Text: Mark 8: 27-32
Today’s appointed New Testament text from the gospel of St. Mark is both one of my favorites and one of the most challenging to interpret. It not only invites us to get clear about who Jesus was to his disciples, to the emerging Christian community of the first century CE, as well as you and me some 2,100 years later. It’s a nuanced story with bold images that has simultaneously been con-fusing, clarifying, and challenging. On the upside, it asks us to come to terms with who Jesus is in our lives; on the downside, St. Mark’s choice of words are so loaded and historically contextual that it’s no wonder we’re sometimes bewildered and befuddled. Do you recall the old story about a young pastor’s first Easter Sunday children’s message?
“Who can tell me something about Easter?” she asked the cluster of little ones? One little girl raised her hand and said, "Easter is when they hide all the eggs.” The pastor said, “Well, sure, but there’s more going on: so, can you tell me something more?” A 10-year-old boy replied, “Well, pastor, Eas-ter is when we’re blessed to get a chocolate Easter bunny in our basket.””
“Hmmm,” said the young clergy woman, “that IS always fun, but it’s not really what we celebrate in church, right? Any other ideas?” At which point a shy little girls said, “Pastor, I think I know: on Good Friday, Jesus was crucified” at which the minister smiled with excitement and said, “Yes, yes, right, go on, please!” So, she added: "The next day, Jesus was placed in a cave behind a big boulder." The minister grew more excited thinking we’re really, finally, getting somewhere. “Anything else?” she asked enthusiastically. To which the child replied: “Um yes… on Easter Sunday, the boulder is rolled back, and Jesus comes out alive!” Which totally flipped the minister out for now at least one child got it. “You’re right on the money, child; can you tell me what happened next?” The little one paus-ed, then smiled, and said: “Well, when Jesus comes out of the cave alive, he looks around and… (say it with me if you know) if he sees his shadow, we’re going to have six more weeks of winter!”
With the innocence of a child, would you pray with me now that we might go a little deeper?
Lord, in your wisdom and mercy, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be made acceptable to you through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ who, with you and the Holy Spirit, reign in heaven forever. Amen.
There are at least four levels of spiritual truth taking place in this short passage – and if we fail to take them into account, we’ll celebrate a Christ who may be familiar to us but will NOT lead us into the kingdom among us as it is already happening in heaven. First, there’s the symbolism linking Jesus to John the Baptist, Elijah, and the other prophets of ancient Israel. Second, there’s what the text meant to the faith community guided by St. Mark’s gospel in the middle of the first century of the CE. Third, there’s the paradoxical spirituality of Jesus concerning the Cross that continues to be worthy of our consideration. And fourth, there’s what WE do with this wisdom.
I’m a believer in wrestling with each of these insights. Not only do they tell us something about the mysterious nature of God – who will NEVER be fully understood lest God no longer be Almighty – but they also offer us a warning about taking the words of Scripture only at the literal level because THAT obscures the historical nuances St. Mark wants us to confront concerning Jesus as a Messiah who must suffer, die at the hands of the chief priests, elders, and scribes before being raised to NEW life by God’s love. A simplistic reading of this text, you know, gave birth to nearly 2,000 years of antisemitism in the Church – and St. Mark the evangelist was NOT advocating that THEN any more than he is today. One commentator put it like this:
Here we come face to face with arguably the most difficult, challenging, and dangerous of Jesus’ teachings: the idea that Jesus must suffer, die, and rise again, and that anyone who seeks to be his disciple must “deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” The disciples are perplexed, Peter is offended, and Jesus takes them to task for misunderstanding him — so we should be caut-ious about whether or not we understand him ourselves… If the disciples are any indication, mis-taken conclusions abound when it comes to the full meaning of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Which is why St. Mark gives us three cycles in which (a) Jesus predicts his passion and suffer-ing; (b) the disciples misunderstand; and (c) Jesus responds with a discourse on the true nature of discipleship.
One useful way I’ve found in sorting this out is to look closely at the arch of Peter’s life. His ups and downs, questions, doubts, fears, and tenacity are a synthesis of how many of us experience grace. In St. Mark’s gospel, Peter symbolizes the journey of faith for many giving shape and form to what I think of as a gradual transformation. He doesn’t get it all right all at once – he’s a slow learner – and THAT, beloved, is good news – and I’ll say more about it in a moment.
