Sunday morning, March 8, 2009

Text: Mark 8:31-38

Title: “Of Divine and Human Things”

Bill Pederson, Pastor

            A knight and his men returned to their castle after a long hard day of fighting.  “How are we faring?” asks the king.  “Sire,” replies the knight, “I have been robbing and pillaging on your behalf all day, burning the towns of your enemies in the west.”  “What!!??” shrieks the king.  “I don’t have any enemies to the west!”  “Oh,” says the knight.  “Well, you do now.”

            When we look to Jesus the furthest thing from our mind is that we could very well have an enemy in Jesus.  When we think about Jesus the word enemy or adversary is not anywhere to found in our thinking.  Jesus is my friend.  Jesus is my Savior.  Jesus is my Lord.  Jesus is the light of my life.  But a Jesus who wheels around and turns on me like an enemy or adversary is just not the Jesus you and I have in mind.

            Mark says in today’s text that Jesus “turned” on his disciples.  Perhaps he did so for good reason.  Jesus has just shared with the disciples “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.” (Mark 8:31)  Peter doesn’t like the sound of suffering, rejection, death for the one he has just proclaimed Messiah, the Christ.  So Mark says that Peter takes Jesus aside and “rebukes” Jesus.  This word rebukes in the Greek is the same word used for exorcism.  Peter is trying to exorcise out of Jesus whatever bad deluded demon has inhabited Jesus’ body and ruined Peter’s vision of the Messiah.      

            Mark reports, “But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan!  For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’”  (Mark 8:33) 

            Notice that Jesus whips around, he turns on the disciples Mark says, not just Peter, but Jesus turns on the disciples.  The disciples represent the church.  And the unmistakable message Mark means to convey to the church throughout the generations is that this Jesus means business, this Jesus is determined to fulfill God’s plan, this Jesus is focused, intent, resolute, and resolved to obey God’s will.   If you get in his way Jesus will turn on you, turn on you like an adversary, turn on you like an enemy. 

            We are in the season of Lent now.  Gone are the warmth and the sentimentality of Bethlehem’s child that we long to cuddle and keep each Christmas.  Gone are Mary and Joseph, the shepherds, and the wise men. The baby is a grown man now, with a grown up serious message, facing a grown up, sobering reality of suffering, rejection and death.  We are not in sleepy little Bethlehem anymore, certainly not in the countryside of Nazareth any longer.  We are in the rough and tumble landscape of Lent where it is time to make grown up, mature decisions about who Jesus is and what will be the cost of following him.    

            Jesus turns on us today in the season of Lent and as he does so Jesus places before us two realities: human things and divine things.  This determined, resolute Jesus turns on us and says “You cannot have it both ways.  Your mind is either set on human things or it is set on divine things.  There is no middle ground.  There is no pretending.”  

            What does Jesus mean by human things?  Staying within Mark’s text for today, it appears that these human things have several characteristics.  Our mind is set on human things when we seek to save our life at all costs.  Jesus doesn’t mean saving ourselves from physical death.  He means the spiritual death that comes from seeking only my way, striving only for what is in this life for me, working only for what improves my life, my pleasure, my bottom line.  Setting our mind on human things means setting out to gain the world for ourselves at all costs – the cost of our integrity, the cost of our physical well-being, the cost of our life.  Setting our mind on human things means convincing ourselves that we are so important that our lives count for everything.  When we are so tightly wound around ourselves and our own little worlds, our mind is set on human things.  And with our mind set on human things, of course we are ashamed of Jesus and his words and very disturbed by Jesus’s gospel of self-sacrifice and obedience to God. 

            As Jesus turns on us today and presses us to decide between human things and divine things, we have to admit that Peter may very well have been onto something trying to exorcise a deluded demon out of Jesus.  When it comes to divine things, we, like Peter, just can’t seem to make sense out of them.  Like Peter, the Jesus we want is not the Jesus we get.

             What Jesus has to say about divine things in today’s text is bracketed at the beginning and the end with two very strong statements.  The first bracket is that these divine things “must” be adhered to; it is God’s plan and it “must” be followed.  The second bracket tells us that these divine things have to do with the glory, not of Jesus, but of “his Father.” (verses 31, 38) 

            What are these divine things?  Suffering, rejection, be killed, after three days rise again.  What Jesus is about to undergo at the hands of the religious and political establishment of his day has to do with God’s plan that must be lived out and God’s glory which must be acknowledged.  We have the advantage over Peter of 2000 years of Christian tradition and Christian scholarship that have sought deeply to understand God’s plan and glory in the suffering, rejection, killing, and rising again of Jesus of Nazareth.  But in some respects, we, like Peter, are still trying to figure it all out – Why did Jesus have to die?  What purpose did Jesus’s suffering serve?  What does the resurrection mean for me and how is its power valid for me today?  What kind of a God would send his Son to rejection, suffering, and death?

            The one thing Peter might say to us today, if he were here, is that I saw Jesus alive again after being good and dead – for three days.  I saw Jesus alive again, and because he lives now with a power beyond all powers, it must be that all Jesus of Nazareth was and all he taught and all he underwent was indeed God’s plan and was indeed for God’s glory even though I can’t quite sort it all out in my heart and head.  I am convinced that if Peter were here with us today, Peter would say He is risen, that is a divine thing, perhaps THE divine thing, and it makes all the difference in the world.

            And then I think if Peter were here addressing us in worship today, he would echo and exhort exactly what Jesus says to us today in Mark’s text as Jesus turns on us and seeks to capture hearts and minds focused on human things: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” (verse 34b)  The way through the landscape of Lent and on to the suffering, rejection, death, and resurrection of Jesus is through a deep, intentional, self-evaluation of the way human things capture our minds and cleave us from Jesus.  The way through the landscape of Lent is through an intense re-evaluation of our lives that begins with denial of self and all the ways that the focus on the self can steal us from the focus on our true life in God. 

            Jesus says deny self as a first step in moving from human things to divine things.  And then he says take up your cross, which means that we must have an integrity and character and fervor about our Christian faith to such an extent that we are willing to suffer public humiliation for confessing Jesus and public disdain for being his disciple.  Deny self; take up your cross; and follow.  Follow means that we don’t have it all figured out.  It means what it says – Follow!  And somehow in the following, somehow in the denying of self, somehow in the taking up of the cross, somehow when we follow, putting one foot in front the other, trusting Jesus to be in the lead, somehow it all begins to fall into place for us and we find that our mind is turned from human things to divine things.