Jesus is rarely angry in the gospels. But today is one of the days when he is, and it’s worth looking at exactly why. It starts with the famous passage when Peter is the only one among the disciples, who can answer correctly the question about who Jesus is: he is the messiah, the anointed one, the savior who is going to gather his scattered people together and show them the way to freedom.
But then, Peter shows that he doesn’t understand everything about what that means. Jesus decides to say more about where this life of the messiah is going. He says that he won’t be living a long and successful life, in fact he will have to be rejected and to die. Peter is horrified, and says that this can’t be, something has to be done. But this instinct to protect Jesus, which seems so right to us, that is what somehow infuriates Jesus more than any of Peter’s other mistakes. The path Jesus is trying to follow is so different from the path of self-preservation, that he can’t understand why Peter doesn’t see it already.
What Peter didn’t realize was this. If you wanted a Messiah who was going to be a king, then yes, dying would be bad. But instead, for a Messiah who would show you how to love, that means a path that includes sacrifice and suffering.
What we have been seeing in these past weeks in the gospel of Mark is what you might call Jesus’s disciple formation program. And if you look at what he has been doing these weeks, we can see what kind of disciples he was trying to train. Because what did he do? He went from place to place, not to gather people into some kind of revolutionary force, but to notice how people lived and what they needed. And how they lived out there in the countryside was largely in poverty, as outsiders; what they needed was mercy and generosity and healing, and that is what Jesus offered. Jesus had no possessions because he didn’t want anything to get in the way of his being able to see people who also had virtually nothing. That was what he wanted his disciples to learn how to do. He reached out to people who were left behind or who had fallen down or been taken over by something evil, and he told them God was now present for them and wanted their freedom. He didn’t place barriers between people the way humans do; instead he crossed barriers and lived the same life as those he wanted to reach.
So that way of life was not really the kind of messiah people had been expecting. This was a revolution, but it was a new kind of revolution. It turns the world upside down by asking people to find their own way of living the way Jesus does. That is the secret weapon that would change the world. And it’s a way of life that isn’t at all about self-preservation — it’s about seeing others the way God sees them, you place their needs on the same level as your own. And when you live that way, you can’t avoid sacrifice, instead you look at it as a privilege to serve someone else who can’t or won’t do anything in return. Disciples can’t avoid sacrifice, since the sacrifices we make have a purpose. It turns out they are what renews the face of the earth.
Is it really possible to live this way, losing your life in order to save it? At times it seems either crazy or overwhelming. The needs of this world and what it asks of us are sometimes frightening, we can remember that better today [9/11/2021] than on many other days. We look around us and we see violence and repression, we see religious hatred, we see refugees who need acceptance, we see changes in the world’s climate that are bigger than we can cope with. The temptation towards withdrawing from all this and living in a separate world, thinking about our own self-preservation, is incredibly strong. But the only solution apparently is to make that leap that Jesus is trying to get Peter to make, to realize that sacrificial love is the only thing that brings us freedom. We’re not trying to be perfect in this world, that’s not the assignment. But Jesus says that if we keep walking towards changing the world for others, no matter how discouraging it is, that is what saves the world through love. Self-preservation isn’t the answer to life. Instead, we have someone else who has already saved us by showing us how to live.