The Costly Path of Discipleship—Lectionary Reflection for Lent 2B (Mark 8)

Mark 8:31-38 New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition

³¹ Then he 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. ³² He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. ³³ 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.”

³⁴ He called the crowd with his disciples and said to them, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. ³⁵ For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. ³⁶ For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? ³⁷ Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? ³⁸ Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

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To be a Christian in modern America is generally not dangerous. While some Christians complain of being persecuted for their faith, generally it’s little more than inconvenience. More often the perception of persecution involves not having political power to implement their agenda, which might include banning certain books, opposing giving equal rights to LGBTQ folks, and Christian prayers in schools. In other words, the agenda is to take the country back to the 1950s. I’m not sure that’s what Jesus meant when he spoke of losing our lives for him. Now, there are places where being a Christian can be dangerous, but rarely in this country. For early Christians to follow Jesus was costly, at least until the fourth century when Constantine opened things up in the Roman Empire for Christians. Then, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire under Theodosius, not being a Christian (or the wrong kind of Christian) became dangerous. I wonder if a Theodosian view of things is under consideration by many Christians today. I’ll let you the reader ponder that question.

The season of Lent has traditionally been a season of fasting, though most of us don’t fast. We might give up chocolate or a favorite TV show, but I’m not sure that is too costly for us. It’s one of the reasons I admire my devout Muslim friends who fast from sunrise to sunset during Ramadan. My Muslim friends tell me that the season, though tough, is spiritually rewarding. Lent is designed to do something similar as it calls attention to the costliness of following Jesus. It’s why the gospel reading for the first Sunday of Lent features Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness.

The Gospel reading for the second Sunday in Lent takes us to Mark 8 where Jesus gathers his followers together and tells them that the “Son of Man must undergo great suffering.” Yes, the religious leaders will reject him, and he will be killed, though he will rise three days later. This conversation takes place right after Peter declares him to be the messiah (Mk. 8:29). Now that Peter and his colleagues seem to know something of Jesus’ identity, Jesus lets them know what this means. He might be the Messiah, but his messiahship will be expressed through his suffering and death. This revelation is too much for Peter, who has his own ideas of what messiahship involves, and it doesn’t involve suffering and death, even if death is followed by resurrection. So, when Peter hears Jesus talk about suffering and death, he decides to set Jesus straight. This isn’t the way things are supposed to go. Jesus responded to Peter’s outburst with a rebuke of his own. In fact, Jesus suggests that Peter’s rebuke was demonic. Thus, he declares to Peter: “Get behind me, Satan!” Yes, Jesus called Peter Satan. Now Jesus didn’t imply that Peter was the prince of darkness. Rather, he suggested that Peter was serving as a tempter and adversary. What he wanted Peter to do was get out of the way. The message to Peter was to stop being an impediment to an aspect of Jesus’ ministry that would be dangerous, but necessary. It was the natural outcome of his ministry.

To be honest, I much prefer a “theology of glory” over a “theology of the cross.” I am inclined to focus on saving my life rather than losing it. I think for many of us the vision James and John have of Jesus' future glory and their place in it seems nice: “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.”  And he said to them, “What is it you want me to do for you?” And they said to him, “Appoint us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory” (Mk. 10:35-37). The folks inhabiting middle-class suburban churches, and the preachers who mount the pulpit to preach, would rather not dwell on a costly, sacrificial faith. We might be open to Jesus spending time on a cross, as long as it doesn’t involve us. We might even imagine that Jesus didn’t really suffer much on the cross. All he had to do was “look on the bright side of life.”  

The message we hear in Mark 8 suggests a different vision. It offers us a theology of the cross that calls for a sacrificial form of discipleship. It stands in strong contrast to what Peter had imagined when he proclaimed Jesus to be the Messiah. When Peter made that declaration, he envisioned himself participating in (and likely benefitting from) Jesus’ eventual march on Jerusalem. If Jesus reigned as a victorious king over a restored Israel, then surely he would serve as one of his key advisors. That was what James and John sought from Jesus later on, after the Transfiguration. Perhaps this is why Jesus didn’t want Peter, James, and John to say anything about the Transfiguration. They needed more seasoning before they could truly understand the nature of his ministry. So, when Jesus spoke of suffering and death at the hands of the religious and political elite, Peter had to challenge such thinking.

