I had this experience once at my former church in Massachusetts when I went to visit a family of new parishioners. The family consisted of two dads and four little boys - a four year old, a three year old, and year-old twins. Usually one of the dads would come to church with Sam and Jeremiah, the two oldest boys. I went to visit them at home one day; I knocked on the door, and Sam, the four year old, came trotting to the door. He saw me and stopped dead in his tracks. His eyes got huge, and he turned and ran back the way he came. Shortly one of his dads came to the door to let me in and said, Sam just came running down the hallway saying, Daddy, Daddy, God’s at the door!
Now. You don’t have to worry; I didn’t let it go to my head. ‘God’ is not a title of mine, and trust me, I have no illusions about that. But there are lots of titles that we do lay claim to – some of them job descriptions, professional titles: priest; teacher; parent, doctor. Some titles we wear lightly; others we tend to be more invested in. That depends a lot on what the title is and how much we feel it is part of our identity.
Jesus was one of those people who had a lot of titles thrust upon him. And not low-key titles, either. Try these on for size: Son of God. Son of David. Holy One of God. Messiah. These are all titles vested with an enormous amount of meaning, deep religious meaning, for us, and also very much for Jesus’ followers – the ones who bestowed these titles upon him. In today’s gospel lesson, there are two titles used for Jesus: one is Christ, and one is Son of Man.
We might not always think of Christ as a title; the way it’s used, it’s easy to slip into thinking that it’s Jesus’ last name: Mary married Joseph Christ and they named their baby Jesus Christ. But, of course, that’s not the case at all. Christ is the Greek word for Messiah – and Messiah literally means ‘anointed one.’ This title of messiah, anointed one, was not always used with a capital ‘M’ the way we use it in reference to Jesus. In ancient Israel, it was often used for priests and kings, especially kings, who were considered to be chosen by God. Then there was also the expectation, in Jesus’ time, that God would send the messiah to save the people – in this particular time and place, save the people of Israel from the armed Roman occupation they suffered under, and the crushing poverty many of them lived with which was the direct result of this occupation. In Jesus’ time, messiah was a political title as much as anything, and the belief – t he conviction, really – was that the messiah would come to lead an uprising against the Romans and free and restore the people of Israel. So messiah, Christ, was a very big deal. In Jesus’ time, it was not a title used lightly. And that it is used for Jesus underscores both the expectations on him as well as the significance of his ministry.
But here’s what’s really interesting. In the gospel of Mark – Mark being the earliest gospel written – the gospel writer himself hardly uses the title of messiah, or Christ, in reference to Jesus. We hear it once, at the opening of the gospel: “the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” And then Mark doesn’t use it again until the lesson we hear today, in the eighth chapter of Mark. When Jesus asks the disciples who they think he is - what title they would give him, if asked – Peter says, you are the Christ. The Messiah. The Anointed One. The Chosen One of God.
But here’s what else is quite interesting: in the gospel of Mark, Jesus also does not use this title of Christ, of Messiah, to refer to himself. He does not call himself the Christ, not anywhere in Mark’s gospel. Instead, Jesus calls himself the Son of Man. Did you pick up on that in today’s lesson? Immediately after Peter names Jesus as the Christ, Jesus tells them that the Son of Man ‘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.’ Peter says Jesus is the Christ; Jesus refers to himself as Son of Man.
And here’s another really interesting thing which is going on here with all of this. In the gospel of Mark, we see a lot of what is called the ‘messianic secret.’ What that means is that Jesus will do a healing, for instance, and after the healing Jesus will tell the one healed not to tell anyone about it. Jesus will perform a miracle, and again, tell the people not to share it. In today’s gospel story, Jesus asks who the disciples think he is. Peter names him as the Christ, and Jesus ‘sternly orders them not to tell anyone about him.’ What is this about? Biblical scholars have been debating this one forever, but here are a couple of their theories.
One is that this silence about being the messiah was attributed to Jesus by the early church. When they wrote down the stories they had shared about Jesus, they wrote in this secret approach – and they did this because Jesus himself never claimed to be the Messiah. But since this proclamation of Jesus as the Christ was so central to the early church after his resurrection, the gospels show others using the title, and Jesus telling them to keep it quiet. The title of messiah, then, is not original to Jesus, but is written in afterwards – so that those who come next, all of those followers over the past two thousand years, will know who it is we’re following. And we’ll know it from the beginning. That’s one theory.
Another theory – and boy, this one has been making me think all week – another theory says that Jesus responds this way, asking his disciples and followers to keep his true title a secret, not to tell anyone, because nobody who uses the title of Christ fully understands it. Nobody who calls Jesus Messiah sees him or his true role clearly. They have different expectations of what ‘their’ messiah will do, expectations that Jesus knows he will not fulfill. They don’t understand what is most vital about his life and teachings, his death and his resurrection, their meaning and their implications. All of their understandings of what it means to be the messiah are incomplete. And because they do not truly understand what it means to call Jesus the Christ, he asks them – tells them – sternly orders them – not to use this title with anyone.
