Mark 8:27-38
Second
Sunday in Lent
“On the way he asked his disciples…”
(Mark 8:27). On the way. Not before they left Bethsaida. Not after
they arrived at their destination, but in transit. On the way.
Where were they going? Caesarea
Philippi, originally known as Paneas, in honor of the sacred grotto or cave of
the Greek god Pan, located there. Today, you can stand in the grotto and
peer down deep into the blackness of the cave, believed to be the entrance to
Hades, gateway to the underworld. Centuries before Jesus, the place was
associated with the worship of the Baalim, the ancient gods of the Semitic
people. Nearby, Herod the Great (d. 4 BC) built an enormous temple, an
Augusteum, to honor the divinity of Caesar Augustus (63 BC–19 AD). In Jesus’
time this was a Gentile region, therefore an unclean place, a transgressive
place. There were temples to many gods of the Greek and Roman pantheon
there; not one for Yahweh. After Herod’s death, the Roman Senate divided
the kingdom into four smaller kingdoms, with one kingdom given to each of
Herod’s sons. The city of Paneas was rebuilt by Herod Philip (d. 34 BC)
and renamed by him Caesarea, Caesarea Philippi.
That’s where they’re heading.
That’s where Jesus is taking them. Beyond—beyond the familiar, beyond
their comfort zones, beyond the religiously and socially acceptable (from a
Jewish perspective), to this secular place, this profane place, this unclean,
unsure, uncertain, deeply disturbing place, to talk about suffering.
And on the way…. As they journey from
one place to the next, from the known to the unknown, in this in-between place,
this threshold place, this liminal place between origin and destination, Jesus
asks them two questions. Liminal places—from the Latin, limen,
meaning “threshold”—are by nature unsettling (or can be). At least
the Romans thought they were. That’s why Romans often marked the
thresholds of their homes with oil or had little shrines near the doorways of
their homes or sought the blessing of a god whenever arriving or leaving
home. Doorways, thresholds, places of transition are holy, but they
also trigger anxiety in us. These places on the way, these liminal
places, where people are in transit—think of airports or train stations or bus
stations—are often places where all kinds of things get stirred in us. There’s
a reason why you find chapels or prayer rooms in these places. For, who knows what will happen when we leave
home? A liminal place is often a good
place to talk about serious things, to consider ultimate concerns.
“And on the way [Jesus] asked his
disciples, ‘Who do people say that I am?’” Away from the crowds pressing
in on them, away from the Jewish community, away from tradition and culture,
outside the bounds of convention, out there in the country, on the road,
they’re free to talk. You can imagine the disciples walking at a
comfortable pace with Jesus, perhaps a little nervous, filling the time and
silence with small talk or chatter, passing the time, not sure where he’s
taking them. You can imagine Jesus saying, perhaps in a moment of
extended silence, “So, what’s the word on the street? What are you
hearing? What are people saying about me?” “Some think you’re John
the Baptist. Can you believe that, Jesus? Some even say you’re
Elijah. Isn’t that crazy? A lot of people say you’re one of the prophets,
but not sure which one.”
Some more silence. Then
Jesus stops and turns and asks, “But who you do say that I am? What
about you?” Peter, always quick with the mouth, often without thinking,
blurts out, “You are the Messiah.” Then Jesus “sternly ordered them”
not to say a word about this to anyone.
Jesus takes advantage of this teachable
moment in this liminal space out there beyond convention and begins to share
how the “Son of Man,” meaning himself, “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” (Mk. 8:31-32). Jesus says all of this
“quite openly,” Mark tells us. There’s nothing to hide, it’s out there
for all of them to hear. But it was too much for Peter, who has his own
agenda. So he took Jesus aside and
asked, “What, are you crazy? What are you doing? You can’t say
stuff like this, Jesus. Are trying to
get us killed?”
Jesus turns away from Peter, looks at
the rest of the disciples, and rebukes him—without looking at him—“Get behind
me, Satan! [Get out of my sight.] For you are setting your mind not on divine
things but on human things” (Mk. 8:33).
And then, remarkably, Jesus turns away
from the disciples and calls out to the crowd looking on, “If any want to
become my followers”—implying that some of the disciples obviously don’t want
to be his followers—“let them deny themselves and take up their cross and
follow me” (Mk. 8:34). And we know what comes next, these searing
words of call and judgment and warning, “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. For what will it profit them to gain the
whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in
return for their life?” (Mk. 8:35-38).
