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.
This line of thinking is idolatry because it’s not Christ-centered; it’s nation-centered. And that is idolatry. When we put anything else in front of Christ, that is idolatry.
When Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world,” he meant it. The nature of God is ever expanding, ever reaching outwards. It’s like the universe, in that sense, always expanding out. Just like God’s covenant with Abraham. It didn’t remain just with him and his descendants. It stretched outwards, with the intent to be a blessing to all the world. And just like Jesus stated, “When I am lifted up, I shall draw all people unto myself.”
The movement of God, the intent of God, embraces and envelopes all things. It does not intend to be contained with one people, one nation. It does not circle inwards reducing its focus to one favored people. It looks and stretches outward, ever outward.
And so Jesus sternly tells Peter, "Get behind me! Don't you dare try to lead me where you want me to go! I will not go there! No, fall behind me, follow me!”
Jesus addresses Peter in the strongest of terms. But by saying this, he’s not telling Peter to get lost. He’s actually pulling Peter out of his lost state and reorienting him back onto Christ’s path of intent. He will only stop being lost when he follows Jesus.
And like Peter, we need to get behind Jesus. It’s the only way we can follow.
Jesus goes on to tell his disciples exactly where he’s going. “If any want to follow me, they need to deny themselves, take up their cross and follow me.”
Jesus mentions a cross. That term would have had an immediate and visceral response in all of them. In those days, the cross was not an ornately decorated piece of chancel furnishings. It wasn’t carried proudly into worship. The cross wasn’t decorated in all sorts of bling and worn on heavy gold chains around glamourous stars.
The cross was a dreaded execution tool of the Roman empire. The cross was something to be avoided at all costs. If you saw someone carrying their cross, it meant they were condemned. They were lugging that cross to their execution site.
I imagine there would have been an audible gasp in the crowd after Jesus declared this.
But Jesus takes it a step further. Once again, he encourages them to get lost: “Those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”
This is the great irony of the cross. St. Paul spoke of the wisdom hidden within it:
“For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles…For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” (1 Cor. 1:21-25)
The logic and the wisdom of the cross is hidden to worldly eyes. But it was by succumbing to all powers that Christ overcame all our worldly opponents: sin, death, and the powers of evil. He carried his cross and he was utterly lost. He lost his high standing, he lost his power, he lost his life. But through losing everything, he demonstrated the power of the kingdom he came to establish. For his kingdom is not of this world, and not of this world’s kingdoms. He is the Messiah of divine light and life. May we all follow behind him.
