September 20, 2009 Sermon

Who Is This Jesus? Mark 8:27-38 Lawrence Jackman

Mark 8:27-38
27Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, "Who do people say that I am?" 28And they answered him, "John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets." 29He asked them, "But who do you say that I am?" Peter answered him, "You are the Messiah." 30And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.
31Then 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 after three days rise again. 32He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 33But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, "Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things."
34He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. 36For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? 37Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? 38Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels."
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Seminary students are taught somewhere very early on about what is called the Messianic secret in the Gospel of Mark. The story is this. For the first half of the Gospel of Mark there is a consistent emphasis on Jesus being the “undercover” Savior. He is the Son of God as he sees it, and for that matter, as the devil sees it and the spirits of the world see it. Jesus just does not seem to want any people to know this secret.

Jesus admonishes spirits that he casts out to be silent. He charges those whom he has healed to be quiet about what has happened to them. Of course, these efforts meet with mixed success. Sometimes the persons who have been healed go out immediately and
tell the story to others. Some of the healings are actually potent enough that they point to the secret identity of Jesus.

All this secret stuff builds through the first half of the Gospel. You remember perhaps that the Gospel is only 16 chapters long. So, half way through, in Chapter 8 comes time for the secret to be revealed. From this point on the identity of Jesus is more and more revealed and clear. The mighty mission becomes the march to Jerusalem. So the first half the gospel is a secret being kept and the second half is a secret being revealed.
The initial opening up of the secret is this fascinating dialogue between Jesus and Simon Peter. They are walking along and Jesus turns to the close followers. “What are people saying about me? Who do they think I am?” The followers reply, “Well some folks are saying John the Baptist, others Elijah, maybe one of the other prophets.” That’s a pretty impressive array of identities, but Jesus isn’t quite satisfied.

“OK guys, who do you think I am?” Silence. Then it is Peter who makes the revealing statement, “You are the Christ.” It is on that three word confession that the entire story of salvation pivots. This Gospel is a teeter totter balanced across these three words of Peter. “You are the Christ”. From that watershed everything else flows toward the confrontation in Jerusalem.

Seminary students were taught that this was an editorial device. That a way to tell the story was to grab this secret/revelation theme and to spin the story about that single issue. Maybe so, but there is a deeper thing here. Why did Mark choose this theme? And the simple answer to that is; for the writer of the Gospel of Mark the single critical issue of spiritual life was in answering the question, “Who is this Jesus?”

Now I find that to be a fitting theme for the day when, in this church, we christen the educational efforts for a new program year. For it is in those efforts to provide Christian education that we, in this place, deal most fundamentally with the issue of “who is this Jesus?”

Several points in the total scriptural story of the day seem to me to mandate features for the base for real educational ministry. They are these: 1) scripturally the question is a real one and not an editorial device, 2) the answer to the question represents a kind of foundational base for a process, and 3) the answer immediately began to evolve and continues to evolve—it is not static.

I believe that the process of religious education (done rightly) follows that pattern.
1) Ask the question. 2) Formulate an answer. 3) Repeat steps one and two.

Step one, ask the question. I use to have a need to explain Presbyterianism to dozens of people every year. They were new employees in the programs of our church related social service/mental health agency. They pretty well always came from Christian backgrounds. So I would start by saying, “there are two kinds of Christian groups. In one you are told, this is what you think. In the other you are asked what do you think. Presbyterians are a ‘What do you think?’ religion.”

I believe that is pretty much accurate. At our best, we are more about the questions than rigid answers. That is our strength. It makes everything else more complicated, but it makes everything else more real. Life, the faith, our tradition is about process much more than specific content. Asking the question is critical the specific answer is not.

The question in the case of the Gospel reading is asked in a interesting place. Jesus and his friends have traveled north outside of Galilee they have come to a region called Caesarea Philippi. What an incredible context for the original question. It was a pagan place. It was around the base of Mount Hermon one of the water sources for the river Jordan. This place had been a place of worship of many gods and spirits. The Roman and Greek gods were worshipped here. The lush green of the mountain sides had lent themselves to the worship of gods of nature.

So Jesus takes his friends to a pagan place to ask the most important question of life, “who am I?” The great question and the great answer are not from a safe and known place. They do not happen in the comfy context of padded pews or familiar chants—they occur in the middle of life and in the middle of all sorts of secular mix.

In our old neighborhood in Saint Louis there was a street that was pretty eclectic religiously. At the base of a hill there was a Masque. A few hundred yards away was a fairly large Catholic church. The street then became lined for quite a little way with both a county park where nature lovers frequented. Then there were McMansions, lots of them. Finally near the top of the hill there was the most beautiful Hindu Temple you could imagine. Over the top of the hill you stand nearly on the grounds of the most prestigious Christian Science academy and that was just down the street from a synagogue. Weidman Road was Caesarea Philippi. Picture the local Baptist pastor taking his flock over to that road to talk about religion. If you can do that you should have a picture of Jesus and the disciples that day. It was not the safe and predictable place.

Our questions are not developed or answered on familiar turf and safe places. That is a lesson for us as we teach. Go into the world—the real world—to ask the questions. The context of the faith for us is the middle of life. Out there where greed and avarice are the gods of the day; Out there where self help books and new age philosophy abound; out there where science and soul struggle to meet; that is the place of our real religious questioning.

Now about the answers to our questions—let them be bold. Peter’s confession is incredible when you stop to think of it. He has walked with Jesus. He has watched the teacher sweat, eat, sleep, become fatigued, get angry, maybe get the stomach flu and everything else that is human. It is in the middle of that when he makes his affirmation: you are the Christ. Think about how bold an affirmation that is.

And while the answer is, for a moment, perfect. This is the formulae of all Christianity that we confess Jesus as Lord. And in half a minute it is rebuked as satanic. Jesus begins to talk with the disciples about what the affirmation means—he begins to spell out the implications. Peter immediately takes him aside and says, “No way Jesus! That is not what being the Christ means.” And Jesus rebukes saying, “Get to my backside Satan”.

Now here is the point of that. The answers, no matter how great they may be, are in a state of evolution. They are always such or they are not real answers. This is taking the results of questioning and answering around the turn and having it become a new level of questioning and answering. We are never done with the process. There is no “faith once and for all delivered to the saints”. That is baloney. There is a way to put your hand in the hand of the man from Galilee, of continuing to walk through the very pluralistic world asking questions, answering questions and evolving our answers through a continuation of that process.

That is the business of the faith. It is the business of education within the church. It is our business and our responsibility to our own souls.

Who is this Jesus? I’ll tell you what the answer is today. And if he is alive to me, then I will not fear that the answer will grow throughout the day into a new one tomorrow.

Amen