This
is one of the most significant passages in Mark’s Gospel. It’s the central, pivotal text in Mark;
everything turns on what Jesus says on the way to Caesarea Philippi. It’s essentially an invitation to
discipleship, “If any want to become my followers….” Jesus wants to know from us: How serious are you? Do you really want to walk with me? Do you really want to follow in my steps?
You. Not
everyone else. You. For, as Søren
Kierkegaard (1813-1855) said and knew and struggled and suffered in his
courageous life, “The crowd is untruth.”[1]
In other words, “The crowd is a lie.” Kierkegaard was deeply
suspicious of crowds, the so-called wisdom of the collective, what everyone
thinks or believes (including the collective known as the
church). Kierkegaard knew that the majority is often wrong. (And
I tend to agree.) We need to pull
ourselves away from the crowd, pull ourselves out from the collective.
What about you? Away from
the crowd, when you’re not here in worship, who is Jesus to
you? What do you say? Not what your spouse thinks or your family or
your parents. Not what your church school teachers taught you
(despite how well meaning they were and are). Not what your pastors
believe. Not what the church believes. At one point—or
many—we must answer this question for ourselves—existentially, personally,
individually, from the heart, from the soul, from the depths. Not
what you think you ought to believe. Not what you think the Bible
says you need to believe. Not what you think you’re supposed to
confess when you stand to recite the creed. What do you think? Who
is Jesus to you? And if you still desire
to be a follower, a disciple, a student of the Crucified, are you willing to
walk with him? Are you willing to suffer the cost of your answer? For the way of Jesus will inevitably lead
toward suffering. Some Christians think
that because Jesus suffered for them, they don’t have to. Yes, we know of
Jesus’ suffering, sure. But to be his
follower means we too are called to suffer.
Mark 8:31 is the first time we hear
reference to Jesus “undergoing great suffering.” Then Jesus elaborates further with talk about
taking up a cross, of putting something to “death” in order to take up
something else, losing in order to find.
This same message of suffering is
echoed in Mark 9:31 and again in 10:33-34. To be a follower of the crucified
inevitably means that we participate in and share in and experience a
particular kind of suffering.
In Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s (1906-1945)
extraordinary book The Cost of
Discipleship, written in 1937 during the oppression of the church by the
Nazi regime, we’re given a deep, challenging theological wrestling with what it
means to be a follower of Christ. The
German title was Nachfolge, meaning
“the act of following.” Bonhoeffer makes
a distinction between cheap grace and costly grace. “Cheap grace is grace
without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.”[2]
Grace, “costly grace,” as Bonhoeffer
said, “confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus….”[3] It is costly because it requires something of
us. It costs us. It places a burden and
a demand upon our lives. That’s why
Bonhoeffer could say, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. It may be a death like that of the first
disciples who had to leave home and work to follow him, or it may be a death
like [Martin] Luther’s, who had to leave the monastery and go out into the
world. But it is the same death every
time….”[4]
We can’t run from the cross.
There was a time when you would never
find a cross in a Presbyterian church—that seemed too “Catholic,” I guess.
Thankfully, those days are over. We have
a cross here in our sanctuary, a beautiful Celtic cross, modelled after the
standing cross of St. John, found on Iona (I wear the same cross most Sundays).
It’s not a crucifix, it’s an “empty”
cross (as my mother would have said), empty of the suffering Christ; it’s a
symbol of resurrection. Nevertheless, we
must remember that a cross is a symbol of extreme suffering. It’s critical for us to remember that the
Christian life is always “cruciform,” as Mike Gorman reminds us, because
Christ’s life was cruciform, that is, it took the form of cross, it took the
form of suffering.[5]
If we walk with Christ then we will, inevitably, be confronted with suffering.
Christians are people of pathos.
Now we must be extremely careful when
speaking about suffering. To be honest,
I’m a little uneasy talking about suffering, in fear that it might be
misheard. I’m not talking about glorying
in suffering, nor self-flagellation, of forcing ourselves to suffer. We must be careful about talking too glibly
about “taking up a cross,” or unnecessarily suffering, enduring something when
one shouldn’t because we think “it’s our cross to bear.” That’s not what I’m talking about. I am all too aware of the extreme suffering
we experience. I also know that we can
cause others to suffer, even people we say we love. We have a way of making
crosses for people. Talking about
suffering is difficult, extremely complicated. For some, Jesus’ teaching here
in Mark 8 might sound especially confusing, even masochistic, for shouldn’t we
be working to alleviate human suffering, shouldn’t we be getting rid of the
crosses? Haven’t we had enough crosses? You
might be saying, I have suffered enough
in life, I’m suffering now, I don’t need more suffering. I don’t want to hear about a cross.
