Rev. Dr. Joel D. Biermann
Mark 8:27-38
April 2, 2107 Fifth Sunday in Lent
Who’s your Jesus? Does he live near you, right in your heart? Does he live high above you and far away in the heavens? Is he your best friend and confidant? Is he your lord and leader? Is he a hard-nosed judge? Is he an easy-going mentor? Who’s your Jesus? In popular culture, even within the church, Jesus is usually associated with smiles and hugs and encouragement, love, affirmation, and overall niceness. That’s how Jesus is supposed to be: kind, understanding, supportive. So, it’s a bit surprising to realize that this gentle Jesus of popular sentiment, does not appear all that often in the pages of the Bible. Certainly, there are tender moments when Jesus shows kindness: He touches the leper and heals him, he makes time for the children, and even makes a mother-in-law well. And he can say sweet and gracious words like, “Neither do I condemn you,” or, “I am willing, be cleansed,” and “little girl, get up”. Still, even in the midst of the gentle and touching times, and certainly all around them, it becomes evident that Jesus simply cannot be defined as a bleeding heart, love-love-love, push-over, soft and sweet figure. While Jesus is kind, he’s also hard. He’s often hard to understand and harder to anticipate. He’s hard to impress and hard to follow. And when he talks, his words are so often hard as nails. He says shocking and difficult words that pierce, and tear, and pin a person down. This is all painfully the case when Jesus leads his group of disciples out of Israel into pagan territory for a time of rigorous and exacting discipleship training. This is an important time for Jesus and the disciples because it is the beginning of the long journey to Jerusalem where Jesus will die.
The lesson recorded in our reading starts innocently and safely enough. With a casual sense of detachment worthy of the halls of higher learning, the disciples are enjoying a freewheeling discussion with Jesus…about Jesus—at least about what other people thought about Jesus. Of course, the disciples should have known better than to feel safe in any conversation with their rabbi, Jesus. He had a way of turning simple, ordinary moments and events into sudden crises of intense individual challenge and eternal significance. True to form, Jesus abruptly kills the comfortable and detached discussion about public opinion and inserts the razor edge question of personal conviction and confession: “and you, what about you, who do you say that I am?” In other words, Jesus wants to hear from his disciples; he wants to know: “Who’s your Jesus?” Jesus puts his disciples on the spot. You see, this is no easy Jesus: he confronts and challenges and unsettles those who would follow him.
Not surprisingly, it is Peter who rises to the occasion and saves the day for the disciples. He says what they may have all been thinking, “You are the Christ.” Right. Jesus is not just a prophet, or a reincarnated hero of days gone by. Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah sent from God. Peter and presumably the rest of the eleven disciples with him have it right. Peter is a good pupil. He’s a regular prodigy. Peter’s got the right Jesus. His Jesus is the Christ. But the discipleship training that Jesus has planned for the twelve is not done—not even close. And the next hard lesson comes all too soon. Peter can call Jesus the Christ, but it is obvious that he has no idea what that actually means. Lacking understanding of what it meant for Jesus to be the Christ, Peter’s confession is incomplete…indeed, his confession is wrong. Yes, Jesus is the Christ, that’s right, of course; but Jesus is not the sort of Christ the disciples expect, or for that matter, the sort of Christ that they want. The more that Jesus tells them what it means that he is the Christ; the less they want to do with it. Again, Peter acts as spokesman for the group, and steps in to straighten things out. He tries to correct Jesus, he wants to fix the strange sort of ideas that Jesus has about what it means to be the messiah. Peter rebukes Jesus. He rebukes the teacher—and why not? He is the star pupil, isn’t he? He’s the prodigy. Bitten by pride, Peter falls hard. He doesn’t get it. It turns out that Peter has the wrong Jesus after all.
So, where do you fit in this story? Which Peter are you? Are you Peter the prodigy who confesses the truth about Christ, or Peter the proud who tries to correct Christ? But that question isn’t quite fair and probably makes you uncomfortable. In fact, you might very well be thinking, “Well actually, I’m no Peter!” You might reject the idea that you somehow identify with Peter to show your great humility: you don’t want to appear to be putting on airs, you don’t want anyone to think that you’d put yourself on the same level as the great apostle. Or, you might resist the idea that you relate to Peter in order to shield yourself, you’d rather not be associated with Peter’s embarrassing failure. Regardless your reasons, in either case, you’d be right. It’s true: you are no Peter. You’re you. But, you are not left out of this story. And, you don’t have to pick a specific character in the text with whom you think you can identify.
