33. Mark 8:27-30: Revelation/Revaluation/Revolution
But that’s about to change! Mark’s
brought us to a climactic moment. But first a moment of reflection. Identity is
anything but something else we know about someone else or ourselves. It’s a
whole life makeover! A new identity is something that changes us. How we see
the world and respond to it can never be the same again. Even if we, at a later
date, try to flee or renounce it. When Jesus and his disciples arrive at
Caesarea Philippi such a decisive moment comes for the disciples.
Mark has already shown us
how God’s affirmation of Jesus’ identity and vocation transformed him from a
peasant carpenter to leader of a messianic movement at his baptism. At the river
Jesus experienced
-a revelation (“My
Son”),
-a revaluation (“the
beloved”), and
-a revolution
(“with you I am well pleased”).
Jesus’
identity as God’s messiah, his royal world ruler is reaffirmed and ready to go
public. His intimacy with his Father is declared. And the shape and practice of
his rule, his messiahship, is determined.
In
knowing his identity, his followers receive their own, discover intimacy with
God, are inducted into his subversive, counter-revolutionary movement. That’s
what’s at stake as they follow Jesus to Caesarea Philippi.
The
latter was a pagan Hellenistic city originally named for the god Pan who came
from an earlier Canaanite Baal cult.[1]
What more appropriate place for this moment! Here, in a bastion of the gods,
God reveals to Jesus’ followers who he really is: “You
are the Messiah” (8:29).
Mark has given us clues, however, that discovering Jesus’ real
identity and embracing it is a more complicated matter than a one-off moment of
insight or “conversion.” The disciples did not understand about the loaves and the
story of the healing of the blind man at Bethsaida immediately prior that took
two touches for complete restoration of sight. To grasp Jesus identity will be
contested matter for the disciples (and also for us!). It will not come in a
moment but in a lifetime of moments. A lifetime of moments filled with as much
failure as success in remembering who he truly is. A struggle all the way but a
struggle that finally gives meaning and focus to our lives.
We should be grateful for God’s willingness and faithfulness to reveal
himself to Peter and the disciples, to vouchsafe to them this most precious of
insights. We can be certain that knowing, really knowing, Jesus for who he
really is remains God’s chief agenda for us. He will always be working on it.
But we will fail from time to time. Too often, truth be told. It
should not surprise us, then, to discover Peter immediately rejecting Jesus’
declaration of his own vocation (more on that next time), rejecting it so
thoroughly that Jesus rebukes him by calling him “Satan” (8:33).
This is the crucible we all live in: between understanding and
disbelief. Between God and Satan. A combatant in a battle who’s constantly tempted
to seek refuge on the other side. Some of this is ignorance and can be cured by
growing awareness of and familiarity with Jesus. But some of it is a residual
core of resistance to God’s call and claim on our lives through Jesus.
Something Paul calls the “flesh.” He doesn’t mean our material, physical being
when he uses “flesh” this way but rather that part of us that remains committed
to our own lordship over our lives and unwilling to cede lordship to God’s
rightful and gracious rule. More about all this in the next post.
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