24th Sunday in Ordinary Time
(Sunday 16th September 2018)
Getting behind the Messiah – (Mark 8:27-35)
The Holy Mother Church often matches the Old Testament reading with the Gospel reading, the story of Israel and the story of Jesus. And this coming Sunday there is a beautiful and clear correspondence. We have a reading from Isaiah chapter 50 where he talks about the suffering servant who is meek, who is on a mission for God and delivering the Word of God but those to whom he preaches are not receptive. And so he talks about giving his back to those who beat him, giving his beard to those who pluck it, but he knows that God will vindicate him in his suffering. This is also what Jesus is talking about from the Gospel today, Mark chapter 8. Jesus is going up to Caesarea Philippi with His disciples and He asks them a question, “Who do people say I am?”. He received a variety of answers. The disciples tell Jesus that some people say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, while more say one of the prophets. But Jesus then asks, “But who do you say I am?”.
That is the key question for us. Who do you say Jesus Christ is? Well, Peter pipes up and answers, “You are the Christ”. And right after that, Jesus then for the very first time in the story predicts His suffering, His passion and His imminent death. And what does Peter do? Peter, as leader of the Apostles, rebukes Jesus and tells Him that He can’t suffer and die because He is supposed to be the Saviour of Israel. But Jesus then has to rebuke Peter and tell him, “Get behind me….” In other words, it is not get behind me and get out of my way, but Jesus is saying, ‘get behind me Peter and follow me. You are not the leader, I am. I am going to show you that the way that the Messiah is going to save Israel is precisely through suffering. By my suffering I am not failing as Messiah, I am actually saving Israel.’ It will be Jesus’ suffering that will be the redemption of Israel and so Jesus predicts His passion. And so Jesus is connecting with the suffering servant in Isaiah. He will be meek and He will suffer in order to fulfil the purpose of God and in order to save Israel.
This is a very beautiful thing and here we get the psalm because the psalm has the whole plot of Jesus’ suffering, dying Messiah. All that secret to a suffering Messiah is hidden in psalm 116. This is a psalm of thanksgiving. It records how they were in plight, how ‘the snares of death encompassed me, but I prayed to the Lord and He redeemed me from death’. And that is the plot for Jesus. Jesus will have death swallow Him and encompass Him. The psalm continues to describe how God ‘..kept my soul from death’. Jesus will sing that psalm at the last night at the Passover meal because that was one of the psalms that was sung at the Passover. Jesus sings that psalm on the night that He was betrayed and He can sing that psalm because God the Father will raise Him up on the third day. And so, Jesus will go through suffering and death and out the other side. He will sing, as the psalm has predicted in psalm 116, of how God saved His life from the netherworld. That is the answer that Peter could not see when Jesus asked him, “Who do you say I am?”, because Jesus predicts His suffering but He also tells us that He will go through suffering and out the other side and rise again through new life.
Jesus’ journey will be the journey that we all have to take and that is why He will be so bold as to say to Peter, “If anyone is to follow me, he is to take up his cross and follow after me”. In other words, Jesus does not take up the cross and die so that we do not have to, but He takes up His cross and dies to show us the way to the Father. There is no health and wealth Gospel here. We, too, have to take up our cross. However, as we take up suffering, we can be assured that suffering will be redeemed by the Father and we, too, will go through suffering and ultimately death but we will also go out the other side of death into a new creation, into a new resurrected life. That is the hope that Jesus gave each one of us, not that we do not have to suffer, not that we do not have to die, but that suffering and death are redeemed in Him and that there is a way through it to the other side of a new, glorious resurrected life. That is the hope that Jesus gives us. And so, the hope of the suffering servant of Isaiah that they could suffer but God would vindicate them, also the hope spoken of in psalm 116, is the hope of Jesus. We, like Peter, have to get our minds around this crazy idea that we have to suffer and die and take up our cross but trusting in God that He will redeem that in the end. That is the question for us – do you trust God to take up your cross, to take up the suffering and sacrifices that God has given and called each one of us to knowing that in the end God will write all wrongs and He will wipe away all tears from our eyes. Do you have that kind of trust to get behind Jesus and follow Him?