What it means to confess Jesus (Mark 8.27-38)
Mark 8.27-38
“What it means to confess Jesus”
Ordinary 24B/September 16, 2018
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church
Tom James
Today is a special day in our family. After church today (well, actually, after Session!), we are all converging on Ann Arbor to celebrate my oldest daughter Emma’s 18th birthday. I feel like we’ve accomplished something. I know it’s a little arbitrary, this 18th birthday as a “crossing into adulthood,” but milestones matter, don’t they?
It’s an occasion to reflect, anyway. What have we been able to impart to her that will guide her as she moves further into adulthood? What many parents seem to want for their kids is for them to become leaders in some way. You hardly ever hear about a parent saying to their kids, “be a follower, not a leader.” And you don’t hear of schools bragging about educating the next generation of followers. There aren’t seminars on strengthening your “followership.” And why is that? We have this idea that being a leader is a marker or perhaps a harbinger of what we have been taught to recognize as “success”—maybe a high-paying job, or prestige in society, or maybe making important contributions to solving difficult problems or to bettering human life in some way. Success can mean lots of things, but it usually means being able and willing in some way to stick your neck out a little and take the lead.
But there’s something very basic about the Christian life that can easily get obscured or distorted when we focus on these goals of “success” or even “leadership.” For, at its core, being a Christian is a matter of confessing the truth of Jesus’ message and his ministry, and that means that we, like his contemporary disciples, are to be followers of Jesus. And so, our deepest identity as Christians is not to be leaders, but to be followers.
Peter learned this the hard way. Peter is a really great picture of a certain kind of person we all know—or maybe are: someone who likes to get out ahead of things, someone who likes to get things done, someone who doesn’t let the grass grow under their feet when there is a mission ready to be undertaken. We all need people like Peter, of course, and it is no accident that he finally did become a leader of the apostles and of the church that was about to explode across the Mediterranean and beyond. But first he had to learn a crucial lesson—I say “crucial” because the word itself hints at the kind of lesson he had to learn. It was the “crux” of the matter for those who followed Jesus—“crux” means “cross.” It was the cross that Peter had to confront, and beyond it the cruciform or cross-shaped quality of the Christian life.
The other day I heard a member of another church nearby lamenting the days when it was assumed that everyone is a Christian, that everyone was a member of some church, whether it be Presbyterian, or Lutheran, or Catholic, or whatever. But can anyone who reads this passage for today be surprised that not everyone wants to be a Christian today? I have already mentioned that there is a basic tension between the imperatives of success and leadership that are so deeply entrenched in our society today and the call to follow that fills the pages of the gospels. But it’s not just that. If it were, we could look at Peter as a kind of apprentice, learning to follow for now, but only as a kind of preparation for when he would lead. In other words, we could see following as a temporary arrangement, an expedient, destined hopefully to give way to something better. But if being a follower is the fundamental thing, if to be a follower is the permanent relationship we have with Jesus, if to be a Christian is to be in a sort of apprenticeship that never really ends, that in some sense we can never ascend to the chair of leadership but must always remain dependent and secondary, then maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised that people reared in a culture that is preoccupied with who is “on top” find this whole Christianity thing a little unattractive?
And there’s more to it that than, of course. It’s not just that we followers of Jesus are permanent followers. Peek behind the curtain with me for just a moment, and see with Peter just where he this Jesus that we are following is actually leading us.
We often think of Jesus as a prophet of love, so he is. But he is a prophet of love in a world that in many ways doesn’t want that kind of prophecy. It’s not that people don’t want it—it’s that there are forces in our collective life that work against it. In Jesus’ day, there was a brutal empire, in which a great colonizing power grew richer and richer by systematically extracting labor and wealth from its subjugated colonies. It was a local government—essentially run by a small number of aristocratic families who were rewarded for their complicity with Rome—that enabled Roman to dominate the region. There were real, nameable dangers that stood in the way of anyone who dared to announce release to prisoners when keeping prisoners was a way to maintain power over the colony, or who dared to announce good news to the poor when the empire existed to serve the rich. So to be a prophet of love was, for Jesus, to be in harm’s way. To be a prophet of love was to be in the cross-hairs of an empire.
What sort of trouble might such a prophet of love get into today? We’ve heard of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., and their bold witness to love. We’ve also heard how they were assassinated. We remember civil rights heroes, and resisters against the Nazi’s, and maybe even the martyrs of the church. Being a prophet of love has always been a dangerous business.
So, what does it mean to confess Jesus? Well, first, it means to confess to being a follower—it is to admit that being a follower is our deepest and most important identity. It also means being prepared for struggle, to recognize that following Jesus takes the shape of the cross. But, thirdly, it means having joy. You don’t see much of the joy yet in our passage. It was the other side of Easter, after all. There are hints of joy in the gospels: for example, when Jesus sends his disciples out and they rejoice when they find that they have the power to proclaim good news and to heal. The joy of the Christian life is this power, and it is a power that comes from being followers of Christ, a power that can change everything.
In 2004 Victor Yushchenko stood for the presidency of Ukraine. Vehemently opposed by the ruling party Yushchenko’s face was disfigured and he almost lost his life when he was mysteriously poisoned. This was not enough to deter him from standing for the presidency.
On the day of the election, Yushchenko was comfortably in the lead. The ruling party, not to be denied, tampered with the results. The state-run television station reported, “ladies and gentlemen, we announce that the challenger Victor Yushchenko has been decisively defeated.”
In the lower right-hand corner of the screen, a woman by the name of Natalia Dmitruk was providing a translation service for the deaf community. As the news presenter regurgitated the lies of the regime, Natalia Dmitruk refused to translate them. “I’m addressing all the deaf citizens of Ukraine” she signed. “They are lying and I’m ashamed to translate those lies. Yushchenko is our president.”
The deaf community sprang into gear. They text messaged their friends about the fraudulent result and as news spread of Dmitruk’s act of defiance increasing numbers of journalists were inspired to likewise tell the truth. Over the coming weeks the “Orange Revolution” occurred as a million people wearing orange made their way to the capital city of Kiev demanding a new election. The government was forced to meet their demands, a new election was held and Victor Yushchenko became president.
Christian author Philip Yancey writes,
“When I heard the story behind the orange revolution, the image of a small screen of truth in the corner of the big screen became for me an ideal picture of the church. You see we as a church do not control the big screen. (When we do, we usually mess it up.) Go to any magazine rack or turn on the television and you see a consistent message. What matters is how beautiful you are, how much money or power you have. Similarly, though the world includes many poor people, they rarely make the magazine covers or the news shows. Instead, we focus on the superrich, names like Bill Gates or Oprah Winfrey. Our society is hardly unique. Throughout history, nations have always glorified winners, not losers. Then, like the sign language translator in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, along comes a person named Jesus who says in effect, Don’t believe the big screen – they’re lying. It’s the poor who are blessed, not the rich. Mourners are blessed too, as well as those who hunger and thirst, and the persecuted. Those who go through life thinking they’re on top end up on the bottom. And those who go through life feeling they’re on the bottom end up on the top. After all, what does it profit a person to gain the whole world and lose his soul?”[1]
The joy of discipleship is being in communion with the truth: being enabled to live our lives in concert with the love vibrates in the heart of the universe. We may suffer defeat now. We may endure hardships, and even, if we are courageous, put ourselves in harm’s way for the sake of the gospel, for the sake of love. And yet, in the end, we know that living the way of love brings us joy. We know that the truth is on the small screen in the corner, always in danger of being ignored or overlooked, but steadily pointing to a different way, the way of love, a way that can change everything. In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.
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