This week’s Gospel Lectionary is Mark 8:31-38.

In this week’s Gospel lectionary, we watch Peter struggle to embrace Jesus’s radical vision of the Christian life, which means risking death so that others might live. For Peter, as for many of us I imagine, such extraordinary solidarity with those on the margins—even to the point of death, if we take Jesus at his word—seems impossible.

So, too, it seems to me, we Christians often struggle to see the church for what it could be—the harbinger of an alternative mode of existence in defiance of the fear and death that characterize the way of the Empire.

Who Do You Say That I Am?

This week’s Gospel lectionary should probably be read along with the story that precedes it in Mark 8:27-30.  In that passage, Jesus poses a question to his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” (8:27). The disciples reply that some think Jesus is John the Baptist, some Elijah, and some one of the prophets (8:28). These responses all imagine Jesus as one who announces a future that is yet to come—not the messiah but one who precedes the messiah. For the people, the imperial order has so dominated their existence that they can’t even imagine an alternative. They cast their eyes on a distant horizon, unable to recognize a new way of life in their midst.

Jesus then poses the same question to the disciples: “But who do you say that I am?” Immediately Peter responds, “You are the messiah!” (8:29). Peter’s recognition of Jesus marks a turning point in Mark’s Gospel. Until this point, the disciples, like the people, had failed to grasp Jesus’s identity. When Jesus had stilled the storm (4:35-41), the disciples had said, “Who then is this, that even the wind and see obey him?” After Jesus had fed the 5,000 (6:30-44) and walked on the water (6:45-52), Mark tells us that the disciples “did not understand” (6:52). Now, at last, with Peter’s confession, the disciples see Jesus for who he is. He is the messiah.

Get behind Me Satan!

Yet when Jesus begins to explain that, as the messiah, he “must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again” (8:31), it becomes clear that the disciples have only partially understood. Peter immediately protests the idea that the messiah must suffer and die. To describe Peter’s protest, Mark uses the same verb (epitimao) that he has used to describe Jesus’s rebuke of demons earlier in the Gospel (1:25; 3:12). Imagine accusing Jesus of misunderstanding his own mission!

Yet, I think it is too often the same with us in the church. When we proclaim that Jesus is messiah, we often get it only partially right. While we declare Jesus to be the Christ, we don’t understand the full significance of that confession.

Like Peter, we are so conditioned by imperial constructions of power that we struggle to grasp Jesus’s alternative vision of messiahship. To call Jesus the messiah means to follow his example by laying our own lives on the line for those oppressed by the Empire. It means entering into such radical solidarity with those on the margins that we are willing to lose our power, prestige, and respectability. It means trusting that on the other side of death there is a new life waiting for us.

In response, Jesus rebukes Peter. Mark again describes this rebuke using the term (epitimao) that he uses to describe the casting out of demons. “Get behind me, Satan!” he says to Peter, “For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things” (8:33).

This is also the great temptation of the church, I imagine—setting our minds on human things while failing to recognize Jesus’s radical call to discipleship. It’s not that we willfully misunderstand Jesus but that our imaginations have been so dominated by imperial ideology that we struggle to imagine anything different. We have organized ourselves using principles from the corporate world. We have measured success by constant growth and innovation. We have become obsessed with cultural relevance, placating wealthy donors at the expense of the poor, fearing to say too much lest we lose our place at the table.

Jesus calls these things Satanic. He doesn’t think of a lukewarm Gospel as “almost” the Gospel. He considers a lukewarm Gospel the antithesis of the Gospel. It is satanic power run amok. This is also why Martin Luther King said in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail that

the Negro’s greatest stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

Those of us who only partially embrace the radical vision of Jesus Christ are worse than those who remain completely enthralled to the ways of the Empire.

Jesus rebukes the moderate church as Satan, right along with Peter.

Taking up Our Cross

Turning to the crowd—and to us—Jesus announces an alternative possibility that presses back against imperial consciousness. “If any want to become my followers,” he says, “Let them deny themselves and take up their crosses and follow me” (Mark 8:34). Yet even this radical vision of discipleship has been sanitized by modern visions of the cross. For some, the cross has become a piece of sparkling jewelry to be worn around the neck, a commodification of a radically anti-imperial symbol. For others, the cross has become a trite symbol of our daily burdens, when we refer to our minor trials and inconveniences as “just my cross to bear.”

But in Jesus’s day, there was nothing beautiful or trite about the cross. Crucifixion was a gruesome means of execution reserved for the lowest classes of non-Roman citizens. It was a painful, public, and humiliating way to die, oftentimes a days-long process of suffocation in full public view. The message of the cross was that one should not dare to challenge the Empire, should not raise a fuss—lest you be hung up to die, too. A modern parallel might be to imagine Jesus commanding us to take up our electric chairs and follow him, or to grab our lethal injection needles in pursuit of the Gospel. Theologian James Cone has powerfully argued that in America the most relevant parallel to the cross is the lynching tree, upon which the Empire has strung up so many innocent Black men to die.

Jesus’s calling is not a pleasant one, and if we are comfortable with it we have misunderstood it. Jesus’s invitation is a call into radical solidarity with those the Empire deems enemies or troublemakers or inconveniences. It is a call into the struggle for justice for those marginalized by oppressive imperial structures. It is the willingness to give up one’s own life in the fight to insure that all might have life and life abundant.

Finally, Jesus declares that “those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake…will save it” (8:35). I think in our own context it may be most useful for the church to think not of our individual lives being at stake, but rather our corporate lives as the church. That is, to follow Jesus means to risk taking positions that may cost us members, that may offend our donors, that may run us afoul of imperial values, in the struggle for abundant life for all people. It means letting go of some mythical past in which we imagined ourselves a center of power (“Get behind me, Satan!”). It means embracing a future in which we are willing to lose members, to shutter our doors, to go out of business if that is what it takes to secure justice and abundance for those on the margins. To follow Jesus, the church must be willing to die.

But the promise of this passage is that on the other side of death there is new life. If we die fighting for justice, so be it. Only in death is there the possibility of resurrection.