The passage we’ve heard read this morning from the Gospel of Mark comes at a key turning point in the story of Jesus and his followers. In the eight chapters that lead up to this moment—fully half the gospel text—Jesus has traveled about the northern regions of Jewish Palestine and ventured into its Gentile borderlands. We have watched him teaching, healing, and attracting huge crowds who follow him everywhere. They even chase him across and around the Sea of Galilee to hear his words and receive his blessings, blessings that offer both material and spiritual nourishment. We see Jesus joust with rival religious authorities. And, quite importantly for the story Mark wants to tell, we see Jesus summon a band of twelve disciples who follow after him and attempt to understand his intentions and teachings, hoping to put his ideals into practice. One feature that emerges in today’s gospel passage is the crucial part those early disciples would play in the drama, and the way in which the narrator presents them as potential stand-ins for future readers, like us.
This book we call the Gospel of Mark arrived as something new and unexpected in its world. The unknown author of this first attempt at writing a gospel embarked on a fascinating experiment as it told the story of its hero. Picking up the book, we find something of a biography of a miracle worker and healer, who is also an untrained but mesmerizing speaker and teacher. The rapid pace of the plot is accelerated with apocalyptic warnings, and rushes headlong toward a potentially shattering conclusion. The Greek style might be folksy and informal, without literary flourish or pretension, but the storyteller is a true master. We are quickly drawn into this world of magic and menace.
Along for the ride with Jesus is a ragtag collection of twelve ordinary men, exceptional only in their willingness to drop everything and everyone, leaving them all behind to follow this magnetic personality. One of the more interesting effects on us, as readers, is how Mark presents the experience of those original disciples. They gain some measure of understanding of Jesus and his role as they accompany him around the region; but their insight into his destiny will soon be shown to be incomplete and lacking in depth. Ultimately these central characters, who might represent us, too, as Christian readers of the story, fail Jesus and deny him and flee from the violence he attracts. Would we have done any better? Can we do better now, in our own circumstances of crisis and distress?
People like us, who identify ourselves as followers of Jesus today, as we read or hear his story, can reflect on the privileges and challenges facing our counterparts back in first-century Galilee. It’s perfectly natural for ancient or modern followers of Jesus to want to identify with the experience of those original disciples as we follow the narrative. They are women and men. We might imagine ourselves being called by Jesus to follow him, leaving our boats on the lakeshore, just as Peter and Andrew and James and John were summoned to do at the start of his ministry. We might even convince ourselves that we’d be just as faithful as those pioneers—or maybe even a bit more loyal and discerning.
Through the first half of the book, we travel along with Jesus as he goes from small town to smaller town, from village to hamlet to countryside. These places can be so small that modern archaeologists and cartographers struggle to locate them on the landscape. Jesus heals people troubled by illness or other maladies, though he does so only on demand. He surprises his audiences with striking, often paradoxical nuggets of wisdom. He gains a reputation both positive and negative among those he encounters. The disciples of course witness all of this, and for a while they seem to have privileged access to Jesus’ intentions and purpose.
When Jesus preaches to the crowds with symbolic parables, perplexing them with his meaning, the disciples are assured that they alone are given the key to understand the mysteries of the Kin-dom of God. When Jesus heals the blind or the disabled, he commands silence and secrecy, though this command is typically ignored. When Jesus debates with more widely respected religious leaders about the import of the Law of Moses, the disciples receive private explanations for his innovations regarding Sabbath and ritual purity. The Son of humanity, we read, is more important than the Sabbath; it’s what comes out of our mouths that makes us unclean, not which foods we put into our mouths. And now we learn that his disciples must keep Jesus’ messianic identity secret.
In the two chapters preceding today’s passage, some cracks have started to appear in the disciples’ capability and confidence. Doubts arise about their ability truly to understand Jesus. They seem to mistake his intentions and purpose in performing his miraculous feedings of crowds. Their seemingly brash over-confidence starts to be exposed as Jesus needs to correct the ways in which they interpret his words and actions. Those private explanations of Jesus’ teaching that they have received away from the crowd have apparently failed to get through to them deeply enough, to penetrate past their prior understandings of what their leader might be up to. But just as we modern readers might have been identifying with the disciples’ early successes, perhaps now we are confronted with the possibility that we share in their shortcomings and weakness.
Like a door that closes and opens on its hinges, in today’s episode we have reached a point, at the end of eight chapters, where the gospel marks a key transition. At this point, we move on from those initial and rather experimental experiences of miracle and parable toward a newly focused agenda in the story’s second act. We now sense a mindset in Jesus that requires fresh commitments and resolve in the face of dangerous uncertainty. Bravado is going to be tested; new challenges now appear. The nameless multitudes that crowd around Jesus, as well as his own chosen companions, have seen in him a figure of godly power and wisdom. His work of healing and divine instruction has led many of those surrounding him to wonder—who can this person be? Could this man be The One, the special figure meant to be sent by God to bring new hope to their nation, who would perhaps lead a movement of liberation from their oppressive Roman occupiers?
