FINDINGS III By Harry T. Cook

Lent II - 2012    

Mark 8: 31-38              

Harry T. Cook

This passage is, in some ways, the heart of the gospel as well as the Gospel according to Mark. It spells out what we might call a post-Easter perspective on the end result of Jesus' public career. Mark puts the words on Jesus' own lips as a kind of prediction of where things were headed in general. And even though we acknowledge that the passion predictions consist in material already retrojected into the narrative, it does not take much imagination to see that, if Jesus was in fact the counter-cultural figure Mark is portraying, Jesus would have been headed for just such trouble as is accounted for in v. 31.

He will run afoul, it is said, of the elders as well as the chief or high priests of the Temple's sacrificial apparatus and the scribes or teachers of the law -- those who conserved what had been written (γραμματεύς). Basically, he will run afoul of just about every interest group that mattered in the Judean establishment. And he will be tried and found wanting (the usual translation is "rejected"). It is also said that Jesus must (as if it were a requirement) suffer in many ways, ending with his death. By the time Mark was compiled after 70 C.E., the official power of execution in Palestine was in the hands of the Romans, but the power of murder is always in the hands of the outraged. Is it possible that Jesus was executed by disaffected Judeans? Probably not. It is politically incorrect even to suggest such a thing. But there is the text.

Ched Myers helps us understand that it was a political and social force against which Jesus is pitted, or which is pitted against Jesus./1 The authorities were probably annoyed at his most quotable "Sabbath-was-made-for-people" speech. The fact that Mark chose to place the passion prediction that is this passage immediately following the Petrine confession suggests that the leaders of late first century Jesus Judaism were not anxious to proclaim a messianic figure such as Jesus seemed to have been. Peter who just verses earlier blurted out his enthusiasm for Jesus as the anointed one (� Χριστος) now patronizes Jesus with a kind of "There, there now, let's have no more of that kind of talk. That sort of thing doesn't happen to messiahs." V. 33 carries the scent of a "turning against," as if Jesus turned in anger to confront Peter who had said a very stupid thing. The response in idiom would be: "Back off there! You are not thinking right. Try to think like God." There may be a suggestion that the ways in which Jesus must suffer are part of a divine scheme that must be endured. Or, putting a more rational spin on it, the sufferings are inevitable if Jesus was to be who Peter says he is. This is a kind of martyrdom that those who revere the late Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. will readily understand.

Vv. 34-38 constitute the familiar call to discipleship. They bear all the marks of the mid-to-late first century C.E. situation during which the Roman military freely applied its own particular means of public humiliation known as crucifixion. The deal is that, according to these verses, those who wished to be numbered among the inner circle should not shrink from becoming public spectacles, and maybe even corpses. No possibility exists for the trivialization of this picture. It is what happened. "Bearing one's cross" must mean exactly that, or the equivalent of whatever culture outrage. Why to such an extreme? The answer comes in vv. 34-35. The figure of speech is an economic one. It will eventually be seen as a poor investment if one tries to preserve his life by failing to take up the cross. The far better investment is to take up the cross and take the loss now against the possibility of a future victory.

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Such a course is fraught with personal danger because it so exposes the one who sets it for himself. Such a course is so challenging to business as usual that it can produce resentment. It is so egalitarian that it will peeve those who fear the economic and social consequences of egalitarianism, or what some call "class war." Mark wants whoever hears or reads his witness to understand that taking up the cross in some real and potentially costly way is "the rule or domain of God" working its way in us. A twenty-first century humanist might put it this way: In the only life we have, is it not better to invest ourselves individually and collectively in efforts to improve the human condition even if it costs us immediate dents in our reputations, even if it costs us friends, even if it costs us material loss? What, though, of any reward? Perhaps none, though a twentieth century priest-poet thought otherwise when he wrote "On Planting Daffodils in a Church Yard."

Here, in the loamy earth beneath a sky

that gently speaks of autumn's brevity,

I plant these daffodils and wait to see

what further glories spring will multiply

from drying root and swollen bud. If I

do not survive that cold soliloquy

which winter utters long and dolefully -

to put the matter plain, if I should die

and leave to eyes of casual passers-by

the harvesting of gold my hands have sown,

then bring my body's withered root to lie

beside these daffodils, which will, when grown

bespeak the newer blooming I shall have known

in a fairer land than this can signify./2

1/Myers, Chad. Binding the Strong Man, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990, pp. 141-143

2 / Frahm, Gary. Summer's Lease, Sioux Center, IA: Dordt College Press, p. 22