Mark 8:27-38

Click here to view the full sermon video, titled "save/lose"

It was the first week of seminary. Marie and I had moved some 900 miles from the charming bungalow she owned in Denver, Colorado to a two-bedroom student housing duplex in Austin, Texas. Half of our home moved with us, while the other half went into storage. We were starting to get settled. Marie in her new job, our 15-month-old baby girl Miranda in preschool, and me as a Master of Divinity student. I had connected with a couple of classmates a year ahead of me who were also from Colorado. Once we’d exhausted the subject of home and our mutual love for the Denver Broncos, one of them asked me, “Are you pre-trib, or post-trib?” “Um, what,” I answered. I had no idea what he was talking about but felt like it was a question I needed to answer in the right way if we were going to be friends. “Oh, sorry,” he said, “are you pre, or post tribulation.” This clarification didn’t help until I recognized that he was asking me a question about rapture theology. We did not become friends.

Three years later I sat in a meeting room in Nashville, Tennessee being examined by a Committee on Ministry, a group of elders and pastors given the task of assessing my fitness for ordination so that I could be installed into my first call as pastor to a church. I had already completed my degree coursework and passed the five written exams administered by the Presbyterian Church (USA) for ordination, but I needed this group’s seal of approval before I could start my pastoral ministry with the saints at First Presbyterian Church of Pulaski. The exchange was mostly conversational until one retired pastor asked me something along the lines of, “what will we be like in eternity.” I was caught off guard and stammered something about spiritual bodies. This was clearly not the answer he was looking for. I later recognized that his question had little, if nothing, to do with an interest in what I thought. He gave me the answer he was looking for, quoting a particular verse from scripture, and making clear that he knew more than I did, I suppose.

In his first letter to the church in Corinth, the apostle Paul writes, “if I understand all mysteries and all knowledge…but do not have love, I am nothing.” We live in a world that teaches us that the life we want is simply a matter of giving the right answer, making the right choice; that if we say the right thing then people will be friends with us. Or, if we give the right answer in the job interview, then we’ll get the job. Of course, the attending fear is that the converse is also true, that if we say the wrong thing, the person we’re interested in won’t want to go out with us. Or if we give the wrong answer, we’ll lose out on whatever it is that we want. In religious circles this thinking has taken on eternal consequences. Say the right words, believe the right things and the pearly gates will swing open for you. Say or believe the wrong things and face an eternity of hellfire and misery.

That may be why, for my faith, this passage from Mark’s gospel is one of my favorites. Because in it we see a demonstration of the point Paul is making in his letter. We can give what sounds like the right answer and not have a clue what we’re talking about. All the knowledge- all the right answers in the world- without love amounts to nothing. In this case, the question at hand is THE question really. Because every other answer we have to give depends upon how we answer this one. Pre-tibulation, post-tribulation? All of it becomes irrelevant in light of how we understand Jesus as Savior and redeemer instead of judge and executioner. What we will look like in eternity- presumably the questioner means after death- but if Jesus is the one in whom the kingdom of God has come, then maybe following in his way has more to with the fullness of life now than it does with some imagined afterlife.

The question is still relevant today. Who do people say that he is? Back then the answers came in the form of what people already know. He’s John the Baptist. You know, calling people to take a different path, one not defined by all their past misdeeds, or even by their current wayward hearts. Or he’s Elijah, the prophet calling out the agents of impotent gods and demonstrating the power of the Holy One of Israel. Or one of the prophets, naming the injustice perpetuated by religious and political power, holding up the mirror to corrupt institutions that leave the poor destitute. Today, we hear people lift up Jesus the moralist approving and disapproving any number of behaviors. Or Jesus the champion of social justice, advocating our particular cause. In our study of Christian history, the question of who Jesus is- human, divine, some combination of the two- has been in the center of whole movements within the church and its surrounding political and social worlds. But at the end of the day, Jesus is more interested in what his own disciples have to say about him than the whole spectating crowd. Who do you say that I am? And here’s the thing, Peter thinks he knows THE answer. He’s that kid in your class whose arm always shot up the minute the teacher asked a question. He KNOWS this one and wants all the attention and approval that come from having the right answer. “You are the Messiah,” he practically shouts. Now in the version of this encounter that Matthew tells, Jesus gives him exactly what he wants for answering correctly, he tells him that he’s right and that on the foundation of his answer he’ll build the church. But before there was Matthew, there was Mark. And in Mark’s version of this story Jesus tells all of them not to breath a word of his being a Messiah to anyone. Why, we may ask. Well, Peter is about to show us why.

