A Hard Teaching [Proper 19B - Mark 8:27-38]
The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson
Mark 8:27-38
A Hard Teaching
James’ advice is
certainly some of the least heeded in the entire Bible. “Not many of you should become teachers…” Considering there are approximately 3.5
million teachers in our country alone, not to mention professors, instructors,
and faith leaders, I would suppose even the most ardent biblical literalists do
not take this canonical counsel literally.
“Not many of you
should become teachers…” is an interesting passage to hear on the very Sunday
we begin Sunday School, on the day we bless students and teachers, on the day
Mthr. Claire teaches the first session of our new class, The Road to Emmaus, at
the beginning of a new year of Ribbon Training, and early in this sixth season
of our Parish Bible Study. Teaching, it
seems, is much more popular in the parish than it is in the epistle of James.
Honestly, even Jesus
doesn’t take James all that seriously. Today’s
Gospel contains the phrase, as if to mock our epistle, “Then Jesus began to
teach them…”
The teaching Jesus
offers in today’s Gospel is among his most challenging and uncomfortable. It was enough to make the disciples scramble
for a certain verse from James that might silence their teacher. Unfortunately
for them, that letter was not yet written.
The Gospel passage
starts with a seemingly innocent question.
Jesus asks his disciples, his inner circle, “Who do people say that I
am?” The twelve report back from the
field. They get around, following an itinerant
preacher; they hear things. They report
back what seem to be only the most flattering comparisons: John the Baptist,
Elijah, one of the prophets. We know
from other stories in Mark’s Gospel that not everyone had nice things to say
about Jesus; some people said he was, for example, the Prince of Demons. But here the disciples choose only the
choicest comparisons. It is never a bad
thing to flatter the boss.
It turns out the first
question, the easy one, was a set up.
The questions apparently get progressively more difficult, because the
next one with which Jesus confronts the disciples is very personal, and the
answers necessarily revealing: “But who do you say that I am?”
Peter gives the
correct answer. But it becomes
abundantly clear that he is unable to show his work. He gets there but he has no idea how. Because Peter and his fellow Jews were living
under Roman occupation, there was a lot of talk about the Messiah, the one who,
like Moses, would rescue them from their oppression, would liberate them from
their tormentors. It is not a stretch to
say that all of Jesus’ talk about his kingdom and salvation, would lead Peter
and the other disciples to the conclusion that Jesus was that kind of Messiah,
a political Messiah, the one who could lead the revolution.
But then Jesus started
teaching. And as James warned, Jesus the
teacher was judged with greater strictness.
Peter could likely put up with a little talk of suffering; a revolution
would not be easy; the Empire was powerful.
But Jesus keeps going and he goes too far. He talks about suffering but then also death,
his death, and dead men do not, cannot, liberate nations or establish kingdoms.
What Peter does is
absolutely inappropriate – even if at some deep level his intentions were good:
he rebukes his teacher – and he does so in public, in a traditional society in
which the hierarchy was sacred. On-lookers
would have been embarrassed, even horrified, by such a display. The language that Mark uses – “rebuke” – is a
word used elsewhere in the Gospel.
Elsewhere it is the verb used when Jesus silences demons. It seems that Peter thought, like some of Jesus’
own family members, that the devil made him say it. He had seen how decisively Jesus confronted
the demons in the possessed; and now he was telling Jesus, or whatever
possessed him, to shut up.
Jesus is not terribly
receptive of that feedback. He returns
the rebuke and then raises the stakes.
Rather than suggest Peter is possessed, like Peter suggested of him,
Jesus just straight up calls him Satan.
Jesus has a lot of opponents in the Gospel of Mark; he only calls one
person “Satan.”
What we know about
Satan in this Gospel is that he tempted Jesus in the wilderness, tried to
divert Jesus from his divine mission, attempted to cajole Jesus into pursuing a
life of less suffering and more fame.
And that is exactly what Peter attempts to do in today’s Gospel. The suffering sounded terrible; the dying
sounded worse; all of it sounded unnecessary for a man with excess charisma and
a healing touch.
