This Week: Proper 19B
Gospel: Mark 8:27-38
Jesus asks his disciples what they’re hearing about him—who people think he is. As a student, this has to sound like a trick question, doesn’t it? Can you imagine hearing something so open-ended and yet leading and deceptively specific. He’s got something in mind, doesn’t he? I have to get this right!
What are you hearing, however, is a fascinating measurement, because it isn’t about truth exactly, but reporting. They are listening and reporting back what they are hearing. This is 100% about perception. Who do other people believe Jesus to be to them?
The second question is similar. Who do you say that I am? is a similar reporting about one’s own experience and perception. It has little to do with who Jesus actually is. The question is about the disciple’s perception. And therefore, belief.
Messianic Expectation
Because we tend to see Peter’s response as the correct one (which is not objectively true, by the way), we are prone to mistake how little the question deals with truth and how much it is asking about belief and expectation.
What we take from this moment is that Peter believes Jesus is the Messiah. But even this isn’t precise.
The question is “But who do you say that I am?” so it isn’t a question of truth or even belief, but of speech, sharing, expression. In short who does Peter tell people Jesus is. Peter tells other people that Jesus is the Messiah.
Peter could believe any number of things and still tell people he is the Messiah. But what is most likely is that Peter has taken all he has seen, thought about it a lot, and has come to a conclusion with, maybe a 75% confidence level that who Jesus is is the Messiah.
Who?
We shouldn’t parse this one out too much further than this, because we’re stretching the language of this moment pretty thin already, but there is another linguistic detail worth taking a half-second on. It is, perhaps a bit semantic, but Jesus isn’t saying what people say about him, which invites adjectives as response: healer, teacher, wise, powerful. He asks who.
Who is an identity question. When people say “who is that,” they are often looking for a name and identifiers. We like to put one another in classification buckets with identity markers for easy understanding and retrieval. We like to know if a person is “rich” or “thoughtful” or “gets things done”.
Asking about who Jesus is doesn’t set up them to say “a rabbi” so much as a particular figure for them. The more logical response is “my rabbi,” I suppose.
It is also obvious that The Messiah is a who identifier more than a what. The Messiah is the one who will lead Israel into liberation. He is a person as much as a role.
Dealing with the truth
OK, let’s be done with the linguistics. But let us be sure to hold the idea of identity and naming, of perception and understanding, and of Peter’s own vision of truth as the material of this passage.
And let us also recognize that objective truth is not.
So we are wrestling with Peter’s own perception and the church’s identification with Peter’s declaration as a window into truth. And this is important because our own interest in truth, in absolute and definable truth, is a dead end. When a person says Is it true? and we say Yes. it has a way of ending our exploration. Not just in the way something is true, but in the meaning, nature, and value of it being true.
In other words, what is important about this passage is that Peter says that Jesus is the Messiah. He is announcing to Jesus that he says to other people that Jesus is the Messiah. And this is what is most essential here. Not only that Jesus is the Messiah. It is more important for us to know that Peter claims Jesus as Messiah than to know definitively that Jesus actually is the Messiah! Why? Because this is our work, too! This is what we are trying to deduce and then declare—that we come to perceive Jesus as Messiah and then tell other people that he is.
What kind of Messiah?
This, of course is what the rest of the passage reveals; that Peter’s expectation of the Messiah is built upon a traditional view of the job. And Jesus is essentially offering him and the reader a revision of that expectation. A sort of “not that kind of Messiah”.
I labored with the language at the beginning of this essay for a reason—because I don’t think Jesus is actually committing to the idea of being the Messiah nearly as much as the church rallied behind Peter’s assessment of Jesus.
This is not unlike the problem of the Christian repurposing of language to make Jesus “king of kings,” for example. We wrestle with a savior who challenges the very concept of kings, rejects the opportunity to become a king, and then dare call him a king anyway, saying that he’s a king, “just not that kind of king.” Which, let’s be honest, is kind of a linguistic cleverness that fools nobody.
Our compulsion to call Jesus a Messiah is predicated on redefining the nature of the Messiah in history, while also adopting virtually all of its historical character. It’s a way of claiming power and saying “but he’ll be just with it.” A line most modern people are skeptical of hearing from any would-be dictator (even when they support them).
Perhaps there is a reframing being done here, however. I believe it is possible. Much like the LGBTQ+ community has reclaimed “queer” as not only a positive term, but of one that reflects a relatively new character and way of being. Perhaps as a way of saying, I indeed am living a different kind of life. It is similarly possible that Jesus is reframing Messiah as a nonviolent liberator.
I suspect the truth is actually somewhere between these two ideas. That Jesus knows the problem with the term and accepts it as another example of transformation and change—of repentance—and redemption. It is also just as likely that it isn’t his word for himself, that it is entirely Peter’s experience of him. Which, as I said above, is actually better than the alternative.
The rest of the story
I’ve spilled a lot of digital ink on the first third (and ultimately the last third, by extension) of the passage, but will briefly touch on the rest of the story because it is awesome and just as important.
The easy frame of it is that Peter gives the “right” answer to Jesus then proves he didn’t get what he was saying by the next action. He doesn’t understand that he is rejecting the Messiahship of Jesus by preventing his mission from being fulfilled, literally putting himself in front of the mission to block it.
This is a handy frame for the text and on-target. But it is much cooler than this because it is also a very physical passage.
Jesus is the rabbi and Peter is his disciple, which means his position is to walk behind Jesus. So when he moves to stand in front of Jesus, blocking his path and telling him what to do, he is not acting as a disciple (or apostle, for that matter) but as the Christ himself, rabbi over his rabbi, to which Jesus is like not happening, Pal!
It is also valuable to remember the way the Tempter (Satan) behaves is to offer power, specifically control over (people, environment, God). In this way, Peter is not only out of position as Jesus’s disciple, being a stumbling block for Jesus, but he is embodying the Tempter by offering him control over his destiny and God’s mission for his life.
It is impossible to overstate how profoundly out of place Peter’s response to Jesus is here, even if many of us in the United States have been taught to reprove our leaders and correct one another when we’re on the wrong track. This is not about the authority of Jesus as a teacher to maintain control of the class, it is about the temptation the student is offering him to reject the mission “for a good reason.”
Sacrifice
The last part, and it is something I’m focusing on this week, is the language Jesus offers after the rebuke of Peter. He says that his mission involves going to Jerusalem to die. And that his disciples mirror this path.
We’re familiar with this concept, popularizing the language of taking up our own cross by suggesting that challenges in our own lives are often “the cross I have to bear”. Often this is casting our place as intentional, static, but ultimately redemptive. Which is mostly true.
But I think our own use of the cross language misses one essential piece of the puzzle: God didn’t put Jesus on the cross: Rome did.
A lot of our burdens and the inevitability of the pain of life doesn’t come from God. It doesn’t really come from any holy place. It comes from human dysfunction: violence, oppression, the will to power.
As yet another U.S. community is dealing with a school shooting this week, I’m reminded that there is zero inevitability of this behavior. And zero God’s willing of this behavior. This isn’t a thing that simply “happens” without human influence. Nor does it reflect that natural relationship of a people to its environment. It is a contagion; it is evil; it is an expression of power/control; and it is entirely human-made, defined, and protected.
It is the cross.
Gun violence is the cross. It is the torture and execution of the innocent by those willing to play God.
We are now bearing the cross, not because God put us here, but because our neighbors put it on us and we must carry it.
And Jesus’s Way of Love involves taking that cross to calvary and exposing the sin of the cross itself.