It seems that Peter’s recognition of Jesus as Messiah, the holy one, the anointed one of God, leads to as many soul searching questions as it answers! (Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost. Proper 19 [OT 24] Mark 8:27-38) Peter is acknowledged for his recognition of Jesus as Messiah – but only moments later is rebuked for wrongly imaging that he therefore knew what it meant! So it is for most of us, that the certainty and confidence we once had when we first were able to proclaim Jesus as Lord dissipates as we grapple with what that means about the identity and nature of Jesus and therefore what it asks of those who would follow him.
I encourage you to read what I wrote three years ago.
Jesus seems to take a great detour, geographically, to be in Caesarea Philippi, as a backdrop to his question and Peter’s answer. “This was a place originally named Panion after the god Pan, to whom there was an important cult site, and was re-founded under Herod’s son Philip, who renamed it in honour of the emperor and himself.” (Footnotes by Lawrence M. Wills, The Jewish Annotated New Testament NRSV Ed: Amy-Jill Levine & Marc Zvi Brettler) This provides a provocative context because the question is being asked in the place where other gods and earthly leaders of power are honoured! Peter’s declaration is profound – you Jesus, my companion on the road, you are the anointed one of God, not other gods and worldly leaders! Yet even Peter does not yet comprehend that Jesus is not going to be another King David heralding the return to the glory days of Israel but a leader in an entirely different way of a different sort of kingdom. Not so much a king of glory and power but a king of suffering and servant hood.
And the confusion and conflict about the nature of Jesus’ identity and dominion contribute to the journey to the cross – the inevitable punishment and attempt to eradicate his exercise of power and influence through love from the known world where Rome and religion intends to continue to be in power. Looking back this long afterwards we frequently “mishear” the command and warning that if we are to follow we need to deny ourselves and take up our own cross. We tend to think of the cross as another word for life/lifestyle/burdens/suffering and that is not entirely wrong. But the cross was specifically an image for the suffering and punishment inflicted by the Roman Empire, especially on those perceived to be guilty of sedition. Other alternate leaders and their followers had already been crucified and the disciples would have felt the shiver of fear that the phrase “to take up ones cross and follow” would have provoked. It is not wrong to now understand the cross as a more universal image but we need to be careful not to water down the meaning to be that only of personal suffering and fidelity. For the language of the cross to remain potent we need to keep its challenging reference to living answerable to a different kingdom and different leader than the place we inhabit in the everyday sense.
The question that Jesus asked Peter, and the struggle Peter had with Jesus’ answer and further questions and command, loops it’s way around us and provokes us to dig deeper into what following means for us at each and every stage of life and situation.
For me, and for many I suspect, we enter a paradoxical landscape with no easy compromises in sight! Jesus, who in declaring himself the elements of the Passover meal becomes our sustenance on the journey from slavery to liberation. Yet also commands us follow in his footsteps on a perilous journey that brings us into conflict with the worldly powers and priorities of our time.
St Paul tells us “For freedom Christ has set us free ... only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another.”(Galatians 5: 1 & 13) We have been set free so that we can become slaves through love?! Surely paradoxical.
I have explored in recent weeks understanding Jesus as the one who practiced self emptying love. And yet in hearing from James, the brother of Jesus, in our current readings, we are challenged to be self disciplined in our learning to be people who hold ourselves to the highest level of practicing focused love. It seems we are being challenged to both let go and yet somehow to exert self knowledge and control. Another paradox.
In his argument of the need for faith and works to be seen as connected, not two alternate ways, James demonstrates why we need to hold contradictory truths together and allow the creative tension not to cancel one or the other truth out, but to take us to a deeper level. And in his caution about the power of the tongue to either speak good news or destruction, to warm or to burn, we are challenged to consider how the everyday minutia of how we conduct ourselves impacts others and our selves.
Over the years I have come to value the wisdom of pastoral counsellors, our ancient forebears who practiced various methods of contemplation, and many of our Buddhist neighbours who seek to learn to understand the sneaky habits of the mind. All of whom, in their different ways, point to the need to understand the ways in which our stuck hearts and minds dictate our behaviour and thus limit our capacity to grow into mature loving. Learning to notice what sad and self limiting messages our minds engage in can be the beginning of freedom to harness our tongues that both tell others and ourselves all sorts of harmful things. Contemplative practices that help us still the ravings of our minds and let go into the embrace of the eternal one can help us stay still long enough to speak without the necessity of words from deeper places of love, healing and truth. Such breakthroughs and changes in the habits of our too-small and often injured mind, that likes to think of itself as in charge, are the work of a life time and often require the loving and wise company of teachers, therapists and compassionate companions on the way.
We know that we who are followers of Jesus and his way are called co-heirs with Christ. So maybe we should not be so surprised that we are called to take up the cross, the instrument of death, upon which we must allow to be nailed all that is not of life and God – a thousand small “letting go’s” of ego, of small minded certainties and ambitions, and untruths that we and others have told ourselves. And maybe the cross is the place that can best hold the competing truths of faith and works, freedom and servant hood, self emptying and self discipline. Not that I expect to arrive at any lofty height of achievement or enlightenment – certainly not for more than glimpsed moments. But the one who died into life challenges us to follow and to practice dying to self that we might live into the oneness at the centre of everything.
Come Lord Jesus the Christ, come call us to follow even though we hesitate.
This is my work informed by all I have heard, read and experienced. I am indebted to the wisdom of others. This week I am especially grateful to:
A favourite Buddhist teacher whose teaching I find of value https://pemachodronfoundation.org/videos/
Footnotes by Lawrence M. Wills, The Jewish Annotated New Testament NRSV Ed: Amy-Jill Levine & Marc Zvi Brettler, Oxford University Press 2011
Andrew McGowan: "On the road at Caesarea: The human one comes"
substack
Richard Rohr and others, Center for Action and Contemplation, Contemplative practices
John T Squires “A small member which boasts of great exploits (James 3)” & "The paradoxes of discipleship (Mark 8) " An Informed Faith
Comentários