Mark 8:31-38
31 Then he 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.
32 He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.
33 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."
34 He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.
35 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.
36 For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?
37 Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?
38 Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels."
CONTEXT:
Peter just declared Jesus as “The Christ” and right after this is the transfiguration. The lectionary is frustratingly non-linear.
if this sounds familiar, its because we just talked about it in September
Peter “gets it” but doesn’t get it. Again.
We can’t talk, because we do the same thing a lot.
It was hard for the disciples to understand the necessity of the cross. Heck, its hard for us today for us to understand it. Why did Jesus have to die? Couldn’t God just forgiven us and be done with it? Well, thats a discussion for another day, but if you ever hear people say that God had to kill Jesus on the cross to free us from sin - that someone had to be "punished" to forgive sins - you’re hearing people that, just like Peter here, are “getting it” but not getting it.
Peter doesn’t want the crucifixion to happen, and who can blame him? No one would want their friend to have to die in this way. And even though Jesus rebukes him here, we’ll see Peter later fight Jesus’ arrest, even cutting the ear off one of the soldiers in the process. Jesus stops him then, as well, because Jesus doesn’t subscribe to the myth of redemptive violence.
The myth of redemptive violence is a lie that we, as a world, have mostly completely bought into, whether we’re aware of it or not.
And the easiest way to describe it is through a cartoon. I’m going to use an old example, but it is so prevalent in our culture that you don’t have to look far to see it everywhere. If you remember Popeye, nearly every episode of Popeye was the same thing. Bluto, who was the bad guy, wants Olive Oyl as his girlfriend. She refuses, so he forcibly takes her. Popeye tries to save her and Bluto would beat the crud out of Popeye, until, somehow, Popeye would eat a can of spinach, which would give him super strength and he’d beat up Bluto and win Olive Oyl back. That is redemptive violence in a nutshell.
Bad guy hurts good guy
Good guy hurts bad guy more and “wins”.
Theres a book series that I really like called the Dresden Files and every book is about as predictable as Popeye. The good guy finds himself trying to defend the honor of someone, gets the living tar beat out of him along the way, yet somehow seems to find a way to do more violence to the bad guys than they do to him and win the day.
Nearly every action movie follows this same formula. The hero has a “set of special skills”, right? Skills developed over a lifetime, that he uses to put the hurt on the bad guys. And we cheer it on, because we want to to see the bad guys get what they deserve (or at least what we think they deserve, right?)
And its not just in books or tv or movies. We are seeing this in real life, right now. In the news every day right now. Lets arm our teachers! The answer to violence in our schools is the opportunity for MORE violence, right? If everyone had a gun, maybe no one would use it! and if you do, well, partner, I’m going to kill you. And when you’re dead and I’m alive, then I win.
But this isn’t what Jesus is teaching us here, or what he taught ANYWHERE in the gospels. "If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn your left to him also. If someone sues you for your cloak, give them your tunic as well. You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemies.’ But I tell you, love your enemies. Pray for those who hurt you. if you are nice only to your friends, then you are no better than other people. Even people without God are nice to their friends."
So do we sit back and just accept violence? Is that what he means by taking up our cross? That we just accept the fact that people are going to abuse us and hurt us because we don’t fight back?
Not at all! There is something vey subversive about these things that Jesus says here. Take the slapping thing. The only way for me to slap someone on the right cheek, using my right hand, would be to use the back of my hand. if you present your left cheek to me, then the only way for me to smack you again would be for me to do it open palm ur with a fist. Now, I know what you’re probably thinking… “HOW IS THIS ANY BETTER?” To get what Jesus is saying here, we have to put ourselves into the cultural context of the day.
One, left handedness was seen as inferior, so you would always use your right hand to strike someone, and lets face it, its more common anyway. backhanding someone was also a sign of disrepect. you would only hit or use the palm of your hand to someone of equal stature. backhanding one reserved for servants or the “less than’s”. turning your cheek would force them to use the “equal” force against you, wjocj they would not want to do, so they would either have to stop or make you an equal.
Now, I don’t know if that would really work or not, but the idea of it is solid, anyway.
The point of this is this - Jesus is proposing a “third way” of dealing with violence. Not meek submission nor escalating retaliation, but a way to end the cycle of violence using other means.
Its been amazing to see the students from the Valentines Day shooting stand up to our government and their lack of response to any of these tragedies that keep happening over and over. If we look at this chart of suggestions for a “third way” to beak the cycle of violence, we can see many of these coming into play right now.
They’re seizing the moral initiative, pointing out that what is going on here is WRONG and taking money for lobbyists who want to maintain the status quo is WRONG. Did you see the high school junior who asked Marco Rubio i he would pledge to not accept any more money from the NRA? Rubio wouldn’t do it. Or the high school senior who called out president Trump for accepting 30 million dollars from them. She asserted her own humanity and dignity by asking the question how much a human life was worth.
“Thirty million dollars. And divided by the number of gunshot victims in the United States in the one and one-half months in 2018 alone, that comes out to being $5,800. Is that how much these people are worth to you? If you don't do anything to prevent this from continuing to occur, that number of gunshot victims will go up and the number that they are worth will go down. And we will be worthless to you.”
She exposed the injustice of the system. A group with a lot of money is influencing the laws that make this sort of thing happen over and over. These kids are taking over the power dynamic. They may not have money but they have a voice, and they are being LOUD. They’re standing their ground and saying “NO MORE”.
I hope they can continue. It seems like things come and go so fast these days. That in a week or something else will happen that will make us forget about the last tragedy. We live from shock to shock and our outrage can only last so long.
Alright, I’ve gotten pretty high up on a soapbox here today, and I’m not going to say I didn’t mean to… my script here proves that I did… But I think we need to remember that following Jesus - that taking up our cross does NOT mean passively submitting to those in power, nor does it mean condoning or participating in a violent response. We must be able to stand in the middle and say “this has got to stop, right here - right now” and be a voice for peace.
I think the second most difficult thing to grasp in the Christian life is how truly and deeply God loves you. The first thing? The thing thats harder than that? Is realizing that he loves that murderer, too.
On passion Sunday, we’ll read an amazing sentence in the passion narrative that might get overlooked that day, but find here perfectly. “Now when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, “Truly this man was God’s Son!””
The guy that helped kill Jesus, the one that tradition says stuck the spear in Jesus’ side, suddenly realizes God’s love for him through all this, somehow. Tradition says that he and several of his fellow soldiers, quit military service and spread the gospel in Cappadocia before being hunted down and beheaded. More useless violence.
I don’t know the answer here. I don’t know if banning all guns or giving everyone one will work. I do know that the Bible says in three different places that eventually that eventually all nations will “beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks and nation shall not list up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore” and I pray for that day to come soon.
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