Isaiah 50. 4 – 9a
Mark 8. 27 – 38
Fr Alex
Another enigmatic Gospel reading for us this morning. What are we to make of Jesus’ strange interaction with his disciples?
First he asks them who he is, and Peter makes the wonderful confession of faith, ‘You are the Messiah.’ But Jesus doesn’t want anyone else to know about it!
Then he quite openly tells first the disciples, and then the whole crowd, all this really difficult stuff about suffering and death – and not just for him, but for all who follow him.
But this seemingly paradoxical exchange is reflective of the whole structure of Mark’s Gospel narrative, which changes dramatically at this point.
The first half of Jesus’ ministry in the Gospel has been very successful – there have been many miracles, great crowds have followed Jesus and acclaimed him. His disciples have come to the realisation that he is the Messiah, the promised one. But all the time, Jesus has told them not to tell others about him.
From this moment on, however, miracles will be rare, Jesus and his followers will meet opposition, and the crowds will be shouting against him, rather than for him. And this is the reality that Jesus wishes to make known.
Jesus is more concerned that his people must know what a Messiah means, before they can proclaim who the Messiah is.
And it is Peter’s reaction today that shows why Jesus needs to be so careful.
Peter has witnessed from the start the miracles, the great wisdom, the charismatic personality of Jesus. And it has all convinced him that he is the Messiah.
But he hopes that the Messiah will bring more of the same: that he will be the triumphant king who’ll end the suffering and oppression of his people. The Messiah that Peter expects is one who will make life good for all who follow him.
But Jesus’ vision is so much greater. Jesus doesn’t see his struggle as a merely political or even religious one, but as nothing less than God’s definitive intervention in history. The fulfilment of all that has been promised and foretold through the pages of scripture, such as we heard in our first reading from Isaiah about the ‘suffering servant.’
Jesus has come not to make things better for a while, but to perfect creation for all time.
And so when Peter rebukes him for saying such difficult things, he rebukes him in turn in the strongest possible way: “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
At this pivotal moment, any challenge to his divine mission is as if it had come from Satan himself – from the forces of darkness.
For Jesus, taking up his cross and going to Jerusalem is not a way to live with the darkness, or to help his friends avoid it; it is the only way through the darkness, and into the fulness of life that he desires for the world.
And so hope for Peter and for all the people of Israel does not lie in the adulation of the crowds, or a triumphant progress towards comfort and prosperity—'human things’—but in the paradoxical divine path that leads through the suffering and emptiness of the cross.
And it is only by taking up their own cross and following Jesus that they can join him in the new creation that awaits.
It’s a shame, in a sense, that this idiom of ‘taking up our cross’ has become so familiar to us. We’ve all heard, no doubt, that ‘we all have our crosses to bear.’ It can mean serious hardship, but more often refers to discomforts that are relatively minor, in the grand scheme of things.
It would’ve been a truly shocking thing to hear back then. If you saw someone bearing a cross, they weren’t just carrying a burden; their life was about to come to an end in the most horrible way.
And I think partly because of its familiarity, it’s been misused over the years to justify all kinds of suffering – almost to make suffering a virtue.
But as we know, the story doesn’t end with the cross; the path of the cross leads irresistibly to resurrection. The cross and resurrection proclaim to us that suffering and death are not the last word.
So what might it mean for us to take up our cross, and follow Christ?
Taking up our cross is not simply offering our sufferings to God, and accepting that that’s the way life is. Nor is discipleship some sort of contract between God and the Christian that life will be ok. We know that’s not true.
Perhaps taking up our cross is making a commitment to follow Christ into the darkness, so that we can work with him to bring about the transformation of life that he has already begun through his own cross and resurrection.
It might be to confront the dark places of our own lives or relationships; those parts of life where we set our minds first on human things and not divine. It might be to go into the darkness of other people’s lives, challenging situations of injustice or suffering. For many Christians around the world it means a willingness literally to lose their life for the sake of the Gospel
But wherever our Christian discipleship takes us, we do not go into the darkness alone; we follow Christ on the way, who has taken up his cross and already gone through it, to lead us into the light.
As St Paul says, “May [we] never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ;” and may we rejoice in the “new creation” that cross has bought. Amen.