Getting Lost

February 25, 2024

Rev. Mary Erickson

Hope Lutheran Church

Mark 8:31-38

Getting Lost

Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.

“Get Lost!” That’s not a polite thing to say. It has the connotation of “Scram!” or “Beat it!” If my mother ever heard me telling someone to get lost, I would have been in deep trouble.

In today’s passage from Mark, Jesus essentially says “get lost” in a variety of ways.

For the first time, Jesus announces to his disciples what his end goal is. Up until this point, Jesus’ ministry has been off to a soaring start. He’s received a tremendous upswelling in popularity. He has fame and prestige. Huge crowds listen intently to his every word. He’s performed remarkable miracles. And the disciples have seen it all from the inside. They’re part of the inner circle. They’re best friends with the man of the hour.

After such a robust reception to his ministry, Jesus asks his disciples what they’ve heard on the street regarding him. “Who do people say that I am?” And then he asks them for their own impressions. Peter shares his. “You are the Messiah,” he says. Jesus affirms what Peter has said. He tells his disciples to keep this knowledge under wraps.

And that’s when he drops the bomb on them. He will undergo tremendous suffering and eventually will be killed.

This news just doesn’t compute for poor Peter. He’d just confessed that Jesus is the Messiah of Israel! No way should Jesus die! That’s not what Messiahs do.

When Peter calls Jesus his Messiah, he conceives this in the traditional meaning that Israel had of this term. The Messiah was the king of Israel. He was the descendant of Israel’s honored King David. God had established the kingship of Israel through the lineage of David.

David’s descendants had ruled over Israel until the nation was overrun by the Babylonians. After that, one foreign superpower over another had held sway over the land of Israel. But Israel believed in God’s promise to David. God’s promise was sure: one day, David’s rightful heir would reclaim the throne and once again rule independently over the land. The foreign rulers would be ousted and Israel would live free.

This is what Peter meant when he called Jesus the Messiah. He viewed Jesus as the legitimate heir to Israel’s throne. He believed that all the momentum Jesus had built up was leading to the one thing Israel hoped for more than anything else. The days of the Messiah were on hand.

So when Jesus says he’s going to Jerusalem to die, that just doesn’t work for Peter. No! Jesus is going to Jerusalem, the capital city of Israel, to retake the throne! Peter takes Jesus aside and begins to rebuke him.

But Jesus puts an immediate stop to it. And he uses the strongest terms possible! “Get behind me, SATAN!” This is a “get lost” to the nth degree! Jesus associates Peter with Satan. Peter is misguided, he’s lost.

Jesus’ notion of the Messiah is light years removed from Peter’s. For Jesus, it has to do with a kingdom beyond this realm. It has to do with a heavenly kingdom. Peter understands it to be an earthly, political role.

Peter has fallen into a very alluring and pervasive trap. He is blending his devotion to God with his allegiance to country. To do so is to shrink the God who created the universe into the size of the nation you are from.

Peter is not alone in wandering down this wayward path. The Roman emperor Constantine did so in the 4th Century. Formerly a pagan, he had a vision of a cross in the sun and he heard the words, “By this sign you shall conquer.” He adopted the Christian faith and he placed the image of the cross on his battle flags. The cross of Christ was a means to an end. It was a tool to accomplish victory and power.

And there are voices today, whispering for us to merge devotion to God with love of country. But the nation is not God, and God is not the nation.

When we follow in Peter’s footsteps, we diminish God. We are trying to tame and harness divine power to suit our political means.

To regard the immeasurable divine source,

• The God beyond human understanding

• The God whose thoughts are not our thoughts

• The God whose ways are not our ways

• The divine being who transcends time and space

And to declare that we are God’s favorite ones, above all other nations and peoples – this is idolatry We are misguided when we believe this. We’ve wandered off the charts. And like Peter, we have gotten lost, very lost.