejected is not Jesus as he actually is. Consider that prevailing opinions of the crowds of people who both reject and profess could be mistaken. It’s quite common nowadays for people to speak of undergoing a “deconstruction” of their faith, and often this is not only understandable but necessary, because the whole edifice of faith is built upon a faulty foundations. And perhaps the most significant and legitimate of those obstacles is the Christians and their churches, those people who claim that Jesus is the Christ but whose God is conspicuously unlike the God revealed in Jesus. The world beholds the character, the witness, the fruit of those who claim Jesus is the messiah and they are not impressed.
But here’s an oddly hopeful thing to consider: that many who have claimed Jesus as messiah didn’t really know what that meant, or rather than being formed in his image, they formed Jesus in their own image, co-opting Christ into their cause rather joining his, who sought to gain the whole world while forfeiting their souls. Things like the Crusades, or colonialism, or the slave trade come to mind. And while Christians must answer for all this and more, I don’t think these episodes reflect the true nature of Christianity - and certainly not the true nature of Jesus - so much as they reflect our universal human nature, a nature which readily uses whatever is at its disposal to justify its will to power, to seek its own desires, to oppress others and exalt itself. It is the very nature that Christ came to transform, and it is a great tragedy of history that those who claim to follow Jesus so often have not (Of course, it’s worth remembering that many others have).
The temptation, as we start a new church, is to convince ourselves that finally we are going to get this right, that we can just throw off all the historical baggage and start afresh, just the Bible and now. But not only is that impossible, it codifies an ignorance which insures we repeat the same kinds of mistakes. This church is quite deliberately claiming our historical inheritance, with all its beauty and inspiration, with all its ugliness and disappointment, locating ourselves within a living tradition that continually calls us to be transformed by the renewing of our minds.
And first and foremost, this means returning again and again to the words of Jesus, who repeatedly says things like, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me. For those who want to save their lives will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel will save it”. What could it mean to be the Messiah, even to be the very incarnation of God, and to say such things?
There are all kinds of misconceptions about who God is. You might be familiar with some. If it means anything to be a Christian it means that, in Jesus we see God incarnate, the fullest revelation of who God is and - less fully appreciated - we also see what it means to be fully, truly human. We see therefore that God is one who, in Christ, practices what he preaches, who gives of himself to us without reserve. And we also see that, if we want to fully realized persons made in God’s image, that we too must follow Christ in the same way. And here’s what’s hard for us to believe: that the best, the truest life, comes not by putting ourselves at the center, not by seeking our happiness, but by giving our lives for others. Peter didn’t understand this, nor have most Christians since, and nor, it is safe to say, do we. But I do hope that this will be a community where together we find, to our confusion and astonishment, that this really is true.
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