St Mark is the most compressed of all the Evangelists. What a lot he packs into today’s Gospel! It began with Our Lord’s question ‘who do men say that I am?’ and continued with a prediction of the Passion, together with Peter’s remonstration against this and our Lord’s rebuke to Peter, and concluded with the universal call to discipleship in the carrying of the cross.
Now we need to know a very important thing: that St Mark’s entire Gospel was written effectively as an introduction to its most important and truly climactic part – the account of the Passion and Resurrection. That also helps us to make sense of the passage we have just heard, which looks forward to the cross and resurrection.
So back to that first question which our Lord puts to His disciples: ‘who do men say I am?’ They, meaning some or all of them, but no one of them in particular, tell Him that there is a great breadth of opinion about Him; He is reckoned to be John the Baptist or Elijah or another one of the Prophets. This tells us that people had a good opinion of Him, they rated Him well, He was popular. But this was clearly not the full picture. It was moreover not what our Lord expected His own disciples to believe about Him. That is why He goes on to ask them, ‘but who do you say I am?’ He is implying that however good an opinion the general public have of Him, it is not the same as He expects His disciples to have; otherwise, He wouldn’t have asked them the same question. He clearly expects a different answer. It is an important moment. He has never asked them this question before.
So it is that Peter speaks up first, as so often in the Gospels. He seems to be the one to put into words the thoughts of others, to be their spokesman, the one who sees beyond the surface of things to the inner heart. So it is that he proclaims confidently and boldly, ‘You are the Christ!’ But Christ’s response to this, in this Gospel at least, is strangely muted. Not in this Gospel do we hear our Lord’s answering words we know from St Matthew, ‘Blessed are you Peter’ and ‘I say to you that you are the rock etc.’ but instead two unexpected and disconcerting things: first, He issued a command to them to keep this secret, and secondly, He gave them a teaching, but in mysterious terms of Himself as ‘the Son of Man’, a figure taken from prophecy, especially the prophet Daniel, connected with God’s majesty and His will to save mankind, and the prophet Ezechiel, who uses the title ‘Son of Man’ when he was called by God to be His messenger. This mysterious and solemn prophetic teaching is that Christ will suffer grievously, be rejected by the authorities of their own religion and people, that He would even be put to death by them, but also that He would rise to life on the third day after He had been killed.
Peter speaks up again, but now He takes our Lord aside to speak privately to Him, saying that this must not happen – the Christ must not suffer. We can imagine that this is issued more as a rebuke to Jesus than as a pious wish it may not come to pass. It is as though Peter is saying to Jesus: we are investing a great deal in you. We recognise your unique status as the Messiah, and therefore you have a role to fulfil. You must be our leader, the king promised from ages past by God to set His people free from foreign domination. You must certainly not talk in this alarming way about terrible suffering and death. Then comes our Lord’s bombshell, as if the foretelling of suffering and death were not already enough to cause despondency and alarm; for whereas Peter has spoken privately to rebuke our Lord, the Lord for His part openly furiously berates Peter, saying ‘Get behind me, Satan!’ Strong words!
What does our Lord mean by this? Yesterday we celebrated the Feast of the Exaltation, or Triumph, of the Holy Cross. It is a feast of some grandeur, in which we recall the victory won by our Lord over our sin and death by His own death on the Cross. But we should never ponder that victory without recognising the tremendous cost at which it came. In a church in this diocese which I know, built in the 1960’s, the then Parish Priest did not instal a crucifix over the altar but an image of the risen Christ instead. After all, he explained, Christ is not dead now, He is risen! Of course, this is true. But when we behold the cross, as we do particularly on Good Friday, but also throughout the year, we are not acting as though Christ Himself is still on the cross, but rather we are recalling its power, its stupendous cost to Christ for us, a cost which remains always present and relevant. So, just as we cannot have Easter Day without Good Friday, neither is there a resurrection from the dead unless Christ had first died, and the way in which He died was appallingly painful and humiliating: a death reserved to the lowest stratum in Roman society. It is hardly surprising, therefore, given the horror of crucifixion that Peter should have reacted so strongly and negatively to Christ’s prediction here,. However, it certainly is surprising that Our Lord responded so strongly and negatively to Peter, even calling him ‘Satan’.
It must come as a surprise to many to hear our Lord speak like that to Peter. Peter was the first leader of the Apostles, the first Pope, as we should say. But this should help us to learn something very important: that even being the first apostle, even being the first Pope, doesn’t mean Peter always gets things right. And if he didn’t get everything right, then neither does Peter’s successor as pope necessarily get everything right. Christ’s rebuke to Peter in this Gospel could apply to any of Peter’s successors who stray from the truth about our Lord. There have been such popes throughout history: e.g. Pope Liberius in the fourth century and Pope Honorius in the seventh century taught serious errors about Christ. They were subsequently condemned and corrected by the Church in General Councils. Of course, the same thing could happen again. So, if ever a pope should say something which goes against Christ’s teaching such as what we heard just now in the Gospel Acclamation: ‘I am the way, the truth and the life; no one can come to the Father but through me’, and instead should say that e.g. Christ is not the only way to the Father; that all religions are just as valid ways of reaching God as the Catholic one; that while there is one God, the many different religions are like different languages expressing what we humans believe about Him; then such a pope would indeed be worthy of rebuke by the Lord Himself and the Church would have to be wary of him and in due course correct him. Peter cannot change what Christ has taught, neither can his successors. So, just as Peter cannot take away the cross from Christ, neither can he rightly deny what Christ teaches. But it is only the Lord who can rebuke Peter in person. While the rest of the Church may recognise that something may be wrong in what a particular pope says, it is only for that pope’s successor or for the whole Church in Council to correct him.
Our Lord’s next words are central to what we should always remember about His death on the cross: ‘If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me.’ This is why we keep the cross ever before our eyes. By ‘renouncing oneself’, Our Lord means, of course, that we must deny any inclination to live life solely for our own enjoyment. But He also means that we must not abandon the faith He has taught us just because it seems difficult, nor fail to defend any of those truths which we proclaim in the Creed which the rest of the world rejects. For, as our Lord says: ‘anyone who wants to save his life will lose it’, meaning that anyone who chooses to follow the way of the world instead of the way of Christ will not inherit eternal life. It is only if we are prepared to lose our life, that is, to stand out against the mind of the world where this differs from or rejects Christ’s teaching, only if we are prepared not only to stand in witness to Christ the person, but to defend His Gospel which He has taught us and remain faithful to it despite all errors that the world prefers, then indeed we will be saved as Christ has promised.
Make A Comment
Comments (0)