But first, there’s the context in which this gospel was conceived: St. Mark crafted it during the Roman Empire’s brutal war of suppression against Israel’s insurrection of 67 CE where war – in all its horror – not only shaped the faith community but defined how St. Mark describes Jesus within it. Former Roman Catholic priest, James Carroll, retired columnist for the Boston Globe and novelist of great insight, unpacks this in chapter two of his monumental: Christ Actually: The Son of God for a Secular Age.
The First Holocaust (he writes) was the Roman War against the Jews, ignited not long after the life-time of Jesus. It began in 67 CE, intensified between 115 and 117 and concluded about 136. The scale of destruction during this war was devastating: millions of Jews were killed, tens of thousands of women were raped, Judea and Galilee were laid to waste, the second Temple was demolished, and Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean were attacked and terrorized.
Carroll reminds us that both St. Matthew and St. Mark were eyewitnesses to the sacrilege – and this horror shaped how they interpreted both Jesus and his ministry. “Mark is the main source of, and template for, the later gospels of Matthew and Luke. Mark’s rendering of Jesus, and its proclamation of him as the Christ, are the central pillars of the Christian imagination – yet Mark is rarely read in the context of war.” The insurrection began in Galilee where sixty thousand Roman legionnaires were killed and more than 100,000 Jews enslaved before sacking Jerusalem… where 10,000 crosses bearing Jewish bodies circled the Temple Mount in the Holy City.
In my analysis, after the Christian community of Jerusalem experienced devastation, slaughter, ter-ror and abandonment, they began to rethink who Jesus was and what he meant. In his day, Jesus was a wisdom-keeping, itinerant spiritual nonconformist emphasizing community building rather than chaos; he practiced a radical inclusivity that broke down the barriers of gender, class, and race; celebrated a radical trust in God’s enduring grace that maintained forgiveness to be the path to personal and social healing - and never called himself Messiah. He insisted that his integrity and authority came from living simply as a human being fully alive. He never spoke of himself as a deity nor did any of the Biblical writers in his lifetime.
· After his followers lived through the moral madness of war, however, Jesus the earthy mystic became Christ the divine God-man who was holier in death than he was in real life. Mark and his allies who endured the unimaginable violence of Rome’s war, started this shift towards Jesus as Christ.
· The gospel writers of 70 and 80 CE, women and men traumatized by the brutality of the Ro-man Empire, borrowed a chapter from the apocalyptic book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible to rethink a reality that included the crucifixion of over 500 Jews every day.
And their conclusion, a re-interpretation of Jesus and his ministry, had two components: First, that Judaism and the Temple HAD to be destroyed by God and replaced by the Church because the old way had become corrupt; that’s the beginning of what we know as supercessionism or replacement theology that remained orthodox until the reforms of Vatican II. And second, that the betrayal of Peter and the male disciples was symbolically linked to the betrayals that occurred throughout the Christian community during Rome’s war against Israel. In this retelling, Peter’s consistent confusion, and eventual abandonment of Jesus, is ugly, but doesn’t end in judgment: just grace.
Carroll asserts that Mark and the other evangelists highlight this as a pastoral assurance to their broken faith communities that even moral and ethical failure need not end in hellfire and brimstone because the loving embrace of Christ begins and ends with forgiveness. He writes:
If the gospel of Mark was addressed to a frightened, demoralized collective of Jesus people holed-up in Galilee, to a people threatened on all sides by marauding Romans as well as revenge-see-ing Jew-ish Zealots (remember the Christians chose NOT to join Israel’s military rebellion against Rome) or Jews associated with rabbis who believed Jesus to be a false Messiah who threatened the survival of what remained of Judaism; if those Jesus people, who bore the burden of guilt at their own failure to join the resistance, or were tempted to believe that they were cowards who may have lost their faith in the Lord, Mark’s message was straightforward good news: Do NOT feel guilty because you faltered in your faith; do not feel disqualified because you lost hope; do not count yourselves for-saken, because LOOK: the most intimate friends of Jesus behaved exactly the same way including the exalted Peter (whom Jesus called the ROCK upon whom a new community shall be built.) What you need to hear in this time of grotesque tribulation is that Jesus extends his call NOT to heroes alone, but to cowards, to those who fail him, and reckoning with our failures can be the starting point of a deeper discipleship.