In this text, there’s no question about where you fit or how the story applies to you. It’s quite clear. Jesus has specific words just for you. But, be warned, the Jesus who has words for you is not the gentle and sweet Jesus who makes everyone feel good. No, the Jesus that speaks to you is the one with words that are as hard as nails. These words as hard as nails are aimed at you. Here’s what Jesus says to you: “If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me.” The “anyone”, of course, is not generic or imaginary. It’s you. You’re the anyone. You’re the one who wants to follow Jesus. It’s true. You want to follow Jesus. You want to be his disciple. That’s why you are here. I know, it wasn’t your idea to follow him—it never is. Somewhere, sometime long ago, someone else made a choice, and now here you are. In fact, it was Jesus who made the choice. Jesus is always the one who does the choosing and the deciding. He chose his twelve disciples. He chose you. It was his choice. But now that he’s called you and claimed you, what are you supposed to do? You have no choice. You have to come. You want to follow, you have to follow. How can you not? So, Jesus has words for you, his follower. And his words nail you. They nail you down. They nail you to a cross. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was exactly right. “When Christ calls a man,” Bonhoeffer famously wrote, “he bids him come and die.” Jesus expects you to forget about yourself and your dreams and your safety, and your identity. He expects you to forsake yourself and give everything to follow him—even to the cross, even to death. This, is no easy Jesus.
Who’s your Jesus? Is he the one who is speaking, here, in the Gospel of Mark, the one who calls you to the cross and has the nails ready? Is your Jesus the one who rattles your plans and shatters your equilibrium? Is he the Jesus who upends the things that make sense and redefines what is fair? Who’s your Jesus? It’s not just the unbelievers, and the spiritually confused who end up with the wrong Jesus. All people, even those who are raised in the church and who know God’s grace, are prone to create an image and understanding of Jesus that fits their own ideas and their own desires. Each person tends to make Jesus in his own image, even committed believers like you. Like Peter, you can have the right formulations and declarations, and accurately confess the identity of Jesus; yet when it comes to the implications of following Jesus, you balk and resist. You declare that he is Christ and Lord, but in your thinking and speaking and living, he is obscured and made to compete with all the other lords that assert themselves in your life. You end up with a different Jesus than the one who actually lived and died and rose, and who leaps out of the pages of the Bible vibrant and active and very real…and hard as nails.
Perhaps the problem is all of those competing lords who keep us from hearing and seeing Jesus as he is. Jesus sternly warns his disciples, and us, about giving offense and being ashamed of him—that was, after all, the problem that Peter was having. Peter couldn’t imagine his messiah suffering and dying. The truth is, he was ashamed of that kind of messiah; that Jesus offended him. That’s why he rebuked and offended the actual Jesus standing in front of him. So, we, those other followers, those who are the “whoever” people of the text, are warned not to make the mistake of Peter, not to be ashamed of Jesus, not to be offended by his words and ways, and not to offend our Lord by recoiling from him and his reality. To be sure, we do tend to be very concerned about causing offense, though most of the time, it seems like we are more concerned about offending the other lords in our life than we are about offending Jesus.
You are careful not to offend the teacher who holds your grade in her hands. You are certain not to offend the employer who provides your paycheck, or the supervisor who writes your evaluation and recommends your promotion. You tread carefully and watch every word and every action so as not to offend the people whose opinions matter very much to you: the parent you try to impress, the peers you admire, the social media group that affirms you, the mentor you emulate, the people from church you wish would appreciate and applaud you a little more, the neighbor who has the right political connections, the expert whose insight amazes you. You are so meticulous never to offend that right group of people whose disapproval would disable you. You are so cautious not to earn the disdain of the world’s witty, charming, beautiful, and wonderful people, whose indifference would somehow diminish you…all of those people, all of those secondary lords in your life, you are careful, so very careful, never to offend—even if that means cloaking or costuming or silencing Jesus just a bit, or tempering or revising or just ignoring his hard and offensive words just a little. When you live like that, engrossed in your pursuit of the affirmation and approval of all those lords, then who is your Jesus?
“Whoever is ashamed of Me and My words…the Son of Man will be ashamed of him.”
The warning of Jesus hits us like nails, like hard and sharp nails. “Whoever is ashamed of me,” and when we are honest, we know that yet once more we are the whoever. It is hard to admit, and our faces burn with the admission, but you know the truth, you are ashamed of Jesus. Ashamed of Jesus…O Lord…Lord, Jesus…have mercy on us, have mercy on me.
And he does. Peter did far worse than rebuke and offend his Lord. He renounced him. Ashamed of Jesus? Peter was. But hear and understand this: Peter could not offend Jesus beyond Jesus’ capacity to find and forgive him. Neither can you. You cannot offend Jesus beyond his capacity to find you and forgive you. Please don’t misunderstand, there are two great truths at work, here, and it is vital that you grasp and treasure both of them. First, you must never dismiss as trivial or inconsequential the severity and the seriousness of the temptations that seek to drive you to the wrong Jesus—do not ever be ashamed of the real Jesus, your Lord Jesus. And the second truth you must grasp and treasure: never, ever, discount the hard-as-nails-truth of Jesus’ promise and power always to forgive even the most egregious and shameless sinner who turns to him. Your Jesus, ,the real Jesus, always finds and forgives. He has the nail marks to prove it. Amen.