Year B

Mark 8:27-38

The Rev. Denise Vaughn

The Question that Changes Everything

“Who do you say that I am”? Good question Jesus, how might we go about answering it? I can’t help but have empathy for Peter, for like Peter I can be quick with the correct theological answer. ”You are the Messiah.” And also like Peter, sometimes slow at realizing the implications of my answer. It would be so much easier if the Christian journey was simply an intellectual journey because then I could easily do my research, as I have and continue to do, and write about who Jesus is. I could even put together a good list of important moral directives and the ethical implications of Christ’s life, death and resurrection.  All the while hoping that this path would assure me of happiness and success but that’s much too easy because there is so much more to answering Jesus’ question than any of these paths. Some questions require more than just a correct answer or even more than we are willing to accept or do because quite possibly they require the need to reassess and rearrange our lives. “Who do you think I am” is one of those questions, a question asked of every Christian who professes faith in Christ.

We are now at the midpoint of Mark’s gospel. Throughout the first half, we read of the growing knowledge of Jesus’ gifts as a teacher and healer, and also of the building tension between him and the religious authorities. Everything in Mark’s gospel leads up to today’s question about Jesus’ identity and the response by the disciples and Jesus governs everything that follows. Most scholars will say that this passage today is the single most important passage in the whole gospel, for it does reveal Jesus’ identity and the true meaning of that identity. Peter is correct, Jesus is the Messiah, but not the one they had hoped for. All along, the disciples demonstrate little insight into what is happening.  For this Messiah’s identity is completely wrapped up in Jesus’ eventual suffering, death and resurrection and following this passage, Jesus and the disciples head for Jerusalem in a journey that finds them in a down-hill run to the cross.

So today, they are on their way to the villages of Caesarea Philippi, a Roman occupied city on the northern side of the Sea of Galilee. This area would have had a mostly Gentile population. On the way Jesus asks his disciples the question, “Who do people say that I am?” People were obviously talking about him and wondering.  For over two thousand years the church has attempted to explain who Jesus is and what he does as God’s anointed one. He has been used for all kinds of causes, noble and demonic, like wars, conquests, crusades, etc.  A number of years ago, a famous American general named Lew Wallace and his friend, Robert Ingersoll, an agnostic, agreed that together they would write a book that would convincingly destroy the myth of Christianity and thus deliver millions of people from religious superstition. So, for two years Wallace studied in the great libraries of America and Europe trying to discover evidence which would enable him to write his book.

But, while writing the second chapter, Lew Wallace found himself on his knees praying to the Christ he had been seeking to expose as a fraud. The evidence for the claims of Christ was simply so convincing on all levels that he could no longer deny Jesus was who he said he was. Lew set aside his book to begin another one, Ben Hur, a novel about the life-changing impact of Christ, the Son of God. So, Peter’s answer that Jesus is the Messiah gives us some hope that the disciples are finally beginning to get who Jesus is but we soon discover as we continue in the gospel, that they remain confused. Like them, we may believe that Jesus is the Christ, but still be confused about what that actually means. In verse 31 Mark tells us, “Then he began to teach them,” then and now, what it means for him to be the Christ, the Messiah. He tells them the Messiah must suffer and die and rise again. By means of the cross, we find out who Jesus is, what resurrection means and how we are to follow as his disciples.

Peter, hearing what Jesus has said objects and Jesus rebukes him for his rebuking. The idea that the Messiah was to suffer and die was completely foreign to the Jewish expectations of the Messiah. Their Messiah would liberate them from Roman oppression just as God had liberated them hundreds of years before from the Egyptians, in the story of the Exodus. Their Messiah would not die as a criminal on a cross, no wonder Peter can’t even imagine this happening. How could he and the disciples until after the crucifixion and resurrection? Jesus then defines in more detail what it means to be his disciple he said to them, “If any want to become my followers…take up your cross and follow me.” Christian discipleship, says Jesus, is a matter of following and living a life that shares in his suffering.

Not everyone will want to follow Jesus for the call to Christian discipleship is a radical call to follow him into the world rather than away from the world. So he goes on to teach how to live this radical call; how to live life in a world where suffering and death are inevitable. Discipleship is a call to an alternative way of living based on self-denial and the giving up of self-centeredness. It invites us to an understanding of God’s paradoxical perspective on life, if you want to save your life, you will lose it; if you are willing to lose it for my sake and the gospel you will save it. The choices we make in light of our faith are serious. Are we generous with our time and our money to do God’s work and are we accountable to the Christian values?

Christian values that James addresses in his letter with emphasis. His message deals with daily life such as control of the tongue, relation to others, especially the wealthy and helping people in need. James shows that religion and morality, evangelism and ethics, belief and behavior, faith and works go together in the Christian life. He taught that salvation is a gift from God received by faith. We cannot be saved by works. We are saved by grace, God’s amazing love. Yet, a person who loves God through Jesus will demonstrate his or her faith by works of love and ministry because Christian life is a blend of faith and works. He tells us, “So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

Like James, Jesus puts God’s perspective in stark terms for those in his day and ours. We are to deny ourselves and take up our cross and follow him into a life of serving and giving and sacrificing. This is what it means to confess that Jesus is Messiah. It demands more than a correct answer. It demands a decision, a life altering decision. Discipleship is the outcome of confessing Jesus as Messiah; a Messiah, who entered this human life, and chose the path of immense suffering and agony and sets the example, to move with love toward suffering.  Will we follow this man to the place that he is going? Peter and the disciples, the early Christian community and many who have followed since, clearly recognized this teaching as fundamental to their life. When we make that decision to follow, then the promise: “those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”