That’s a lot to take in, right, so let me ask: are you still with me? Carroll contends – and I concur – that the good news during and just after the catastrophic collapse of Jerusalem: Where many “refused to stand up to Rome, but hid… who likely informed on one another, became collaborators, ran off to the caves in the desert, committed suicide or helped others do so… were just real people looking out for their own skin. They were beleaguered, terrified human beings who behaved like broken human beings always do.” And Jesus NEVER condemns our humanity – he joins it – by grace. Carroll concludes that this shift in interpreting Jesus, “born of mass violence inflicted by the Romans in 70 CE demanded St. Mark’s revisions. The catastrophe… forced the Jesus people to look back on their memories, prayers, collected sayings, and stories in a new light… a light cast by the fires of war."
This macro context is usually avoided or at the very least forgotten in most of our Bible commentaries, but it shapes even the shortest verses of St. Mark’s gospel – including today’s text – where our old friend Peter begins by celebrating Jesus as the Anointed One only to say in his next breath that Jesus should skip out on his appointment with destiny. Jesus asks: Who do people say I am? Peter answers: The Christ … but please don’t act like it. Stay here with us here in safety. You may remember that Peter said much the same thing in the story of the Transfiguration we considered on my first Sunday with you: Let’s stay where it is safe! To which Jesus says: GET THEE BEHIND ME, SATAN!
Lord, in your wisdom and mercy, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be made acceptable to you through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ who, with you and the Holy Spirit, reign in heaven forever. Amen.
I’m a believer in wrestling with each of these insights. Not only do they tell us something about the mysterious nature of God – who will NEVER be fully understood lest God no longer be Almighty – but they also offer us a warning about taking the words of Scripture only at the literal level because THAT obscures the historical nuances St. Mark wants us to confront concerning Jesus as a Messiah who must suffer, die at the hands of the chief priests, elders, and scribes before being raised to NEW life by God’s love. A simplistic reading of this text, you know, gave birth to nearly 2,000 years of antisemitism in the Church – and St. Mark the evangelist was NOT advocating that THEN any more than he is today. One commentator put it like this:
Here we come face to face with arguably the most difficult, challenging, and dangerous of Jesus’ teachings: the idea that Jesus must suffer, die, and rise again, and that anyone who seeks to be his disciple must “deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” The disciples are perplexed, Peter is offended, and Jesus takes them to task for misunderstanding him — so we should be caut-ious about whether or not we understand him ourselves… If the disciples are any indication, mis-taken conclusions abound when it comes to the full meaning of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Which is why St. Mark gives us three cycles in which (a) Jesus predicts his passion and suffer-ing; (b) the disciples misunderstand; and (c) Jesus responds with a discourse on the true nature of discipleship.
One useful way I’ve found in sorting this out is to look closely at the arch of Peter’s life. His ups and downs, questions, doubts, fears, and tenacity are a synthesis of how many of us experience grace. In St. Mark’s gospel, Peter symbolizes the journey of faith for many giving shape and form to what I think of as a gradual transformation. He doesn’t get it all right all at once – he’s a slow learner – and THAT, beloved, is good news – and I’ll say more about it in a moment.
But first, there’s the context in which this gospel was conceived: St. Mark crafted it during the Roman Empire’s brutal war of suppression against Israel’s insurrection of 67 CE where war – in all its horror – not only shaped the faith community but defined how St. Mark describes Jesus within it. Former Roman Catholic priest, James Carroll, retired columnist for the Boston Globe and novelist of great insight, unpacks this in chapter two of his monumental: Christ Actually: The Son of God for a Secular Age.
The First Holocaust (he writes) was the Roman War against the Jews, ignited not long after the life-time of Jesus. It began in 67 CE, intensified between 115 and 117 and concluded about 136. The scale of destruction during this war was devastating: millions of Jews were killed, tens of thousands of women were raped, Judea and Galilee were laid to waste, the second Temple was demolished, and Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean were attacked and terrorized.
