Mark 8:31-39 | Göttinger Predigten im Internet

The Second Sunday in Lent | 25 February 2024 | Mark 8:31-39 | Samuel Zumwalt |

³¹ And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again. ³²And he said this plainly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. ³³But turning and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, „Get behind me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.“ ³⁴And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, „If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. ³⁵For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. ³⁶ For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? ³⁷For what can a man give in return for his soul? ³⁸For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.“

THE WAY OF THE CROSS

In the name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I’m not sure Simon Peter knew why he gave up fishing to follow Jesus. Maybe he thought to himself: “Every man in my family has lived in this same place and done the same job for generation after generation.” I wonder what Peter said to himself. Was it something like: “This is my chance to get out of here and do something else with my life?” Was that it? Was Jesus’ call to follow Him Peter’s big break?

I’m not sure you could call it ambition. Certainly, that’s what James and John seemed to have on their minds when they argued about who was the greatest among the disciples and when their Mom asked that they might sit on Jesus’ right and left hand when He became king in Jerusalem.

Obviously Jesus saw something special in Peter, James, and John, because He always seemed to treat them as His inner circle… like when He took them up on the Transfiguration mount and asked them to pray with Him in the Garden of Gethsemane.

I have to admit it’s kind of hard to psychoanalyze Simon Peter from a distance. All you can do is look at the things he says and does and try to interpret what’s going on inside of him. Clearly Simon Peter is important to Jesus. Peter seems always to be ready to speak up and answer Jesus’ questions. He doesn’t seem to be a complicated guy. Yes, he seems to wear his feelings on his sleeve and maybe could even be called impulsive… like stepping out of the boat and trying to walk on water.

It’s difficult to forget what we know about Simon Peter as we read the story. We know what he’s going to do when Jesus is on trial. We know what will happen to Peter down the road. We’ve heard the stories and even read the other gospels besides Mark. But at this point in Mark’s story of Jesus we really don’t know much about Peter other than he has loyally followed Jesus and must be clearly devoted to Him.

If James or John had started to tell Jesus not to talk about dying, it would be easy to say that it was their ambition talking. If Jesus dies, then there go the seats at the left and right hand in the royal throne room in Jerusalem, and they don’t get to be the greatest of Jesus’ disciples after all.

But with Peter’s protest, we’re left puzzling with whether it’s more about his love for Jesus rather than his need for Jesus to make it big as king in Jerusalem. If this were James and John, we could speculate that they were already tasting the power and the glory of being the king’s men… almost like students searching online for luxury cars and the sharpest threads and the houses they’re going to own someday.

With Peter we don’t know if it’s about love for Jesus or the end of the dream of a different life or the possibility of arriving at a place where one could function as the real power behind the throne… like presidential advisors or denominational bureaucrats. Did Peter have a map in his head of wrongs that needed righting and policies that needed changing and landscapes that needed transforming if and when he got where he could pull the levers? Or was Peter just afraid for his own life? Or was it about real love for Jesus and trying to keep Him from foolishly and needlessly giving up His life and all the good He could do if Jesus finally sat on the kingly throne in Jerusalem?

We’ll never really know what was going on with Peter right up to the moment that the Lord Jesus rebuked him. All we can do is to look at the choices Peter made.

Looking at Simon Peter and Ourselves, Too

Being honest with oneself doesn’t always come easily. Let me give an example.

One of the key pastors from my seminary days was known for thinking he was always right. He would never have said that he was without sin, but he did think that he always made the right choices. If you were on the other side, he made it clear that you were not on God’s side. He always knew which was God’s side, you see. It was his.

At a particularly eventful moment after I had been a pastor for a while, the man wrote me a note, after the fact, that “I had had a brush with ambition.” Because I had taken the path that he thought was the right one, it was a congratulatory note – sort of. It was vintage stuff from his pen. He was certain that he always made the right choices and always knew what the right choices were for others. He was suggesting, I think, that I was learning how to avoid the kinds of choices he thought were wrong – sort of.

Looking back, I think now he was driven by a kind of certitude that was not very self-aware. He may have believed he was captive to sin, but that captivity to sin must not have been very strong in his own mind…not if he always made the right choice.

Looking back over the tremendous influence the man wielded over so many lives and also looking at what came of some of his “right” choices, I think often how very wrong the man often was about what was right and also about his ability to know the right. But then we Lutherans, as someone once said, seem to think that if we can only say it right, then we have it right and then we will know what the right thing to do is.

The call of Jesus to follow Him is really not about having things on our own terms. Perhaps that is the very reason that St. Mark’s Gospel doesn’t try to delve into Peter’s psyche to tell us why Peter followed and what kinds of interior battles were going on along the journey. The point is that Peter does follow and, as he follows, he stumbles and makes wrong choices from time to time. He is not the hero of the story nor are we.

