St. Peter's Confession of Jesus as Christ
A Sign in Our Hearts
Second Sunday of Lent (Year B)
4 March 2012; 8 am Spoken Mass; 10 am Sung Mass
Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church, Ashland, Oregon
Second Sunday of Lent (Year B)
4 March 2012; 8 am Spoken Mass; 10 am Sung Mass
Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church, Ashland, Oregon
The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson, homilist
Gen. 17:1-7, 15-16; Psa. 22:23-30; Rom. 4:13-25; Mark 8:31-38
Then Jesus began to teach his disciples that the Son of Man 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. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, "Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things." He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 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? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels." (Mark 8:31-38)
God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
Today’s Gospel tells the story of what happens just after Peter first tells Jesus that he believes that he is the Messiah. Jesus tells him that what he has been taught about this hoped-for anointed future King of Israel is wrong. Contrary to common expectations, the Messiah Peter has just confessed has to undergo great suffering, be rejected by the religious and social leaders of his people, and be killed. Peter can’t accept this, and tells Jesus off, and says he is out of line.
Clearly what Jesus is saying here is something unexpected, something new. Most of people of that time drew their image of the Messiah from combining various prophetic and apocalyptic scriptures that together said the ideal future David would be a conquering hero, who would set up a new, just government and society exerting world hegemony--the kingdom of God.
Jesus draws a very different picture. He links the “Son of Man” with “suffering.” Daniel 7 describes a mysterious figure looking something like “a human being” (“a son of man”) coming in the distance in clouds of glory. This figure receives kingly dominion over all nations and then destroys the evil kingdoms ruled by the “beasts” or wild animals of Daniel’s visions. Understandably, the figure was often linked with the idea of an anointed future king, the “Messiah.”
Jesus draws a very different picture. He links the “Son of Man” with “suffering.” Daniel 7 describes a mysterious figure looking something like “a human being” (“a son of man”) coming in the distance in clouds of glory. This figure receives kingly dominion over all nations and then destroys the evil kingdoms ruled by the “beasts” or wild animals of Daniel’s visions. Understandably, the figure was often linked with the idea of an anointed future king, the “Messiah.”
But Jesus says the “Son of Man must suffer.” The image suggests the “Suffering Servant” of Second Isaiah, a figure most likely there representing God’s people and their sufferings in history. Isaiah sees this suffering of the Jewish people as not in vain, but rather as a witness that eventually will bring people of all nations to knowledge of the true God, who say in reply, “It was to correct our transgressions that he was wounded, to remedy our iniquities that he was bruised. He bore the brunt of punishment that brought us to peace, and by his stripes we are healed” (Isa 53:5).
It is the linking of these two disparate ideas—the Messiah and the Suffering Servant—that upsets Peter. Jesus is telling him to put away any hope that Jesus is somehow going to make the hated Roman oppressors go away, or win over the powerful elites in Jerusalem. The “elders, priests and scribes” there collaborate with the Romans. They are the beneficiaries of a huge system of oppression having at its heart the Temple cult, strictly interpreted Law, and the influence that money can buy. Those who bear the brunt of this system of oppression are the very people whom Jesus has been attracting throughout the Galilean rural areas by preaching the arrival of God’s reign with such words as “blessed are the poor, God’s kingdom belongs to them; blessed are the downtrodden, for they shall inherit the earth.”
No, he says to Peter: ‘God wants me to go to Jerusalem to confront the powerful. They will reject my message. They will almost certainly kill me. But despite this I still trust in God, on the third day, he will raise me up.
Jesus is using here an expression of trust in God from the book of Hosea. It makes use of the Hebrew poetic device of giving a number and then adding to it to emphasize certitude, “[the Lord] has struck us, but he will bind our wounds. He will revive us after two days; on the third day he will raise us up, to live before him” (6:1-2).
Jesus is using here an expression of trust in God from the book of Hosea. It makes use of the Hebrew poetic device of giving a number and then adding to it to emphasize certitude, “[the Lord] has struck us, but he will bind our wounds. He will revive us after two days; on the third day he will raise us up, to live before him” (6:1-2).
Peter cannot believe what he has just heard. “Don’t be so negative. God blesses the righteous and punishes the wicked. Where’s your faith, Jesus? How can this be the kingdom of God if evil will triumph by killing you? Just take it down a notch or two. You don’t have to go to Jerusalem just yet. Wait until the right time, and you shall prevail because God is with you.”
Jesus’s reply is biting: “Get away from me, Satan.” He knows that Peter’s pep-talk is not in accord with reality or with what God wants. He must go to Jerusalem to bear proclaim the arrival of the Reign of God there, and he knows what this means. The powers that be will not let it go unchallenged. They must respond brutally to any challenge to their power. Accepting God’s will means accepting that, and in persevering despite it all. To argue otherwise is as Peter has done is to present temptation.
Then, as if to underscore the point that it is the Romans who are the ultimate powers-that-be, Jesus summons the crowd and announces, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.”
Jesus’s reply is biting: “Get away from me, Satan.” He knows that Peter’s pep-talk is not in accord with reality or with what God wants. He must go to Jerusalem to bear proclaim the arrival of the Reign of God there, and he knows what this means. The powers that be will not let it go unchallenged. They must respond brutally to any challenge to their power. Accepting God’s will means accepting that, and in persevering despite it all. To argue otherwise is as Peter has done is to present temptation.
