The Turning Point

“The Turning Point”—Mark 8:31-33

“Then [Jesus] 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. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But 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.’”

Did you just get conversation whiplash? Because that’s a pretty sharp turn that Jesus has just taken us on.  Just one sentence before today’s verses, Peter was confessing Jesus to be the Messiah—the One promised and hoped for and foretold by prophets for centuries, the One who would restore Israel’s fortunes and establish God’s Reign of peace and justice.  And without denying it, Jesus just tells Peter to hold his horses--even though Mark the Gospel writer in fact opens his gospel with the spoiler that Jesus is in fact the Messiah and the Son of God (see Mark 1:1--spoiler alert!). 

But here's the twist: in the very next breath, now Jesus is insisting that he is going to be rounded up, rejected, booed out of town, and executed… and then, something about three days later—which the disciples can hardly wrap their minds around.  But wow, what a turn-around:  from divinely-chosen king to Public Enemy #1 in two sentences—it’s enough to give a person mental whiplash!

This is really the turning point of the whole Gospel.  Up to this point, Jesus has been doing things that reveal he is the Messiah, and now from here out, he will be redefining for his disciples just what it means to be the Messiah. 

All their lives the disciples have pictured a royal general when they heard the name “Messiah,” someone like old King David or Solomon, who would lead the charge into battle, repel the wicked pagan forces of the Romans, resolve problems at the point of a sword, and surround himself with wealth and power and prestige.  He would be a respectable leader: someone who impressed, someone who squashed his enemies, someone unbreakable.  They disciples all grew up expecting God's Messiah to look the part of a "winner."

And Jesus showed such great power in his miracles and his way of handling the religious authorities who tried to spar with him that his disciples were finally getting that he really was the “chosen one” they had been waiting for.  Finally, after however long they had been following him by this point, it is getting through to them that Jesus is the one they have been hoping for... and the word they reach for to describe it is "messiah."

But now that they have begun to catch on and connect the name “Jesus” with the word “Messiah,” Jesus has to break open their understanding of what that word means. Because now here comes the turn: there will be no armies.  There will be no victory tour. There will be no rallies with fawning fans--the closest they come will be a short, weird parade with palm branches where Jesus comes in riding on a jackass, after all. There will be no rebellion against Rome on Rome’s terms.  There will be no usual signs of power or wealth.  In fact, Jesus doesn’t seem to be all that interested in being a respectable religious figure at all.  Instead, he says, he is headed for rejection and a criminal’s death. 

And Jesus doesn't say it like a paranoid nut-case looking to blame everybody else for his problems--he doesn't say, "They're all out to get me!" as a way of deflecting attention from not living up to people's expectations of what a Messiah is supposed to be.  No, Jesus owns his weirdness.  He owns his intentional, chosen vulnerability.  It is his intentional choice, because he is convinced that evil doesn't get defeated through fistfights, but through subversive self-giving love.

Well, this begins to explain why Jesus has been so insistent on silencing the people he healed—at least the ones in Jewish territory.  They were expecting a “messiah,” and they expected a messiah to look a certain way.  If people started announcing, “Hey, we’ve found the Messiah—it’s this guy named Jesus,” they would have come to Jesus looking to start an army.  He had to get his inner circle to recognize him as the Messiah, and then Jesus has to redefine that word for them, a word they had heard all their lives equated with a general commanding the troops, a tyrant barking orders from his gilded throne, or a CEO ordering around underlings and leveraging buy-outs of competitors.  Jesus has to empty the term "messiah" of all that gold leaf and faked machismo for people who have been using the word with the wrong picture in their heads.  It's rather like Vizzini in The Princess Bride, going around shouting, "Inconceivable!" until Inigo Montoya has to reply, "You keep a-using that word--I don't a-think that word means what you a-think it means!"

I wonder if we have the same problem, at least we church folk.  We have learned the right technical terms to refer to Jesus.  We know to call him “Christ,” or “Messiah,” or even “Lord.”  But all too often, we want to define those words on our terms.  We want the word “Christ” to mean “someone who makes my problems go away,” "my personal divine genie who gives me whatever I ask," or “someone who gives me more wealth and health.” We want the word “Lord” to mean “someone who will cater to my wishes.”  We want the word “Messiah” to mean something like, “someone respectable, whose importance will make me look good by being associated with him,” or “someone who will raise my standing in the community.” We want "Messiah" to mean "winner." We have learned, like Peter, to call Jesus the right thing—but maybe Jesus needs to break open that word for us, so that we can be prepared to see God’s power in weakness, God’s victory in suffering and death, God’s glory in a shameful execution. 

Maybe even for us who have heard these Jesus stories before—or maybe especially for us, because they are dangerously familiar to us—we need to have Jesus break open the shop-worn religious words we use, so that we can come to see Jesus’ strange way of being the Messiah is through a cross, and Jesus’ strange way of reigning is through suffering and serving.  For a world that thinks it’s heard this Christianity business all before, maybe we all need to let Jesus break open our old assumptions.  Maybe today, with Peter, we need to get to the turning point of letting Jesus redefine the things we thought we knew, so that we can recognize God’s strange and beautiful and compelling upside-down power, the power of the cross.

What do you and I think it means to call on Jesus as "Lord"?  Because maybe, a long-haired Mandy Patinkin might tell us, "Thatta word doesn't-a mean what you a-think it means." Maybe we've had the right religious words to say but are in dire need of hearing what they really meant all along.

Lord Jesus, come and redefine for us who you are, and break open our expectations if you have to.