St. Luke’s picture of Peter in the Book of Acts is much more heroic in the sense that, having made such poor choices in the past, Peter is now “heavenbent” to do the right thing for the sake of the Good News of Jesus Christ. Driven by the Holy Spirit, the Apostle Peter seems to be marching from victory unto victory on the way to martyrdom. Doubtless it was heady stuff to live the narrative that St. Luke describes. The phrase that jumps out of the book of Acts is “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and us.”

Joseph Sittler, an extraordinary Lutheran theologian, said near the end of his life: “While St. Luke could write such words in Scripture, it would be far better for us to say: ‘It seems good to us and, we hope, the Holy Spirit.’” Having lost his eyesight, his independence, and on the verge of losing his life, Sittler was far wiser than many of us pastors and parishioners alike. Sittler understood that being captive to sin meant that we ought to be a lot humbler about thinking our choices were always on the side of God. Sometimes we are all just wrong… no ifs, no ands, and no buts. Our failures teach us that we are all empty-handed sinners in need of God’s grace and mercy in Jesus Christ.

Captive to sin, we rarely are able to follow Aristotle’s advice to “know thyself.” We are all too good at self-deception. We think too easily that we know the right thing when, in fact, we are often unaware of our own ambitions, wants, and dreams.

Peter thought he knew what the right thing was when he rebuked Jesus for talking about His death. In fact, what Peter knew was that he didn’t like where following Jesus was leading. It wasn’t in Peter’s plans. The point of following Jesus is to follow and not to lead! Captive to sin in our bodies and hearts and minds, where we would go is often far from where Christ Himself is leading. Like Peter, all of us shrink from the death both Christ Jesus and we must die!

Dying and Rising with Jesus

The paradox of following Jesus is like an ancient TV commercial that used to say: “You can pay me now or pay me later.” The point of the commercial was that the cost is always much greater on the backend rather than the front. So, do what is required now.

Judas ended up hanging himself having betrayed his friend and master Jesus. All who don’t follow Jesus now are going to end up just as dead but with a trail of betrayals and bad choices in their wake.

I once wrote an e-mail to the, then, chief pastor of our denomination asking that he intervene in a publishing decision that was about to be made. I asked that he make clear that it was wrong to mistranslate Scripture for purely ideological purposes. He wrote back that indeed it would be wrong to mistranslate Scripture but that it was OK to retranslate Scripture in the way that was being proposed. He refused to admit that this so-called “retranslation” was in fact a departure from what the original text said and thus was indeed a mistranslation driven by the ideological biases of the translators. Qui bono?

It is a common defense in our day to say that there are simply two (or more) different but equally valid ways of reading Scripture. All of which is a cleverly obtuse or cleverly devious way of marginalizing if not silencing those who say that some ways of reading Scripture not only depart from what Scripture actually says but more importantly from what it actually means to follow Jesus… to lose one’s life with Him now.

We are going to die biologically, and we are all going to give God an account of our lives with all the choices we have made, right and wrong. The question is not whether we are going to die or even when. The question is whether we will die with Jesus and rise in Him to live forever with the Triune God… or… whether we will die eternally separated from God and lost through our own stupid conviction that we were always right.

The End of Me Is at Hand

Jesus rebuked Peter as on Satan’s side, and He still rebukes us captives to sin!

To die with Jesus is to be drowned daily with Him in the waters of Baptism, confessing both our sin and our need for Christ to save us from ourselves. To rise with Jesus is to be raised through no effort or merit of our own to follow Him uncertain of where He is taking us in the short run but confident that He is bringing us safely to eternal life with the Triune God.

The meaning of our Baptism becomes clear. We don’t get to tell the Lord Jesus how we will travel or where we are willing to go. We don’t get to tell the Lord Jesus what ideological or personal or even relational baggage of ours He is bound to agree to because we are certain we know His mind better than He does. In short, His call to follow means the death of myself, a death Peter rightly feared as should we.

Surely you remember the rich young man who wanted to follow Jesus but on his own terms and with the certainty that he was making all the right choices. The Lord Jesus looked at the man lovingly, and then said: “You only lack one thing. Just sell what you have, give the money to the poor, and follow me.” And the young man went away sorrowful, because he had many possessions.

Not all the obstacles to following Jesus have a monetary value. For some, it’s pride. For others, it’s intellect. For others, it’s strong feelings including those that shape one’s self-image. For others, it’s ambitions, dreams, and convictions that we are certain are godly and right, because, after all, we know best. As C.S. Lewis once wrote (in The Great Divorce), surrendering our favorite sin is so difficult, because that’s what occupies God’s place in our hearts and minds.

When the Lord Jesus says, “Follow me,” His call is not laden with ambiguity.

That we will stumble and fall in this life is neither debatable nor excusable in the sense that such things aren’t all that bad. The cry of the brokenhearted makes all the difference: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” With nail-pierced hands, feet, and riven side, He reaches down to us saying, “Arise. Follow me.”

In the name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

—

szumwalt@stmatthewsch.org

St. Matthew’s Evangelical Lutheran Church

Wilmington, North Carolina USA