We’ve heard this passage of the Gospel only a few months ago…We had Matthew’s version, but Matthew’s and Mark’s narratives are quite similar. I may repeat some of the things that have already been said, it’s such an important passage of the Gospel though. We’re in the middle of the book and we find ourselves in between “Peter’s confession”(when Peter acknowledges Jesus is the Son of God) and the Transfiguration on the mount. And indeed, lot of commentators have noted that until then, everything has gone uphill, Mark’s Gospel is fast paced, and we have witnessed through Mark’s eyes an uninterrupted series of miracles and healing. Jesus’s ministry is quite the success, bringing the whole village to the doors of his house in Capernaum and sometimes, even, people dig a hole through his roof. But now is a turning point, and after the Transfiguration, everything is literally going downhill, Jesus is going to encounter more and more opposition from the religious authorities, until he is arrested and put to death by the Romans.
I always find this quite puzzling that so much of Jesus’s life and ministry was about suffering and yet we think so little about Jesus’s sufferings in our churches. We think about Jesus’s suffering forty days in the liturgical year (during Lent), actually keeping the passion narrative itself only for Holy week. Even so, we generally think of “Passion Sunday” as “Palm Sunday” instead, the joyful and triumphal arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem and, from there, we often jump straight to Easter (Church attendance during Holy week, for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, is generally quite low). We may point our finger at Peter, and indeed after two thousands years of Christianity hearing him deny that Jesus would die on the cross sounds like the silliest prediction ever, yet, as Peter, I guess we aren’t that comfortable with the cross, with a suffering and dying Jesus. Our lectionary, our liturgy, most of our prayers don’t dwell on it, and I think we all at some point prefer the Jesus from the “first part of the story”, the Jesus who was nice to people, and helped them with their lives. Now we certainly should love this Jesus! What a waste though, and what a misunderstanding of all of Jesus’s life, ministry and mission, if, as Peter, we treat Jesus’s suffering and death only as a very sad and very unfortunate incident. Indeed, in Matthew’s version, when Peter takes Jesus aside and rebuke him, we hear him say: ‘God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.’ (Matthew 16:22). But Jesus’s suffering and dying is nowhere in the message of the Gospel just a very sad and very unfortunate incident, and especially in Mark’s. So much so that a theologian once called Mark’s Gospel: “A passion narrative with an extended introduction“. And in this passage today indeed Mark wants us to look at the cross, because from now on this is what the story will be about.
So why should we look at the cross and consider Jesus’s suffering? Wouldn’t it be more natural, healthy and reasonable to do like Peter, to try to look the other way or to try to avoid it? The thing issuffering was a big part of Jesus’s life, because suffering is also a big part of our lives as human beings and as living creatures. We may continue to consider our sufferings as very sad and very unfortunate incidents, we have to acknowledge that suffering just keeps on happening in all lives, falling like steady rain, from everyday little sorrows to greatest tragedies. We believe that Jesus entered the human condition and so he did have to enter our suffering. Jesus’s disciples called him the Messiah and they were right to do so, but Jesus preferred for himself to be called the Son of Man, as he does in our passage today. It means that he saw his mission first as being human with all it entails, neither a spectator nor a hero. If you have noticed, in the Creeds of the church, we don’t talk about Jesus’s miracles, healings or teaching, we mention, as if defining all of Jesus’s life, his suffering and his dying. Suffering is such a big part of human life, and it is God’s mystery that Jesus willingly entered into this suffering. A theologian says that indeed there was a turning point in the Gospel because there was a turning point in Jesus’s mind. Jesus realized that all the teachings, miracles and healings would never be enough, he had to enter the deepest of human pain to assume it and redeem it as the holy man of God, bringing reconciliation by faithfulness to God in the places where our sins have brought destruction.
If you will, what Jesus says in our Gospel today is basically that suffering and dying are part of the Messiah’s job description. I don’t pretend I can explain how,what I know is that no good doctor has ever been able to cure someone if they are not willing to enter their pain, to acknowledge it, to hear it, to see it, to touch it. If your doctor isn’t willing to take your pain seriously they will give you a band aid and you’ll be back in a week. It’s even truer with emotional pain and the work of a therapist: they really have to be there and to listen to be able to lift their patient from the pit of what was left unsaid. And it’s like when you pray: you bring yourself into someone’s painful situation so you can ask God to be there with them, you die a little death for them by being with their pain so you can lift them to God. In a much deeper way, the suffering and the death of Jesus weren’t an accident, something very bad that just happened, the passion and the cross were Jesus’s greatest prayer and act of healing. Even if we cannot understand why, we believe that Jesus had to go down to the bottom of the well of human misery so he could bring us back with him.
So how do we respond to that?
To me, one of the lesson Jesus is teaching Peter today is that he had to to let him do his job, to let the Messiah be the Messiah, to let God do what God has to do. Jesus says to Peter: “”You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things“”. His words are very strong and probably offensive to our ears when he calls Peter Satan. And yet, this is what it means: By refusing the cross, Peter is trying to prevent God’s work from happening, in the same way than Satan, the adversary, always tries to prevent God’s work from happening. Matthew’s version of the story adds a verse that explains it a little more clearly. In his version, Jesus says to Peter: “‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling-block to me‘”. Peter literally stands in Jesus’s way, he stands on the way to the cross. We can understand that: this is what a compassionate friend would do, protecting his friend. And protecting Jesus, Peter is also trying to protect himself from the pain of losing his friend. It is healthy and natural to try to avoid suffering and to prevent the ones we love from suffering, yet what Jesus is teaching here is that there is also something supernatural and holy in accepting our suffering and in confronting our death. Peter needs to be willing to acknowledge the reality of human life, suffering, death and Peter needs also to admit the reality of human sin, the hatred and rejection people have towards Jesus and how it is going to cost him. Satan does not only or mainly try to scare people, he also wants them to believe that nothing’s wrong in the world, he wants us to think of ourselves as invulnerable, living in a fantasy world where we can just go on for ever, and where our sins and selfishness have no consequences.
But we have to accept our suffering to let Jesus do his job of entering our suffering and healing our suffering. Indeed no good doctor can heal us if at some level they don’t enter our pain, acknowledge it, see it, hear it, touch it yes, but it means we first have to show our wounds and maybe we need to be willing as well to endure the treatment. It can mean that we need to be honest in prayer about how we feel and what’s going on in our lives. It also means that we should stop trying to fix ourselves, in whatever ways we self medicate and numb our pain: with work and busyness as it is with drinking and medication, or maybe when we try to fix others and be their savior instead of looking at what we need, or when we think everything is everybody’s else fault but ours. We have to be willing to feel the pain of our lives, and the pain of our sins, the pain our separation from God has brought on all of us. If we accept this pain, if we accept to die to ourselves by stopping to try to cheaply fix ourselves, Jesus can bring real healing instead of our band aids. We don’t have to pick up Jesus’s cross, this not our job, but we have to bring our own crosses, and this is what this season of Lent is here for. Because if it is most of the story, at least half of the story, this is also not the end of the story: All the sufferings and all the dying are never the end of the story. The promise is new life, and this is what Peter cannot hear: Jesus will suffer, die and he will rise again. And so will we.