Carroll reminds us that both St. Matthew and St. Mark were eyewitnesses to the sacrilege – and this horror shaped how they interpreted both Jesus and his ministry. “Mark is the main source of, and template for, the later gospels of Matthew and Luke. Mark’s rendering of Jesus, and its proclamation of him as the Christ, are the central pillars of the Christian imagination – yet Mark is rarely read in the context of war.” The insurrection began in Galilee where sixty thousand Roman legionnaires were killed and more than 100,000 Jews enslaved before sacking Jerusalem… where 10,000 crosses bearing Jewish bodies circled the Temple Mount in the Holy City.
In my analysis, after the Christian community of Jerusalem experienced devastation, slaughter, ter-ror and abandonment, they began to rethink who Jesus was and what he meant. In his day, Jesus was a wisdom-keeping, itinerant spiritual nonconformist emphasizing community building rather than chaos; he practiced a radical inclusivity that broke down the barriers of gender, class, and race; celebrated a radical trust in God’s enduring grace that maintained forgiveness to be the path to personal and social healing - and never called himself Messiah. He insisted that his integrity and authority came from living simply as a human being fully alive. He never spoke of himself as a deity nor did any of the Biblical writers in his lifetime.
· After his followers lived through the moral madness of war, however, Jesus the earthy mystic became Christ the divine God-man who was holier in death than he was in real life. Mark and his allies who endured the unimaginable violence of Rome’s war, started this shift towards Jesus as Christ.
· The gospel writers of 70 and 80 CE, women and men traumatized by the brutality of the Ro-man Empire, borrowed a chapter from the apocalyptic book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible to rethink a reality that included the crucifixion of over 500 Jews every day.
And their conclusion, a re-interpretation of Jesus and his ministry, had two components: First, that Judaism and the Temple HAD to be destroyed by God and replaced by the Church because the old way had become corrupt; that’s the beginning of what we know as supercessionism or replacement theology that remained orthodox until the reforms of Vatican II. And second, that the betrayal of Peter and the male disciples was symbolically linked to the betrayals that occurred throughout the Christian community during Rome’s war against Israel. In this retelling, Peter’s consistent confusion, and eventual abandonment of Jesus, is ugly, but doesn’t end in judgment: just grace.
Carroll asserts that Mark and the other evangelists highlight this as a pastoral assurance to their broken faith communities that even moral and ethical failure need not end in hellfire and brimstone because the loving embrace of Christ begins and ends with forgiveness. He writes:
If the gospel of Mark was addressed to a frightened, demoralized collective of Jesus people holed-up in Galilee, to a people threatened on all sides by marauding Romans as well as revenge-see-ing Jew-ish Zealots (remember the Christians chose NOT to join Israel’s military rebellion against Rome) or Jews associated with rabbis who believed Jesus to be a false Messiah who threatened the survival of what remained of Judaism; if those Jesus people, who bore the burden of guilt at their own failure to join the resistance, or were tempted to believe that they were cowards who may have lost their faith in the Lord, Mark’s message was straightforward good news: Do NOT feel guilty because you faltered in your faith; do not feel disqualified because you lost hope; do not count yourselves for-saken, because LOOK: the most intimate friends of Jesus behaved exactly the same way including the exalted Peter (whom Jesus called the ROCK upon whom a new community shall be built.) What you need to hear in this time of grotesque tribulation is that Jesus extends his call NOT to heroes alone, but to cowards, to those who fail him, and reckoning with our failures can be the starting point of a deeper discipleship.
That’s a lot to take in, right, so let me ask: are you still with me? Carroll contends – and I concur – that the good news during and just after the catastrophic collapse of Jerusalem: Where many “refused to stand up to Rome, but hid… who likely informed on one another, became collaborators, ran off to the caves in the desert, committed suicide or helped others do so… were just real people looking out for their own skin. They were beleaguered, terrified human beings who behaved like broken human beings always do.” And Jesus NEVER condemns our humanity – he joins it – by grace. Carroll concludes that this shift in interpreting Jesus, “born of mass violence inflicted by the Romans in 70 CE demanded St. Mark’s revisions. The catastrophe… forced the Jesus people to look back on their memories, prayers, collected sayings, and stories in a new light… a light cast by the fires of war."