In the vignette we are considering together this morning, Jesus himself invites such a conversation with his closest followers. We hear questions and answers proffered in the presence of that faceless and curious crowd. Jesus poses a question that by its very phrasing might suggest another series of questions. When he asks his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” we might wonder what the point of his question might be. Might Jesus be a bit uncertain of his own identity and role, and seeking some sort of confirmation or approbation from popular opinion? Or is it mostly, “How’s it going, fellas—what’s the vibe, what sort of impression are we making on these folks? Let’s take another poll!”
Or is it possibly a more anxious question. Jesus will soon explain what he understands his assigned role to be, to proceed faithfully and resolutely on a path that will involve danger, pain, and death. Are his enormous crowds a confirmation of his divine destiny, or do they perhaps pose something of an obstacle to accomplishing his mission? Beyond the attitude of the crowds, what about the capacity of his closest disciples?
In response to Jesus’ inquiry about popular views of his identity, his followers mention prophetic figures no longer on the scene, brave folks who spoke truth to power—John the Baptist, who was recently executed by Herod Antipas; Elijah, who was carried off to heaven long ago in that fiery chariot; or simply “one of the prophets” of olden days. Jews of that time and place did not have a theory of reincarnation: there was little to no expectation that deceased people would return to a new bodily existence. Instead, Jesus is being compared by the crowds to exceptional cases of holy men who are thought to be held in reserve, so to speak, in the presence of God, only to be sent back to earth, to the people of Israel, to announce the messianic age. So, when Peter answers his teacher’s follow-up question, “Okay, fine, but who do you say that I am?” he seems to pass the test: “You are the Messiah!” he exclaims. But it turns out that Jesus is more than an avatar of some ancient prophet—he embodies a totally new and remarkably different concept of messiahship.
Peter’s pleasure in getting the answer right is quite short-lived. First of all, he and his friends are commanded to keep this revelation to themselves. What? Worse than that, even, is that Jesus then proceeds to explain that his messianic destiny will involve rejection, and torture, and execution—and resurrection! I wonder how well the stunned disciples could even hear the word “resurrection” at the end of that terrifying list of pain and humiliation. Peter’s attempt to walk Jesus back from this disastrous future is met with the striking retort, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on godly things but on human things.” To be clear, this Satan that Peter exemplifies is not demonic, not the red-tailed Devil, the savage enemy of God of later imagination; instead, Peter plays the role of the traditional Biblical tempter, who with God’s permission is allowed to try to pull people off the path of holiness, as we see famously in the Book of Job.
After this counter rebuke, Jesus turns to the crowd surrounding them to offer what reads as one of the worst recruiting campaigns in history. “Do you want to follow me as your prophet, or your Messiah? Good, but first you need to upend your hopes and expectations. I’m not the sort of leader who will expel the hated occupiers from our holy land. What will be required of me, and also of you, is that we be willing to sacrifice our very lives to attain heavenly glory. So, come on! Pick up your cross and get in line on our journey to Calvary! Those who want to save their life will lose it; but those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”
Now of course it is important for us as readers to realize that these stories about Jesus and his first disciples are set in a time period one or more generations before the author’s own day. Whatever Jesus actually did say to potential followers back in his day, by the time this story was written down, rumblings of discontent against Roman rule had grown louder and more insistent down the decades. Mark’s Jesus is speaking not merely to the minor characters in his own drama, but more pointedly is addressing the followers of Jesus in Mark’s own community. The author describes the words and fate of Jesus from the perspective of the fiery crisis of his own day, during the deadly suppression of the revolt of the Judeans in the late 60s of the first century. Mark’s first readers came to his story having recently heard of Roman armies advancing on Jerusalem, soon to sack the city, slaughter, rape, and enslave its people, and tear down its holy temple. In the midst of this monumental disaster, Mark offers a vision of hope and safety beyond the enormous devastation of the present. Mark’s original readers were called to look forward to the impending apocalyptic day of the Lord, when justice would surely be done. The humiliating execution of Jesus, who was mistaken as a violent rebel, was not the end of God’s story.
We must recognize that even earlier, the very first followers of Jesus were able to overcome their fears and doubts, beginning with the frightened women who bore first witness to the empty tomb. Mark tells us that Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome worked to carry Jesus’ mission and message forward. Knowledge and memory of their courage and commitment were recorded for us and for countless others by the author of Mark and the other gospels. We their spiritual progeny are the inheritors of their courage, their steadfastness, and their passion.
Over the generations and millennia that have passed since those events occurred, and this first gospel was written and circulated, so very much of course has changed. To be sure, the return of the Son of humanity on the clouds, with God’s holy angels, as predicted in Mark’s story, did not happen—or at least not yet! We all know that. But this fact does not let us as Christian readers of Mark’s story off the hook. Where do we find in our own time and place ways to confront the forces of oppression and unholy violence? Have we the courage of standing up for the work of God’s justice even when the task can feel endless, the struggle relentless, and our goals at times so far out of reach? Will we shrink from the challenge to show mercy and do justice in our own families, our own city, state, and nation? My hope and belief is that we will not shirk our responsibility to carry on the work that our God calls us to, as we leave our hesitancy and ambivalences behind. Let us look to the example of Mary and Salome and other early followers of Jesus to press ahead with faith, with hope, and with love.
Amen!