I don’t know about you, but that one made me stop and think. But it makes a lot of sense, and we can see how much it makes sense because of today’s gospel lesson. Peter calls Jesus the Christ. Jesus tells them not to tell anyone. Jesus starts to teach them: the Son of Man will be handed over, and suffer, and die, and after three days rise again. That’s what this title of Christ means for Jesus. This is what it’s about, he’s trying to teach them. Let go of your other expectations of that title, and hear what it is I’m saying to you. If you’re going to use this title for me, than you have to understand what it truly means. It doesn’t mean the kind of glory and power you have in mind. It doesn’t mean the kind of revolution you think it does. It means this: self-sacrifice. A putting aside of all self-centeredness. It means truly opening yourself up to the will of God – not just partly, but all the way. And it means suffering, death, resurrection.
Now, as we know, Peter does not take this news well. He doesn’t understand it, for one thing; that much is clear. And he doesn’t want this for Jesus, for another thing. He has a much grander vision of what it means for Jesus to be the Christ, and Jesus’ teaching doesn’t match. Instead of examining his own expectations and possibly re-thinking them in light of this new information Jesus is sharing, Peter does something only Peter would do. Peter takes Jesus aside and begins to rebuke him. You can see it, really: Peter has his brief moment in the sun – you are the Christ. From that to this bewildering, incomprehensible, and frankly depressing thing that Jesus is saying? No way. But Peter can fix it. He takes Jesus aside – as if he’s the authority, rather than Jesus – and, let’s imagine, says something like, Hey Jesus? This whole suffer and die thing? It’s kind of a downer. Look, we know you can’t really mean all of this, and anyway you’re freaking us out here. Just cool it, okay? This isn’t the kind of teaching we need. I wonder if at any point Peter realized he had made a big mistake, put his foot in his mouth big-time. Whether he got that he had crossed the line – the way a mouthy kid will say the absolutely the wrong thing to his mother in a heated moment, and then realize he’s in deep doo-doo. Or maybe Peter didn’t have that much awareness, and is caught absolutely off-guard when Jesus unloads on him. Either way, it’s clear that what Peter meant by calling Jesus messiah, and what Jesus knows that title to mean, are two very different things. And that tension will continue throughout the rest of the gospel, really up until the time of the empty tomb, when the disciples will finally begin to realize what Jesus meant.
But Jesus never gives up trying to have his followers understand. He avoids use of the title Christ, but the one he does use for himself in Mark’s gospel, Son of Man, he explains pretty clearly. The Son of Man will suffer, and die, and rise again. The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve. The Son of Man came to give his life as a ransom to many. To be a disciple of the Son of Man means to follow in this way – to deny oneself, take up one’s cross, and try to walk in the footsteps of Jesus. On the way, one might lose oneself in order to find one’s self again.
We, like Peter, may have a hard time getting this. Indeed, most of us spend our lives trying to figure out what Jesus’ words mean for us, and how we each in our own particular circumstances can follow him faithfully. And as I reflect on this gospel lesson, I understand Jesus’ reluctance to use the title of Christ for himself. I understand why he suggests caution in how we use it. We don’t necessarily understand it either – just like Peter. Here’s something to note about the whole exchange between Jesus and Peter. We know Peter doesn’t get Jesus’ meaning of Christ. We know Peter doesn’t understand. Listen again: ‘Jesus began to teach them that the Son of Man 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. He said all of this quite openly.’ But Peter misses something. Peter never hears the end of Jesus’ teaching. Peter only hears ‘suffer and die.’ He doesn’t hear ‘rise again.’ He rebukes Jesus, wrongly, on the basis of inaccurate information, incomplete information – as incomplete as his understanding of how Jesus will claim and live the title of Christ. And we get stuck too. We get stuck at ‘lose your life.’ We don’t want to lose our lives, lose ourselves. We forget that it is in the losing that we are freed to find. It is in coming up hard against what defeats us that we have to let go of who we thought ourselves to be, and become instead who we really are. We forget that to claim that title ‘disciple’ will require as much from us as it requires for Jesus to claim the title ‘Christ.’
Maybe what all of this means is that we should be much more careful in how we use these titles – disciple for ourselves, and Messiah for Jesus. Maybe we need to concentrate more on listening and learning and trying to understand, rather than assume we already know. Maybe we need to open ourselves up – open ourselves to our holy scriptures, open ourselves to the teachings of Jesus, open ourselves to the voice of God in our own lives. Maybe if we start to do these things, we will start to find our understandings of these titles changing. Maybe we will learn more about what it means for Jesus to be the Christ, and for us to be his disciples.
Amen.