This macro context is usually avoided or at the very least forgotten in most of our Bible commentaries, but it shapes even the shortest verses of St. Mark’s gospel – including today’s text – where our old friend Peter begins by celebrating Jesus as the Anointed One only to say in his next breath that Jesus should skip out on his appointment with destiny. Jesus asks: Who do people say I am? Peter answers: The Christ … but please don’t act like it. Stay here with us here in safety. You may remember that Peter said much the same thing in the story of the Transfiguration we considered on my first Sunday with you: Let’s stay where it is safe! To which Jesus says: GET THEE BEHIND ME, SATAN!
This is Peter distilled to his essence: his is a wandering faith where he’s called, doubts, resists, affirms, learns, wonders, hopes, betrays, and finally let’s go of his ego long enough to become a courageous, albeit flawed disciple – much like you and me. Have you ever looked at the totality of his story as a continuous whole? Early in all the gospels, Peter is called – and follows. Life as a fisherperson under the bootheel of the Roman occupation was a dirty, thankless job. Most of the catch went to feed the garrisoned troops in Israel – and what wasn’t taken by Rome left only a meager existence: so who wouldn’t leave all that behind to follow Jesus, right?
· But no sooner does Peter leave then he starts to question and doubt: he freaks out in the boat on the Sea of Galilee, begging Jesus to save them from a storm that Jesus sleeps through. He confesses his mentor to be the long anticipated Messiah but urges him to not act like it. He celebrates Jesus and then doubts him. And after Jesus tells Peter he’s not a political messiah in the expected way, Peter turns on his friend: he deserts Jesus in the garden when the Roman soldiers take him captive, he denies knowing Jesus while awaiting the outcome of the trial shouting: Woman, I do not even know him. The gospels go on to tell us that Jesus predicted this betrayal before the cock crowed three times. And when the cock does crow, Jesus looks at his friend in sorrow – and Peter flees again weeping in shame.
· But the story doesn’t end there: St. John’s gospel, written 40 years after Mark, includes a post resurrection story in which Peter first dismisses Mary Magdalene as an hysterical woman after SHE meets the resurrected Lord in the garden; and then fails to recognize his old buddy after returning to his old life as a fisherman by the sea. Talk about symbolism, yes? Betrayal and denial has pushed Peter back into his old way of being.
As the story ripens, after breakfast on the beach, Peter’s eyes are opened to the presence of resurrected one much like the experience of other disciples on the Road to Emmaus where they, too, fail to recognize Jesus as the Risen Lord at first until they break bread together. When Peter awakens, Jesus asks: Peter, do you love me? Three times he asks this in parallel to Peter’s three betrayals. Peter, do you LOVE me: You know I love you, Lord – then feed my sheep.
John closes the story with Jesus telling his friend: when you were young, you went where you wanted and did what you felt; but now that you have matured, you will be led into those places you do NOT want to go by another. By those in need. By those haunted by a shame like your own. Go out and love, them. And tradition as well as Peter’s own letters tell us that is exactly what Peter did: he went back out into the world to tell people that God’s grace was available to everyone: sin and shame are NOT the end of the story. In the Acts of the Apostles, Peter says: Silver and gold I have not, so I give to you all that I do have: in the loving presence of Jesus as Christ – pick up your life and walk!
· But no sooner does Peter leave then he starts to question and doubt: he freaks out in the boat on the Sea of Galilee, begging Jesus to save them from a storm that Jesus sleeps through. He confesses his mentor to be the long anticipated Messiah but urges him to not act like it. He celebrates Jesus and then doubts him. And after Jesus tells Peter he’s not a political messiah in the expected way, Peter turns on his friend: he deserts Jesus in the garden when the Roman soldiers take him captive, he denies knowing Jesus while awaiting the outcome of the trial shouting: Woman, I do not even know him. The gospels go on to tell us that Jesus predicted this betrayal before the cock crowed three times. And when the cock does crow, Jesus looks at his friend in sorrow – and Peter flees again weeping in shame.