Then, as if to underscore the point that it is the Romans who are the ultimate powers-that-be, Jesus summons the crowd and announces, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.”
Feodor Andrejeitsch Bronnikov "The Damned Field, Execution place in the Roman Empire" 1878
The word “deny” here means disown, renounce claims to ownership. “Picking up your cross” refers to the fact that prisoners who were to be executed by crucifixion had to carry the crossbeam to the place of execution. Crucifixion was the Roman execution reserved for revolutionaries, slaves, and bandits who fought against the established order. It was a brutal form of slow torture ending in death by shock, dehydration or suffocation, all conducted in public to make sure that the messy and shameful spectacle had deterrent effect on anyone else even thinking of challenging Roman power.
Jesus means something like this: “If you want to follow me, you must give up any claims you may think you have of owning yourself. You’ll have to stick your head in the hangman’s noose to follow me.”
We often misread Jesus’ saying here. We think he is praising suffering for suffering’s sake, and extolling the virtues of a stoic victim-hood, or worse, of a vicarious suffering for someone else’s wrongs. “This is my cross, and I’ll have to bear it” is the proverbial expression of the idea. Sometimes this wrong idea is actually used to encourage passivity and enabling behavior by the abused or the oppressed.
We often misread Jesus’ saying here. We think he is praising suffering for suffering’s sake, and extolling the virtues of a stoic victim-hood, or worse, of a vicarious suffering for someone else’s wrongs. “This is my cross, and I’ll have to bear it” is the proverbial expression of the idea. Sometimes this wrong idea is actually used to encourage passivity and enabling behavior by the abused or the oppressed.
Or we think that Jesus had perfect knowledge of what was going to happen, and that he is referring here to his own (future) crucifixion and resurrection that any of his followers, reading the story after the fact, automatically think of.
Jesus here has no such idea in mind. Orthodox Christology is that Jesus is wholly God and wholly man, and that he suffered like us in all ways save for sin. That for me means that He shared our unknowing fear of the future.
What Jesus is calling for is this: those who wish to follow him actually must follow him: follow God’s call, work for God’s kingdom, announce the liberation of the captive, help the sick and the downtrodden—and do this even when we know that it may very well have a high price.
The difference between Jesus and Peter here is this: Jesus is open to God and whatever God can throw at him, and trusts. Peter thinks he already knows what he can expect from God, and gets very upset when told that it just isn’t what God is going to do.
There is a lesson is this for us, and it is a basic theme of the Old Testament and Epistle readings today: open-ended trust in God. Belief in God is not just intellectual assent to the idea that “God exists.” It is trust in God, in God’s love and goodness, and in God’s ability to finally bring things aright. This is not a naive and silly “everything will be OK.” Nor is it “things have to go well for me, because God owes it to me.”
What Jesus is calling for is this: those who wish to follow him actually must follow him: follow God’s call, work for God’s kingdom, announce the liberation of the captive, help the sick and the downtrodden—and do this even when we know that it may very well have a high price.
The difference between Jesus and Peter here is this: Jesus is open to God and whatever God can throw at him, and trusts. Peter thinks he already knows what he can expect from God, and gets very upset when told that it just isn’t what God is going to do.
There is a lesson is this for us, and it is a basic theme of the Old Testament and Epistle readings today: open-ended trust in God. Belief in God is not just intellectual assent to the idea that “God exists.” It is trust in God, in God’s love and goodness, and in God’s ability to finally bring things aright. This is not a naive and silly “everything will be OK.” Nor is it “things have to go well for me, because God owes it to me.”
Saint Paul in today’s epistle says that God establishes his promise to Abraham even before Abraham has shown a sign of that promise by making a seal of it in his flesh by the rite of circumcision. He says that the key is that “Abraham trusted in God” despite all the evidence around him that God’s promise could not be fulfilled. Later in the same letter, Paul says that nothing can separate us from the love of God even as he lists all sorts of things that may go wrong. Again, the key is trust. For Paul, trust in God is a response to God’s loving act in reaching out to us. It is a seal in our hearts even more real and enduring than the seal that Abraham put into his flesh by the rite of circumcision to show his acceptance of God’s covenant.
Jesus asks his disciples to risk death and not worry about it by following him as he followed God. He asks us to trust God because of who God is, and his promises to us. He asks for single-minded trust in God. He asks us to place this seal in our hearts.
Following Jesus means letting go, and letting God. It means doing the right thing even when counting the cost tells us it will be hard. It means stone cold clear assessment of what we face, and not putting on the rosy lenses of self-deception in order to work up a false sense of that all will be well when it won’t be. It means accepting that God’s plans may not be what we thought they were. But through this all, it means trusting God--beyond the limits of reason, beyond the limits of our experience, beyond the limits of our fear—because God’s basic nature is to love us unconditionally.
Following Jesus means letting go, and letting God. It means doing the right thing even when counting the cost tells us it will be hard. It means stone cold clear assessment of what we face, and not putting on the rosy lenses of self-deception in order to work up a false sense of that all will be well when it won’t be. It means accepting that God’s plans may not be what we thought they were. But through this all, it means trusting God--beyond the limits of reason, beyond the limits of our experience, beyond the limits of our fear—because God’s basic nature is to love us unconditionally.
May we all learn to so trust in God.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
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