Ever
said something and the minute it was out of your mouth you started
backpedaling? You wished you hadn’t said it. You wanted to drop through the
floor. You pretended it wasn’t your voice. Who said that anyway? Umm, uh, well I
said yes, but I meant no. Even if you weren’t doing it visibly, you were
squirming internally. Wishing you’d said something else.
Peter
does fine when Jesus asks the disciples who people are saying he is. Along with the other disciples, the answers
are a compendium of what people are saying: John the Baptist, Elijah, one of
the prophets. There are so many prophets from which to choose, after all.
But then,
Jesus asks the hard question: “Who do you
say that I am?” Peter, for once, gets it right. He blurts it out, “You are the
Messiah.”
I
can imagine Peter was expecting Jesus to praise what he said. “Wow, Peter. You
got it right! You know who I am!”
But then,
as Jesus so often does, he starts saying things we don’t want to hear. Things
like this: “Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo
great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the
scribes, and be killed, (and be killed?) and after three days rise again.”
That’s when
Peter finds himself wishing he could take back his words. He tries, doesn’t he?
You can practically see the smoke of his
backpedaling.
Because,
my new friends in Christ, we’d rather go straight to the resurrection and
bypass everything else. We’d rather put a little air into something, or water a
nearly dead plant, or restart an old program, and hope for the best. None of us
like suffering, and none of us, if we’re honest, really want death.
Jesus
is nothing if not honest. He tells us what following him really means. It can
mean suffering. It can mean being ridiculed. It can mean struggling to
accomplish something. It can mean a life of change as we continually learn who
Jesus really is and what he is calling us to do.
So
yes, Peter probably wanted to stuff those words, “You are the Messiah,” right
back into his own mouth. Pretend they’d never been spoken.
Peter
could play it safe by imagining someone in the crowd was right. Jesus was one of the prophets. Maybe even
Elijah. That would be pretty cool. Or, he was John the Baptist come back to
life.
But
the Messiah? That’s something else entirely. And anyway, who said the Messiah
would suffer and die. What kind of Messiah is that anyway?
Jesus
was trying to tell the disciples something they didn’t want to hear. We don’t
either. Who wants to be told: You have
to have death before you can have resurrection. Anything else is resuscitation.
We’re
really good at doing resuscitation in the church. We constantly take things
that aren’t doing well and put them on life support. We have Christian amnesia:
forgetting in order to have resurrection: Death. Must. Come. First.
Being
a Christian is risky business. That may be why Peter reacted the way he did. He
was afraid. This story in Mark’s Gospel makes an about face. Suddenly we know
Jesus is not the Messiah we thought he was. He is not a Messiah of power. He is
not a Messiah of strength.
So who
is this Jesus? As revealed in Mark’s
Gospel, Jesus is a Messiah of vulnerable love. He is a Messiah willing to die
to give us life. He is a Messiah who knows death must come before resurrected
life.
When
we begin to know this is the Messiah Jesus is, we are no longer tossed about by
everyone else’s theory of whom Jesus is. Instead,
we can allow Jesus to shape us in his image. We become a reflection of his divine self. We become people who live a
life of vulnerable love. We no longer seek strength and power. We are willing
to give away our strength and power. We’re willing to die to strength and
power.
And the more we become people of
vulnerable love, the more we will know what to answer when Jesus asks us, “But
who do you say who I am?” AMEN.
The
Rev Nicolette Papanek
©2018
No comments:
Post a Comment