WARNING
PREACHY…
There
are a few movements in this passage so instead of me putting the scriptures in,
please follow the link and have another window open so you can read the
sections as we go.
Movement 1:
8:27-30…
Jesus asks his disciples who they
think he is and Peter answers for them (correctly I might add) that he is the
Christ – the Messiah of God.
Movement 2: 8:31-33…
Jesus then teaches his disciples that
it is necessary for him to suffer, be rejected, killed, and raised from the
dead. At this point Peter takes Jesus
aside and rebukes him but Jesus looks at the disciples and then rebukes Peter; calling
him Satan and commanding him to get behind him.
The
Merge…
What just happened? Why did it go from a very high point of Peter
rightly identifying Jesus as the Christ to a very low point of Jesus calling
Peter Satan?
What happened here was that the disciples
correctly identified Jesus as God’s Christ: the Jews had been waiting a
thousand years for the Christ of God to come.
In much the same way the Church of Jesus is waiting for him to return
just as the Jews had been waiting for the Christ to come to Israel. And just as the church has a very detailed
orthodox theology and doctrine of what exactly will and will not happen and
when Jesus returns, so also the Jews had a very detailed theology of what the
Christ would and wouldn’t be when he arrived.
And according to Jewish theology, the Christ would not be is a suffering
servant who was rejected by the bigshots of Judaism and then prematurely die. And so Peter had to take Jesus aside and
remind him of the “good biblical teaching” that the Israelites had developed over
the previous thousand years or so.
“Get
behind me Satan, for you don’t have the mind of God but the mind
of men.” Jesus erupted.
The Greek word[2]
that is translated “the mind” is actually used twice in this verse and is
better translated as “understanding”.
For Peter, in this instance, did not have the “understanding” of God
when it came to the Christ but rather he had the “understanding” of the men of
Israel and their best study of the scriptures and their interpretations of the
Christ. I can only imagine that if Jack
VanImpe, Tim Lahaye, and Jerry Jenkins told Jesus what was going to happen when
he returned, they too might be called Satan and told to sit at the back of the
class.
We are all like Peter too. We may have rightly identified Jesus as our
redeemer who died on the cross for us and resurrected from the dead on the
third day, but then we adopt very
specific and detailed biblically derived opinions and theologies based on our
best studies. Too often I have caught
myself explaining to God how he is supposed to act in a situation or what he is
supposed to do. I am afraid that I am
too often sitting with Peter behind our Lord.
Movement 3:
8:34 – 9:1…
Jesus then calls everyone together and
explains to them how suffering and sacrifice is the only way to be his
disciple. The Jews had a very health-and-wealth
theology about the Christ but now Jesus is kicking that understanding of Israel
being restored and put again in a place of political power again out of their
minds.
This must have been a huge shock to
them for everything they had ever learned about the coming of the Christ was
about how good it would be for Israel to not be under the rule of Rome or any
other foreign governments. They had a
very utopian ideal in their thinking and Jesus here was kicking it to the curb.
In this section of Mark’s Gospel you
and I learn WHO Jesus is and WHAT he expects from us: personal sacrifice for
others for the sake of Jesus and the Gospel message.
“For whoever wants
to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for
the gospel will save it.”
I think about the success of some
Christian ministries in the American arena and I wonder if they would know such
success if they preached this message of self-sacrifice. Somehow I doubt it; but this is the message
that Jesus preached.
Certainly faith in Jesus brings grants
us forgiveness of sin and gives us life-eternal with the Father in heaven when
we die, but that is a future event.
Jesus is here pointing out the now of being and living as a Christian: we
are to willingly surrender our earthly lives for the sake of Jesus and the
Gospel in the service of others. It’s a
Kingdom mentality.
And
honestly, the calling to follow Jesus is a noble calling indeed but one that most
of us find difficult to accept.