In
the Acts of John, a Gnostic text that
dates from the 2nd century, we find the Hymn of Jesus. The English
composer Gustav Holst (1874-1934) set it to music in 1917, probably in response
to the Battle of the Somme the previous year.
In this extraordinary text, Jesus says these words, “If ye know how to
suffer, ye would know how to suffer no more.
Learn to suffer and ye shall overcome.”
There is deep, profound psychological and theological wisdom here. (And don't call the church police on me for citing a Gnostic text.) These words have been with me for decades.
Out of my own experience, I have found them to be true. But I would never, ever say this to someone in
the throes of suffering. Still, it’s an
insight I know, personally, existentially, to be true.
After
being at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich the past three weeks, I’m reminded
of something that psychiatrist C. G. Jung (1875-1961) found to be true. He said, “Neurosis is always a substitute for
legitimate suffering.”[6] Sometimes we suffer more because we resist
facing what we know at some level we must suffer through and experience in
order to grow, in order to have a meaningful, enriching, purposeful life; we
resist suffering through what needs to be faced, confronted, accepted—not
unlike Peter. We could say that this is
resisting “the cross,” resisting the legitimate suffering that is required for
discipleship. Personal transformation,
growth, healing, and development, growing in grace and gratitude, heeding the
call and purpose of our lives—in other words, following Jesus—inevitably entail some form of suffering.
This is heavy, I know. It’s tough to
talk about, especially in a sermon. This
text is demanding. Suffering takes many
forms. One size does not fit all. What Jesus is talking about is the kind of
suffering that will almost, inevitably result whenever we align our lives with
God’s vision for humanity and the world.
Whenever the selfish, ego-centric part of us, with its fearful, small
agenda is forced to yield to God’s larger, life-giving, redemptive, and
expansive vision for our lives, that yielding, of giving up one life for
another, is a crucifixion, it’s the way of the cross, it’s an act of suffering.
Bonhoeffer is again helpful here. Writing from Tegel Prison in Berlin, 18 July 1944, Bonhoeffer wrote to Eberhard Bethge, “Man is summoned to share in God’s sufferings at the hands of a godless world.”
Isn’t
that what Jesus was doing? He shared in
the suffering of God in the world. The
suffering of God occurs when God sees and experiences the suffering of God’s
people. Jesus shows that when we align
ourselves with God’s hopes and dreams for humanity, when we mourn with God, we
share in the suffering of God in the world.
Through the sharing of suffering, when we suffer in this way, we are moved by the suffering of the
world. We suffer in order to reduce the
suffering of God’s people.
Where
is God suffering today? Look
around! Everywhere! To follow Jesus means we enter into those
suffering places and not run from them—not all of them, but some. A Christian shares in the suffering of God’s
people. Our capacity to care, our
capacity for greater compassion (which means to suffer with someone) is deepened,
not lessened; it’s intensified. As
people of pathos, we find ourselves caring even more, entering more deeply into
life, freer to share in the tears and griefs of God’s people, freer to enter
into the wounds and the pain and injustice of God’s people. We might be called
to suffer more, summoned to fight and resist and protest—whatever it takes to
tends to the wounds of God’s people, to bind them up, and heal them, and offer
liberation. This is the way of the cross.
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Images:
-Georges Rouault (1873-1958), Christ in Agony (1939).
-St. John's Cross, Iona Abbey, Iona, Scotland.
[1] Søren Kierkegaard, “The Single Individual”: Two “Notes” Concerning Myself as an Author, 1846-1847,
published posthumously in 1859.
[2] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York:
Collier Books, 1963), 47.
[3] Bonhoeffer, 48.
[4] Bonhoeffer, 99.
[5] See Michael J. Gorman, Cruciformity:
Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001)
and Inhabiting the Cruciform God:
Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Narrative Soteriology (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009).
[6] C. G. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 11 – Psychology
of Religion: West and East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), §129.
