Rejecting its offer of fake peace
Proper 19B  |  Mark 8:27-38

We are at a turning point, friends! The path changes but the way is the same! Stay focused and keep up! Jesus is turning his face to Jerusalem and all that stuff from the first half of the journey helps us understand the second half—but now there is additional work, new things to learn, and most of all, new people to be neighbors to.

I wish we were getting here next week, however, because we’re skipping over twenty-six verses, which is a lot in the gospel of Mark. So let’s dig into some of that context quickly so we can better understand the moment we’re in.

The first twenty-one verses describe three connected stories: a miraculous feeding, a demand for a sign, and a warning to the disciples. This is one story, friends! And I think it greatly impacts how we read today’s gospel story about the naming of Jesus as Messiah, his rebuke of Peter, and the call to sacrifice at the end.

The Miracle

Chapter eight begins with a second feeding of the multitudes. This is not a mistake, but a second time that people are following Jesus with nothing. They’ve gone three days without eating. They are halfway to starving to death. This isn’t a hangry, forgot-to-eat-breakfast-and-have-a-full-day-of-work moment. This is about people with nothing literally starving. Jesus worries that some of these people won’t make it home alive! So he tells his disciples to feed them. And they do, from a couple loaves of bread; collecting seven baskets full to take with them.

The Demand for a Sign

Next, some critics come to Jesus and demand a sign. Which is as ridiculous as it sounds given what Jesus just did. That was a sign. God fed over four thousand people. 

This demand is also insulting and selfish. Who are they to make this demand? Why should Jesus even think about proving himself this way? What ridiculousness is this even?

But this demand is also wrong-headed for a person of faith. It is not on us to demand a sign from God. To make God prove to us on our terms that God is at work here. What kind of gross, self-indulgent BS is this? Prove your worth, God! And Jesus, like anyone of deep faith would say back to us, you open your eyes! 

This leads to one of my favorite lines of scripture: “And he sighed deeply in his spirit”. You know that feeling don’t you? When you sigh deeply in your spirit. Maybe with a silent “God, give me strength to not yell at this fool!” 

But what this leads to is no wonderworking in this place. Just like when Jesus went home and the people were all belly-aching about Jesus being the carpenter’s son and how they know him and all that trash. When people try really hard to not get what’s going on—to really push their own incredulous selfish junk—Jesus isn’t saving them. Because they don’t want saving; freeing. They are defending their prison cell.

The Warning

Given all of this, the warning to the disciples is the most telling part of this story. Jesus warns them: 

“Watch out—beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and the yeast of Herod.”

Which seems logical—these people were trying to derail him five seconds ago. Guess how the disciples hear it? They’re thinking about how they forgot the bread. That whole miracle with the seven baskets. Apparently they left the baskets behind somewhere and now that Jesus is talking about yeast, they’re focusing on the lost bread. Which is to say that the bread is a stand-in for their screw-up, for their own hunger, for their fear.

Jesus is warning them about who is coming for them and they are worrying about starving to death and screwing up in front of Jesus. They don’t get there because the leap from “the yeast of the Pharisees” would make a normal person think about the bread they don’t have—they get there, and the text says as much—because they were already obsessed with it. Their minds aren’t on the abundant grace of God in Jesus. It’s on their own starving bellies. 

And guess who were focused on that before? The crowds. They aren’t acting like disciples at all.

The Midterm Exam

As they continue on through this Greek region, Jesus offers a simple question about himself. It sounds like a pop quiz, but given this is the turning point in the middle of the story, it is really closer to a midterm exam. Who am I?

He asks them who he seems to be and who they believe him to be. I would have hated this test.

Peter seems to get the answer right. And tradition holds that it is. Jesus is the Messiah. But this, we all know, is a lot more complicated than that. And moments later, Peter demonstrates that he doesn’t understand what this “correct” answer actually means.

Jesus is the Messiah, but he is also destined to die. At the hands of those who would control them. The ones who would deny the liberation Jesus offers. A liberation from want of food and shelter and community and peace. People in charge of the system that maintains that want will kill to protect that control.

Remember, we are to beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and Herodians, the religiously zealous and the patriotic protectors of a particular person in power.

Get Behind Me, Satan!

