The Sixteenth Sunday of Trinity
Sermon
15 September 2024
The Reverend Devin McLachlan
Mark 8.27-38 (‘Peter’s Declaration about Jesus’; ‘Jesus Foretells His Death and Resurrection’)
Set everything else down, everything that ties you to fear – set down pride, set down wealth, set down anxiety, set down self-loathing… Set everything down, pick up your cross and follow Jesus. Not to be Jesus, but to make room for our Lord, and him alone, and so make known the love of Christ.
My son is very much into linguistics and languages; and some time ago we spoke about ‘false friends’ — words shared between languages that look like they should be cognates, but definitely aren’t.
Pity my poor god-daughter who, while in France, wanted to ask if her delicious strawberry jam had any preservatives. Except that preservatif was most definitely not the right word.
And beware Germans bearing gifts, as ‘gift’ is German for poison, or Americans with pot plants — for my people, potted plants grow in pots, while pot plants always and only grow pot.
For a newly installed incumbent such as myself, today’s Gospel also offers a false friend:
“Who do people say that I am?”
Well, it’s not just that the churchwardens have already answered that question by consulting with my referees, but more importantly — the vicar is not Jesus.
So while it’s a tempting text for a new incumbent, after a thousand years of sermons in this place, and five score of previous vicars, rectors, and perpetual curates, I think these stones know very well:
My job is not to be Jesus, but to make room for Jesus, and so make known the love of Christ.
It’s your job too, as baptised Christians. By being loved by Christ and loving our neighbour as God loves us, we make known the love of Jesus Christ. Love that turns out to feel more complicated than it look on paper, or in an epistle or Gospel lesson. It certainly was more complicated than Peter expected.
(As an aside, this pericope from Mark’s Gospel makes me fairly certain that if Jesus would fail a typical church-growth evangelism seminar.
Clearly, this Jesus of Nazareth is not a preacher whose learned to ‘accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative’.)
“You are the Messiah!” Peter proclaims. But does Peter get an A* and a promotion to social media manager? Not remotely. In Mark’s Gospel, Peter doesn’t even get his investiture as the Rock of the Church. Just a stern rebuke, and instructions to bury the lede, to tell no one who Jesus truly is.
For Peter too has stumbled on to a false friend. When Peter declares, “You are the Messiah” he has — as Andrew McGowan puts it — the right word, but no idea what it means.
‘You are the Messiah,’ Peter proclaims with patriotic joy, and Jesus hears in Peter’s voice the blaring of the trumpets of war, the traumas of Roman occupation turned back onto the oppressors, but above all Jesus hears what is missing.
(For it is one of the hallmarks of God’s wisdom, that God hears, and reveals, in the silence.)
Jesus hears what is missing in Peter’s declaration: That the coming of the Messiah means God’s definitive intervention in history, not for one people or a select few, but for the entirety of the cosmos.
And the way forward with the Messiah is a Way: a road to be walked by the crowds, by the disciples, by Jesus himself — a road that leads to, and through, the cross.
Is this, then, the lede, for Jesus, what he preaching “quite openly”, as Mark phrases it in his best oh-so-scandalous voice? Suffering, rejection, and death? We don’t want to hear about that stuff.
No more than we want to hear about the thousands of children being killed in Palestine, no more than we want to hear about the precarious state of our environment, and the perilous needs of the poor in our own city, and the brokenness of our our sinful natures.
Peter didn’t want to hear such news either.
Jesus call to “take up the cross” was no abstract parable, but a blunt and unflinching recognition of the Roman occupiers, whose distinctive instrument of torture the cross was.
It must have terrified Peter, as we will see outside the courtyard of the high priest when his fear of those in power will lead him to deny he ever knew Jesus, and briefly in that darkest moment himself become a false friend.
There’s one more false friend here in this reading: And it comes when we take up false crosses, to justify oppression or idolise our own suffering, explaining to all and sundry: “It’s just my cross to bear.”
Handled without great care, that can quickly become toxic theology which the church historically has applied especially to women and victims of abuse; a theology that has been used to justify slavery, ignore poverty, shut down discussions about sexuality.
“Suffer in silence; it is your cross to bear.” But suffering, in and of itself, is not the summum bonum; suffering is not the high good that God wants for us.
“I have set before you life and death,” God tells the recently freed slaves escaping from Egypt, “I have set before you life and death…choose life.” (Deut. 30:19).
Listen again to Jesus on that bright morning outside of Caesarea Philippi, at the turning point of his ministry from Galilee to Jerusalem. For Jesus didn’t stop with the cross, any more than he flinched away from it. On that morning Jesus also taught about the resurrection, about new life and the coming of the kingdom, the justice, the loving reign of God, on this earth and in our lives. Take up your cross and follow me, he asks us, and the journey we are invited on is a journey to life -- not to death, but to life.
You need both your hands to carry this journey with me, he teaches us. Set everything else down, everything that ties you to fear – set down pride, set down wealth, set down anxiety, set down self-loathing – set everything down, pick up your cross and follow Jesus, not to be Jesus, but to make room for our Lord, and him alone, and so make known the love of Christ.