Notice that Jesus doesn’t call himself the Messiah, which should be our first clue that something’s up. He calls himself the Son of Man. God may call him God’s Son, but Jesus seems to be called the Son of Man. Or as some have translated, the human one. He then goes on to say that this Son of Man is bound to be rejected. That all the powerful and learned people will be the death of true humanity. But that he will rise three days later. And Peter WILL NOT HAVE IT. He tries to take him aside and make him take it back. He goes so far as to rebuke him. He’s like the little boy in the movie The Princess Bride telling his grandpa that he’s messing up the story. That isn’t what it means to be the Messiah, Jesus!

And that’s just it. Who we want Jesus to be, who we think Jesus should be is often very different from who Jesus truly is. I’ve seen any number of depictions of Jesus as a muscular savior, who could certainly overpower Rome if he wanted to. It isn’t unprecedented. When Christianity first encountered Viking culture, it wasn’t uncommon to see pictures of Christ with a sword, like one of their Norse gods. When Peter calls Jesus the Messiah, he imagines the righteous warrior, the new David come to kick the Roman menace out of their land and liberate them once and for all. The idea of Jesus being rejected, let alone killed, did not fit that narrative. It simply couldn’t be. Peter’s insistence leads to what has to be the most awkward moment outside of Peter’s denial in the courtyard of the high priest, Jesus rebukes him and calls him, ‘Satan.’ Ouch.

Now, is Jesus rejecting Peter. Does he see his social media post and decide they can’t be friends anymore? No. Because that’s not what Jesus is about. But he isn’t above calling out a friend when he’s wrong. Dangerously wrong. Thankfully, Jesus explains. Although his explanation is a hard one to hear. Like the Vikings who will follow, Peter is trying to fit Jesus into his box, into his expectation of what a Messiah looks like. Peter is thinking the way the world thinks, the way the world still thinks; that might makes right. That enemies are to be defeated and destroyed, not loved and certainly not redeemed. It’s a point that is so important to Jesus that he calls the crowds to hear what he is saying to his disciples. To follow him is to carry the cross. To follow him is to risk rejection for the sake of love. To follow him is to care more about love than the approval and sanction of the powers that be and all conventional wisdom.

Last month I attended a workshop for creators of all kinds. We were invited at the outset to sit with what was getting in the way of what we were feeling called to bring into the world. At one point a woman sitting two chairs away spoke up with a realization, “I’m in love with the wrong life,” she said. Jesus makes it clear. Chasing the wrong life, the one we’re told we’re supposed to have, the one that the world wants us to have, the one that falls into conformity with all the right answers. That is a fool’s errand. And trying to save a life that we make for ourselves according to the world’s expectation is the surest way to lose who we are and who we are meant to be, because that is an artificial life. But to lose that life, to let go of the expectation, or the behaviors driven by self-preservation. To let go of this idea that our lives are what we make of them in order to receive that life that has been offered to us from the beginning, to lose the artificial for the kind of real life that has always been ours from eternity is to find that we are saved. Not for some afterlife, but saved for the fullness of this life. Here. And now. Because we can have everything the world has to offer- the promise of safety, the security of wealth, the power of position and status, control of our lives- only to lose all trace of who we are. We can have the certainty of all the right answers only to discover that to rely on the certainly of what we think we know prevents us from experiencing a peace that will always elude our understanding because it doesn’t come from anything we can acquire for ourselves. It is the gift of love that comes to us in Jesus Christ. It is the gift of love fiercer and more powerful than the grave.