Pentecost XVII: New-fangled Messiah

Mark is the earliest canonical gospel and it does not have a flattering portrait of Jesus' disciples.  They are an ignorant and hard-hearted lot.  In Chapter 4, they debate who Jesus might be.  They are clueless.  In Chapter 6, they mistake him for a ghost.  They're hopeless.  But for us who are readers, reality sets in from the very first sentence of the gospel:  Jesus is "the Messiah, the Son of God."

In today's pericope [Mk. 8: 27-38] Jesus calls the question and Peter actually gets the answer correct, "You are the Messiah."  So far, so good.  But then Jesus tells the disciples not to tell anyone. (In the Markan gospel, his true identity is to be kept secret until the resurrection).  More importantly, Jesus now pivots to explain that he is re-defining messiahship!    He will not be the expected and glorious military leader who heads up a violent revolution against the Roman Empire, re-establishes Jewish statehood, and brings in God's earthly kingdom by magic. On the contrary, this new-fangled Messiah will suffer.

Suffer?  That is a shocking notion, that the one we awaited should be a suffering servant instead.  And suffer he shall.  Let me make a theological statement about that.  He will not suffer because suffering builds character and endurance (suffering often just makes people weaker, and bitter).  He will not suffer because his angry, unforgiving  Father demands to be appeased through bloody sacrifice.  No, Jesus is going to suffer because it is the natural consequence of a life lived fully in conformance to God's will.  He will reject bad social and religious norms, opposed imperial power and the values of the Empire.  He will lift up the marginalized, the unclean, the forgotten, teaching that God equally loves all his children and never gives up on any of us..  That kind of social action can get a person killed -- and it will.

The question for us is not "do we profess?' but "do we practice?"  Do we live Jesus' life and take those same risks that Jesus took for the sake of God's inbreaking Reign?

In answering the interrogative "Who do people say I am?,"  many folks today acknowledge Jesus a prophet, a religious leader.  Many others, like the disciples, mistake him for a ghost with unlimited knowledge and powers, not a fully-human being magnificently radiating the love of God.  But Jesus wants to be our leader and master, not our favorite philosopher, nor a godlet disguised as a human. Jesus wants to be our Lord and Savior, not our mascot. That requires surrender to the faithful and dangerous God-life which is our mission and is the only life worth living anyway.