You Are the Messiah, and You Are Wrong About It

Mark's Gospel turns on this passage. For eight chapters the question has been who Jesus is. Demons know, the wind and sea obey, crowds guess, and the disciples are repeatedly amazed and slow. Now, on the road to the villages around Caesarea Philippi, far north near the sources of the Jordan, Jesus asks them directly. Who do people say I am? They report the guesses: John the Baptist, Elijah, one of the prophets. Then he asks the question that matters. But what about you? Who do you say I am?

Peter answers for them all. You are the Messiah. It is the first time a human being in Mark says it, and it is correct. Jesus does not deny it. He tells them not to tell anyone, which in Mark is what he does with true things that are not yet ready to be understood.

Then he begins to teach them what the title means, and it is nothing like what Peter had in mind. The Son of Man must suffer many things, be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and teachers of the law, be killed, and after three days rise again. Mark says he spoke plainly about this. No parable. No riddle.

Peter takes him aside and begins to rebuke him. The verb is the same one used for what Jesus does to demons and storms. Peter has just confessed Jesus as Messiah and is now correcting him. Jesus turns, looks at the other disciples, and rebukes Peter in return, with the hardest words he speaks to any follower in the Gospels: get behind me, Satan. You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.

The one idea is that it is possible to have the right title for Jesus and the wrong Jesus. Peter believed in a Messiah who would win. Jesus was a Messiah who would be rejected and killed, and would win by that. To object to the cross, however lovingly, was to stand on the wrong side of the line, the side of the tempter in the wilderness who had offered kingdoms without suffering.

The turn toward life is uncomfortable. Each of us carries a picture of what the Messiah should do for us, and it usually does not include suffering, ours or his. When Jesus speaks plainly about the cross, his own and the one he asks us to carry, our instinct is to take him aside and explain that there must be another way. Mark wants us to hear the answer Peter heard. Get behind me. Not go away. Get behind, into the place of a follower. Then follow where he is actually going.