· But the story doesn’t end there: St. John’s gospel, written 40 years after Mark, includes a post resurrection story in which Peter first dismisses Mary Magdalene as an hysterical woman after SHE meets the resurrected Lord in the garden; and then fails to recognize his old buddy after returning to his old life as a fisherman by the sea. Talk about symbolism, yes? Betrayal and denial has pushed Peter back into his old way of being.
As the story ripens, after breakfast on the beach, Peter’s eyes are opened to the presence of resurrected one much like the experience of other disciples on the Road to Emmaus where they, too, fail to recognize Jesus as the Risen Lord at first until they break bread together. When Peter awakens, Jesus asks: Peter, do you love me? Three times he asks this in parallel to Peter’s three betrayals. Peter, do you LOVE me: You know I love you, Lord – then feed my sheep.
John closes the story with Jesus telling his friend: when you were young, you went where you wanted and did what you felt; but now that you have matured, you will be led into those places you do NOT want to go by another. By those in need. By those haunted by a shame like your own. Go out and love, them. And tradition as well as Peter’s own letters tell us that is exactly what Peter did: he went back out into the world to tell people that God’s grace was available to everyone: sin and shame are NOT the end of the story. In the Acts of the Apostles, Peter says: Silver and gold I have not, so I give to you all that I do have: in the loving presence of Jesus as Christ – pick up your life and walk!
If you look at Peter’s letters to the young church, you find not an overblown enthusiast nor an un-grounded soul shaped by shame, but a man of sober humility. So much so that at the end, when Peter was arrested by Rome and condemned to crucifixion, he pleaded with his captors to nail him to the cross upside-down because he would never presume himself to be equal to his Lord and Sav-ior Jesus. Peter’s witness shows us a person transformed by grace. And Mark was trying to assure his beaten down friends that the power of Jesus that healed and renewed Peter, could renew them as well. Grace is greater than demons or death, war or betrayal, confusion and chaos. Jesus is NOT just a humble wisdom keeper… No, he's the one who shares with us the unpredictable, undeserved, and even promiscuous grace of God that can heal wounds personally AND advance mercy in our society.
What St. Mark did in his day, you see, is what ALL good preachers do in theirs: tell and retell the story of Jesus and his love as the story of how grace can set us free from fear, shame, and the stench of sin. Peter learned this incrementally – step by step – mistakes and forgiveness intertwined over a lifetime. And I submit to you that this is good news for us. I know it’s been so for me because like Peter I’m a slow learner, late to the party, and in need of a ton of grace. Most of us are NOT like St. Paul on the Damascus Road: we’re rarely smitten with one life-changing event that causes a 180 change of direction. Rather, we experience the blessings of the gospel slowly, taking two steps forward and one step back most of our lives.
Mark’s gospel was crafted to assure us that THIS can be a blessing. Yes, the train MAY have left the station, but it will make frequent stops so you can climb aboard. For if this was true for a guy like Peter, it can be true for us as well. Slowly and unevenly, Peter opened his heart to the love of Jesus and came to experience a grace that subversively transformed him – and the promise is that it can transform us, too even when we’re lost, hurt, and confused. Elizabeth Bolton and the scholars at the SALT Project write:
Some of the worst things in the world (the Roman cross and betrayal by your friends) can be trans-formed into some of the best things in the world (the Tree of Life and forgiveness even among enemies) — by a God willing redeem everything… like poet, Mary Oliver, wrote: Christ’s story will break our hearts open, never to close again to the rest of the world.
The path of Jesus is the paradoxical way of healing, and liberation – it is grounded in humility and the Cross not grasping, dominance, and destruction – and it’s every bit as bewildering and challenging to us as it was to St. Mark’s community. With all due respect: MOST of us are like Peter, slow to change and able to grasp grace only incrementally.
That’s why Lent shows up again and again, asking us to listen to a story where patience is the path to faith, giving is more important than grabbing, generosity trumps vengeance, and trust instead of control carries the day. It’s the counter-cultural message of the Cross – good news then and now.
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