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The Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost
Grant us, O Lord, not to mind earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to cleave to those that shall abide; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (Proper 20)
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The Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost
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Scripture citation(s): Mark 8:27-38
A Sermon by
Fr. Daniels
on
Mark 8:27-38
✛
The Most Beautiful Idol
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We can look at the gospel reading today like a play in three acts. The first act consists of Jesus’s questions about who people say that he is. One of the prophets, most of them respond. Then we have Peter’s great confession: “Thou art the Christ.”
The second act is Peter’s rebuke of Jesus, for talking about his death, and then Jesus’s subsequent rebuke of Peter: “Get thee behind me, Satan.”
Then, in the third act, we get Jesus’s own teaching about this: “Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.”
By the time they are coming to Caesarea Philippi, Jesus and his disciples must have come to know each other personally quite well. They have been traveling around together for some time, greeting crowds, encountering widespread general support, as well as ominous, threatening behavior from religious leaders. They have spent a lot of time together.
Yet, if there’s anything that’s made clear in the gospel of Mark, it is that the disciples are a confused bunch, and one of the things that they’re most confused about is who this Jesus is, the Jesus whom they should know. In chapter 4, Mark records them asking each other, “What kind of man is this?” In chapter 6, they see him but don’t recognize him, and think they’re seeing a ghost. And in chapter 8, as we heard today, Jesus asks them directly: Who do others say that I am? And who do you say that I am?
It was becoming clear, even to the disciples, that the life of Jesus was in some way connected with the promises of the coming Messiah: so perhaps he was the new Elijah, or the return of John the Baptist, who had been killed but perhaps returned, or some other prophet. That is who the people were saying Jesus was.
It was Peter alone whom the gospels record as asserting that Jesus was not exactly a prophet. Instead, Jesus of Nazareth was the one about whom the prophets had prophesied. He was the fulfillment of the prophetic promises. He was the Messiah that had been promised for generations. Not a prophet, he was the one the prophets foretold. He was the culmination of prophecy.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus congratulates Peter on his discernment, but not here. Here, he only tells them to keep quiet, to keep this belief to themselves, to tell no one. He was Jesus, but not yet to be known as Christ. You might expect that moment of recognition to be one of exaltation, excitement: finally, someone had recognized the momentousness of what they were involved in. But he charged them to tell no one.
Were the disciples confused by that? I would have been. There is something exceedingly strange about it. If Peter is right, then everyone should be told. I would think so, at least.
It is with that strange dynamic that Jesus begins to teach them about the time of trial that is to come. He must suffer many things, he tells them, and be rejected by the community’s leaders, be killed, even, and then “after three days rise again.” And this, Mark tells us, Jesus went about saying openly. His messianic status he wanted kept quiet; his impending persecution and death was to be made public knowledge. You can imagine Peter’s frustration. Nothing succeeds like success. Foregrounding impending failure wasn’t likely to be an inspirational strategy.
Peter took him aside, as the one person we know with certainty who appreciated Jesus’ position, and he rebuked Jesus, the way one can, with discretion and delicacy, rebuke friends, which they may have been. If you’re close with someone, you can speak truths that would not be useful coming from someone else. That’s what Peter wanted to do, understandably. He took his friend aside and out of earshot said, Hey, what are you doing? Cut it out! That’s a useful thing for a friend to do.
But what Peter wanted to do privately, Jesus made public again, returning to the body of disciples, and rebuking Peter: “Get thee behind me, Satan: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men.” Get behind. For Peter to oppose Jesus’s acceptance of his own suffering was to oppose the final purpose of his whole life. In Peter’s suggestion that he avoid the cross, Jesus hears the voice of the tempter—the Satan—again, the voice he heard in the wilderness at the beginning of his public ministry, the voice that would take him away from the mission he had been sent on. Satan’s voice promised him prestige and power; Peter’s voice was doing the same.
It is at this moment that Jesus mentions the cross for the first time. It is following the awkward, emotional exchange between himself and Peter, now teaching in the presence of the disciples, that Jesus first speaks of the holy cross. To follow Jesus—to get behind him faithfully—requires denying the self, taking up the cross, and following Jesus to Jerusalem. Anyone who succumbs to the temptation to save his life will lose it; but those who lose it for the sake of Christ and his good news, will save it.
Three acts, almost three set-pieces: the confession of Peter; then the rebuke of Peter; and finally, the teaching about the cross and the soul—how it is lost, and how it can be saved.
The question comes to us as well, we characters in this drama of salvation: who do we say that Jesus is? This is no small matter, as Mark’s gospel makes clear: how one answers it will set the parameters of one’s life. And yet Peter’s experience shows us that answering the question (of who Jesus is) and living the faithful life (derived from that), are two entirely different things, related but distinct, and neither particularly easy.
Peter’s experience shows every Christian, of every age, in every era, one of the reasons why this Christian faith is so risky. It is all too easy to decide who we would like Jesus of Nazareth to be: to predetermine that he shares our social or political aims; that he supports, or disapproves of, this or that issue or program or cause; that he condemns what we condemn and smiles indulgently at what we find unimportant.
If we do so, we are not discerning who Jesus is, but rather who we would like Jesus to be. And, surprise of surprises, generally it turns out to be someone like me, or at least amenable to me. The Reformer John Calvin once wrote that the human mind is a factory of idols, and no idol is more idolatrous, more seductive and attractive, than the one we sculpt in our own image. You can ask Peter about that: Peter rebuked Jesus because he wanted the Messiah, the Christ, to conform to his expectations, to agree with him, and to define success or failure the way that he would. But this was to tempt Jesus to unfaithfulness. It was satanic.
How do we, today, avoid making Jesus simply the projection of our own religious or social or political desires? How do we keep from making Peter’s mistake? How do we avoid idolatry?
I’m not entirely sure. If there is a key, however, I think it is in the third act of today’s gospel. “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for [Jesus’s] sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it.” To gain the world, then, is to lose Christ. To gain Christ, on the other hand, is to lose the world, with its successes and its temptations. The uncomfortable conclusion, then, is that in some sense it is precisely a comfort with our own religiosity that should make us nervous, because whoever seeks to save his life will lose it. Or, to paraphrase the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, When Christ calls us, he bids us to come and die. Christ calls us to die. It is not exactly the most uplifting of Sunday morning messages, I will grant.
But the picture of faithfulness that St. Mark portrays in the gospel today is one that does not succumb to temptations of religious fantasy and projection, the way Peter did in the second act. Instead, faithfulness means getting behind Jesus on his way to the cross, while we ourselves carry whatever cross has been appointed for us, sharing in his suffering—indeed, sharing in his death. That may be a high price to pay, to be sure, but what does it profit a man, if he gains the whole world, but loses his own soul? What safety and illusions about Christ would we give in exchange for our soul?
Even then, we are still left with the nagging question of who we can say Jesus is, while avoiding the risk of self-idolatry; still left with the difficulty of figuring out what that means for determining the way we live our lives. Perhaps the addressing of those questions is the work of a lifetime—as it was for Peter. I don’t know exactly what this will mean in our lives, which are the Act 4 of this gospel. I don’t know what this will look like.
But we are also left, once everything else is said and done, with the cross that he told them about in Act 3, the cross that is the sign of God’s grace and the promise that his grace will carry us through. Through our stumbled answers and misguided rebukes and whatever else our individual lives of faith look like: for all of that, the cross of Christ is sufficient. For us, for Peter, for the disciples, whatever Act 4 will hold: The cross is enough. The grace of God is enough.