The sequence of events here is super important because Peter, who just aced the exam, hears this stuff about Jesus heading to his death, and he’s all puffed up, thinking he’s Jesus’s best disciple, right? Number one student. Teacher’s pet and lieutenant in this growing God army of righteousness. Mr. Big Shot. So he steps in front of Jesus and says, what amounts to, we aren’t going to let this happen.

We have two things to remember here. One, Jesus is Peter’s rabbi. So the disciple’s place is behind Jesus. That’s where he can watch what his rabbi does. It isn’t to be in front of him, where he can tell his rabbi where to go.

The other thing is that Satan’s place in the story is to tempt Jesus with power. Power to control destiny, other people, his whole environment: in short, God. 

Jesus tells the tempter to get behind him, for that is Peter’s place and it is where temptations go: the rearview. The mission now is Jerusalem. That’s where the confrontation with Rome will happen. That’s where the critics will make enough civil unrest that Rome will have no choice but to kill Jesus. Because that is what empires offer: the promise of dominance, protection by submission.

And they enforce that power by convincing a few, often the wealthy, or they convince the moderately wealthy with the promise of wealth, to participate in the dominance system. So they name a king of Israel and protect him as long as he makes sure his people don’t cause trouble. And Rome promises to protect the Temple, in modern terms we might say, through the promise of enough weapons to keep things in order.

And Jesus is going to mess with that whole system and call it sin. John of Patmos will call it the dragon and its participants as marked by the beast.

A Motivational Turn

What Jesus offers as he turns his face to Jerusalem is a different, complimentary vision to what he has offered his followers to this point. In the first seven chapters, he offered repentance, turning, as the central mission of the faith. He offered healing and exorcisms as a means of liberating people as an act of repentance, not just as a reward for believing the right thing or saying the right words, but as an essential part of the process. People came out into the wilderness for freedom, to turn, to change their fortunes, to be made new. People all over the region flocked to him for the opportunity to change their ways, find true peace (Shalom) in the grace of Jesus.

And within this mission, Jesus sent his disciples out as apostles to do this repentance, redemption, liberating grace work. And they themselves were filled with such grace and peace from it.

But now the retaliatory forces are building. And they are entering a new phase of the liberating repentance project. A new sacrificial stage.

They’ve already given up their possessions and associations; even their families and livelihoods for this work—to follow Jesus around and learn from him, heal the world with him—and Jesus is making the sacrifice explicit. It will cost their lives. Grace contains a burden of personal sacrifice to this great divine project. And in this, I think we still might think like Peter does about it. So we need to deal with one last thing.

Rejecting Empire

Jesus isn’t speaking of sacrifice as an intrinsic good. Note that he uses a metaphor that will be his literal torture and death. This sacrifice is not objective, it is relational. 

Jesus will be crucified by Rome. They will make him carry a cross as a means of torture. To carry his own source of death with him until they force him up onto it. To watch him struggle, pained, suffer, until he dies.

For us to “carry our cross” is not to speak of the burdens of living. Even when we like to say that always being asked to reach things off the top shelf “is the cross I have to bear.” Please! Nobody is torturing me. I am not shackled and tormented by using my height to be of service to the vertically challenged!

Besides, the cross in the metaphor doesn’t come from God, it comes from Rome. Our having to bear our own crosses is not a naturally occurring phenomenon, or a spiritual penance. It is the shackles and torture of empire. It is the way the empire steals our freedom and rejects our humanity. Empires are not inevitable—what’s inevitable is the behavior of empires. They desire to control and oppress.

We are called to reject empire, walk in the way of Jesus, and bear the burden of being the source of hatred because we threaten that power—not through violent insurrection, but through love. By loving our neighbors, feeding and clothing them, encouraging them, and sharing the liberating love of Christ with them. Empires are threatened by the promise of love! Because loving each other steals empire’s means of controlling us through fear of each other.

Loving, feeding, clothing, healing, sharing, hoping: this is what repentance looks like. What discipleship looks like. What following Jesus looks like. It looks like being good news to other people. Hope. Joy. Faith. Courage. Humility. Honesty. Love.

May we know that freedom to free our neighbors, that the burden of the cross is a sign of empire’s oppression, and that we are doing the faithful work we are called to do with integrity and sincere hope in this place.

Rejoice, Friends! Rejoice in this beautiful world in grace and with true love for one another, following Jesus’s Way of Love from here and into the great city.