Having been advised to
soften his rhetoric, Jesus chooses to call together a larger crowd for his
speech about methods of public execution.
Without a doubt, this homily landed differently in the first
century. People wear crosses now. Then they carried crosses through the
streets, covered in blood, on the way to their execution site. Today people say “this is my cross to bear”
when they are inconvenienced. Then
people said “this is my cross to bear” when they were about to be hung naked to
die in front of their neighbors. Cicero,
a Roman statesman who lived in the century before Jesus, said, “To bind a Roman citizen is a crime; to flog him, an
abomination. To slay him is virtually an act of murder. To crucify him is—what?
No fitting word can possibly describe a deed so horrible.”[1]
And Jesus says, to his
listeners, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and
take up their cross and follow me.”
It is not easy to be a
Christian. It is not easy to follow
Jesus. In a nation in which a strong
majority of people call themselves Christian, it is easy to wear the
label. It is easy to wear a cross; it is
stunningly difficult to carry a cross. I
am reminded of the well-known Chesterton quote: “The Christian ideal has not been
tried and found wanting. It has been
found difficult; and left untried.”
Jesus not only talked
the talk, he walked with his literal cross.
He suffered and died. And he did
so for the cause of love – a cause that is surprisingly unpopular. But it is clear in the Gospels that it was
his mercy that made him enemies, his love that offended sensibilities, his
cries for peace and his healing touch that incited violence against him. The kingdom he proclaimed, the kingdom for
which he prayed, was the divine alternative to the entrenched human
things. And the centuries since have
showed us repeatedly that the radical ways of Jesus continue to shake the
foundations upon which societies and economies are constructed.
There are people, in
this world still today, who literally die for the cause of Christ, who make
justice and mercy and peace and love the hills upon which they are willing to die. But for most us, our faith will never require
of us a literal life or death decision. Most
of us are called to lose our lives one day at a time or one choice at a time.
A few decades ago,
Fred Craddock, in an address to a room full of pastors said:
“We think giving our
all to the Lord is like taking a $1000 bill and laying it on the table – ‘Here’s
my life, Lord. I’m giving my all.’ But
the reality for most of us is that [God] sends us to the bank and has us cash
in the $1000 [bill] for quarters. We go
through life putting out 25 cents here and 50 cents there…. Usually giving our life to Christ isn’t
glorious. It’s done in all those little
acts of love, 25 cents at a time.”[2]
Yesterday was the 20th
anniversary of 9/11. And while what
sticks with most of us is the memory of the moment, the images of the devastation,
the panic and uncertainty that plagued the nation on that terrible Tuesday, 9/11
lives with many of the first responders every day. Two decades later, many of those who bravely
marched into the rumbled remains of the fallen towers are living with the consequences
of their bravery and selflessness, suffering from cancers and other ailments
caused by the toxic mix they inhaled. The
firefighters, paramedics, police officers, and concerned civilians who walked
into the wreckage were aware of the risks; some even tried, unsuccessfully, to
hold their breath as they dug through the ashes. And yet they kept showing up – day after day –
for weeks, on a rescue mission that became a retrieval mission. Every day another quarter spent, a little
life given for the cause of love. Many
of those who walked into the catastrophe are still sacrificing, still giving
their lives for the greater good.
Most of us will never
take up a literal cross. But we should
take literally the heart of Jesus’ teaching.
As I remember Deacon Sally today, as I look towards her empty chair,
missing that friendly wink she shared with me every Sunday, this is what comes
to mind: the many ways she offered her life in service of love, for the sake of
the Gospel. She took following Jesus seriously. Every single day. Hours before she died she was visiting and comforting
the sick, in Jesus’ name. Because that
is the work to which Jesus called her.
And when he called, she followed.
We too are called
follow Jesus. We are called to give our
lives to cause of the gospel, for a greater good, for the sake of love – one day
at a time, one choice at a time, one quarter at a time.
Comments
Post a Comment