After Jesus tried to set Peter straight by rebuking him and referring to him as Satan, Jesus invited the disciples to take stock of the path that lay before them. He knew what was in store for him, but were his disciples ready to walk the same path?  If they were to take the path Jesus was going to take, they needed to set their minds on divine things rather than human ones.

Having had this conversation with the inner circle, Jesus invites the crowd to come closer so they can hear what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. The message is simple. If you want to be a disciple/follower of Jesus, then take up your cross and follow Jesus as he takes up his own cross.  Why? The answer is this: If you save your life, you lose it. If you lose it, you save it. By this, we might envision suffering and death, for that is the path that Jesus would take (as well as some of his disciples, at least according to tradition). But there are other ways of following this path.

The key might be the warning about gaining the whole world and forfeiting one’s life. Might we understand this as a reference to the will to power as the overarching principle of life? It’s something many in the Christian community today seem open to, even as political leaders across the globe from Trump to Orban to Putin connect authoritarianism to Christianity. That goal, which many seem open to, does not fit with the call to discipleship laid out here. It is not the path Jesus took. As we continue the Lenten journey, we are reminded that the path of discipleship embraces a very different kind of power. Rather than power over, might we embrace what David Fitch calls “power with,” but he also notes that “power with” can be corrupted if we don’t embrace “power under,” by which he means submitting ourselves to God’s power. I’ve only just begun reading his book Reckoning with Power, but maybe what Jesus speaks of here has to do with a contrast between worldly and divine power. To lay down one’s life is to find it, in the sense that we discern what it means to look at things from God’s point of view. Fitch contrasts worldly and godly power, noting that “whenever the two powers are blurred, and God’s people take up worldly power in God’s name, abuse and destruction are not far behind. Jesus’ words now become all the more pronounced when he describes worldly power in terms of the way the gentiles ‘lord it over them,’ But for Jesus, ‘it shall not be so among you’ (Mark 10:43)” [Reckoning with Power, p. 55]. If we are going to embrace and embody this form of power then the way forward might be difficult, but in the end, it leads to resurrection.   

                Bringing this conversation into the present, we might embrace a vision of the church living in exile. To follow Jesus is not to capitulate to the ways of the world or to withdraw from it. Rather, we recognize that we do not have dominion over the world. Instead, we bear witness to the ways of God in the way we live in the world. We exhibit in our lives the values of God’s realm, which are very different from those of the world that seek power over others. For Jesus that means taking up the cross. To refuse to do so suggests we are ashamed of Jesus. If we are ashamed of Jesus, then upon his return in glory the Son of Man will be ashamed of us.

                The call to take up the cross is not an easy one for us to hear and abide by. It doesn’t seem to be all that empowering, and yet it is the path Jesus took. It is, ultimately, a path that leads to the healing of the world, for in taking up the cross we embrace a truly relational view of life. As Elizabeth Johnson points out, as Jesus enters into human suffering God transforms, heals, and liberates through the “liberating power of connectedness that is effective in compassionate love.” We see this connectedness spoken of here in Mark—by taking up the cross we are being drawn into the God who suffers on the cross. Johnson writes of Sophia-God who is in solidarity with those who suffer:

With moral indignation, concern for broken creation, and a sympathy calling for justice, the power of God’s compassionate love enters the pain of the world to transform it from within. The victory is not on the model of conquering heroism but of active, nonviolent resistance as those who are afflicted are empowered to take up the cause of resistance, healing, and liberation for themselves and others (She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse, p. 270).   

Peter found it difficult to understand Jesus’ vision of messiahship, as did James and John. Down through history, the majority of Christians have also struggled to understand this vision. Perhaps that is why the idea of penal substitution developed. If Jesus paid it all by dying on the cross, then we can go on with life as usual, embracing worldly visions of power. To do so, however, is to look at things from a human point of view and not a divine one. 

Image Attribution: Piombo, Sebastiano Luciani, known as del, 1485-1547. Chris Carrying the Cross, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=55456 [retrieved February 18, 2024]. Original source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sebastiano_del_Piombo_-_Christ_Carrying_the_Cross_-_WGA21099.jpg.