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Mark 8:27-38
Put yourself in Peter’s shoes in our reading from Mark this morning. One minute he’s flying high because he got it right—he proclaimed Jesus as the Messiah. “Who do you say I am,” asked Jesus. And Peter responds, “You are the Messiah.” “You are the Christ.” “You are the anointed one.” “You are the savior.”
It was quite a moment. There they were in Caesarea Philippi and Jesus is alone with the disciples at this point. And Peter gets it right. Though the other disciples, echoing the voices of the crowds, declare that Jesus is John the Baptist come back to life or Elijah come back to earth or one of the prophets, Peter, speaking for the rest of the disciples states quite openly that Jesus is the messiah.
The Jewish messiah was the one who was anointed to save: to save Israel—to save it from foreign domination. The messiah would be the one who would bring back the glory of Israel, of God’s kingdom on earth, and bring to fruition God’s promises to the ancient Hebrew people of a land.
There hadn’t been a country of Judah or Israel for centuries. Ever since the 6th century bc the political entity of Judah had been taken over by others, except for a brief period of time. So the Jews were looking for an anointed one to save them; to bring them back to the glory of David’s kingdom.
That’s the context in which Peter makes his declaration of Jesus’ messiahship. Now whether Peter believed that Jesus was going to restore the kingdom of Judah or Israel, we don’t know. But certainly if that’s what he believed, he would be no different that anyone else in Israel at the time. All were looking for a messiah to come and save them from the Roman empire, the current oppressors. So you can’t fault Peter if he had high expectations of what a messiah would do.
That’s why the rebuke that Peter received just following this moment must have been so surprising to him. For Jesus went on to explain, immediately following this declaration of messiahship, that he was going to suffer and die. The messiah would suffer? The messiah would die? Impossible!
The juxtaposition is strong. Declared the messiah at one point and then pronouncing his own suffering, death & resurrection. It didn’t make sense. That’s when Peter blows it. Peter, riding on the high of getting it right, goes ahead and rebukes Jesus. What a thing to do. It’s not a word we use often but it’s found twice in this passage. Peter rebukes Jesus.
To Peter, and most Jews, the messiah cannot suffer, none the less die at the hands of the political and religious leaders of the day. The messiah is untouchable when it comes to suffering. To think that the one who is anointed to save Israel would undergo any suffering was, once again, impossible. And Peter wastes no time in pointing this out.
But Jesus turns around and does his own rebuking. And does it in a forceful and unwavering way: “Get behind me Satan,” he says. “For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
Peter (and probably the others, to be fair) is thinking of the messiah in human terms, but Jesus has God’s plan in mind; God’s plan which involves all of creation; all humankind; not just the political state of Israel. A messiah who will defeat not the enemies of the Jewish state, but a messiah who will defeat the final enemy: death. That’s the messiah that Jesus knew himself to be. Though Jesus was a good Jewish teacher he envisioned a mission broader than the one that Peter and the other disciples saw; that they could only see because of their limited, human scope.
So Peter goes from the high of getting it right by proclaiming Jesus as the messiah but then finds himself being rebuked and even called “Satan” within moments of his astute proclamation. It must have been quite a precipitous fall.
How often do we do that? We catch a glimmer of the Truth, with a capital T, and then moments later waste that Truth by turning it into earthly terms. How often are we like Peter, glimpsing and proclaiming some vastly wonderful piece of information only to use it in some way that is less than heavenly?
It’s like catching a glimpse of God’s all-powerfulness in a moment of clarity and then immediately using it to ask for a parking space. We don’t have any idea of how abusing such power might affect ourselves or others.
We live in an age in which many would like to tell us who Jesus is. Just like the disciples answering that others think Jesus is John the Baptist, Elijah or a prophet. We have those who insist on a formulaic answer to who Jesus is and leave little room for other responses.
But we have to decide for ourselves who we think Jesus is and then figure out what that means. If we declare Jesus the messiah, that just isn’t enough. For, if we’re not careful, we can be like Peter and begin to rebuke Jesus when he doesn’t turn out to be what we expected. We have to pay attention to Jesus himself as he tells us who he is and what he must go through.
We don’t like a suffering messiah. We want an unscarred hand on our shoulder. We don’t want to know that our messiah suffers like the rest of us. Our image is too rapped up in the old westerns where the hero gets shot in the shoulder and bravely goes on anyways. That’s the hero we want and we want our messiah to be a hero. The one who saves us needs to be impermeable and teflon-coated.
But Jesus has other ideas. He knows that messiahship is messy. It’s not a pretty game. He knows what he has to go through. And nothing in our attitude or Peter’s desires can stop it.
But where does that leave us? With a messiah with scarred hands that have been wounded. And unlike Peter, we have the benefit of hindsight that puts some balm on the sting of rebuke that we might feel. But we can feel those scarred hands healing and comforting us. And we know that our messiah has conquered death.
We need to ask ourselves, “Who do you say Jesus is?” We need to be continually asking ourselves that question. We may not like what Jesus says to us in reply, but we are continually comforted by those scarred hands of the messiah.
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