The Heartbreaking Messiah

Mark 8:27-38

Have you ever heard the sound of a heart breaking? Do you remember what it sounds like?

Maybe it was your child's heart breaking when they found that the job market had disappeared? Maybe it was your sister or brother's heart breaking when the test results were worse than you feared? Maybe it was your friend's heart breaking when they called to say their marriage was over? Maybe it was your own heart breaking when you lost your loved one?

Have you ever heard the sound of a heart breaking? Do you remember what it sounds like?

We hear that sound again in today's reading. It might be hard to detect at first; but if you listen closely, you can hear a human heart first tremble under the stress of an uncertain future and then fracture amid severe disappointment and shame.

It happens just outside Caesarea Philippi. Jesus is walking with his disciples when he asks them what people are saying about him. By this time in Mark's story the disciples have been with Jesus for some time and have seen him cure the sick and lame, cast out demons, feed literally thousands of people, even restore life to a young girl. It’s small wonder, then, that Jesus might ask what the crowds thought of all this. And the disciples don’t disappoint, reporting that the crowds indeed recognise that Jesus is clearly a prophet.

Then Jesus ask his real question of the disciples, "But who do you say that I am?" And the disciples come up with the right answer, especially Peter who declares that Jesus isn't just a prophet but is the long-awaited Messiah.

We'll never know whether that confession of faith had been brewing in Peter for some time and only needed Jesus' question to bring it out, or whether it came to him in a flash, but it's not hard to imagine that getting that right had to be one of the best moments in Peter's life. There's something great about recognsing and participating in a truth bigger than yourself, about naming truth in a way that somehow makes it more true in your own experience. It's like saying "I love you" for the first time to a beloved and in saying it realising just how true it is, even truer than it was just a moment before. That's what happens with Peter in that moment, only moments later, his heart begins to break.

What I mean is that straight after Peter says that Jesus is the Messiah, Jesus them very firmly to keep it to themselves, and that he would suffer and die. It's very faint, but after Peter gets it so right, Jesus doesn’t affirm or congratulate him, but sternly orders them not to tell anyone. Then the heart-breaking noise gets louder, as Jesus' words about how he’s going to suffer and die etch tiny fissures into the depths of Peter's heart and hopes, fissures that spread like cracks in a windscreen after the stone has hit it, and Peter's heart fractures into a thousand shards of disappointment so loudly that I think it drowns out Jesus' final promise, that he’ll be raised on the third day.

No wonder Peter isn’t happy. Peter wants and needs a strong God. Like so many of his day, he's looking for a descendant of the mighty king David to come and overthrow Roman rule and restore Israel to its rightful place among the nations. Jesus has to be that person. After all, he's already brought relief, comfort, healing, and life. Peter wants a strong God, and who can blame him. When the crushing weight of hardship bears down upon us, when the voices of despair drown out all others, when it's one disappointment after another, don't we also want a strong God to avenge our hurts, to right all wrongs, and to put us back on top of things? Except that it's precisely when I'm down, when life's setbacks and disappointments have conspired to make me feel like I'm nothing, that I wonder what a God of might and strength has to say to me when I feel far closer to defeat than to victory.

So often, by our human reckoning, strength is seen as everything, might makes right, and the one who dies with the most toys wins, but God measures strength not in terms of might but of love, not by victory but vulnerability, not in possessions but in sacrifice, not by glory but by the cross. Peter hasn’t got that yet, and this isn't the last time Peter's heart will break.

Later in Mark's story when Peter denies his Lord three times, and when he sees him nailed to a cross and die, Peter’s heart breaks again. And then at the very end of Mark’s story, Peter’s heart is broken again by the mercy he encounters in the risen Christ, a mercy he couldn't comprehend and knows he doesn't deserve: mercy, grace, forgiveness, and life that surpass our earthly categories. This time, at the end of the story, Peter realises that instead of getting the God he wants, he gets the God he needs.