On the Road at Caesarea: The Human One Comes

Proper 19/17th after Pentecost, Year B: Mark 8: 27-38

This passage is the center of Mark’s Gospel, the hinge on which the two halves of the story turn. Morna Hooker represents most commentators in saying “the character of the story changes at this point.”¹ Until now, Jesus has ministered in Galilee and has performed many miracles, teaching (but not so much) of the reign of God and having the rapt attention of crowds, as well as forms of opposition both human and demonic. Now in these dramatic exchanges with Peter and the teaching about his passion, Jesus reveals something only hinted at previously concerning his work and the nature of events to come; with this revelation begins his fateful journey to Jerusalem. From here on, he and the disciples will be on the road: he will teach them much more actively; only a few miracles will follow, and these will have symbolic significance; and the events to come in Jerusalem will be the constant reference point.

The theme running through this small but complex narrative (confession, prediction, denial/rebuke, teaching about discipleship) set “on the road” (v. 27) around Caesarea Philippi—named for Augustus Caesar and symbolically a center of imperial power—is the identity and mission of Jesus himself, beginning with his question to the disciples “who do people say that I am?” We can assume the initial diverse answers are accurate; their variety suggests not just that Jesus’ ministry was getting attention, but also that there was some uncertainty even about the categories to put it in. Was he a prophet, or a revolutionary leader, or a second coming (already) of John the Baptist?

When Jesus drills down further by asking what the disciples themselves think, and Peter famously answers “You are the Christ,” we have reached a real but brief high point in the Gospel. Jesus’ response—the now-familiar command to silence—confirms that Peter is correct. The warning to silence, by the way, is stern—this is the same word that will appear twice more in the passage when Peter and Jesus exchange what are termed “rebukes” in the NRSV. “Christ” is of course “Messiah,” Hebrew/Aramaic for “anointed one,” rendered into Greek. Jesus, like kings of old (and prophets, and priests) is “anointed” to fulfill God’s plan for Israel. There were already expectations of such a leader, although some have exaggerated the extent to which people in Jesus time already expected “the Messiah,” as though this idea were universal and defined in some sort of field guide to Jewish religious claimants. The expectation of redemption was real, but the way some anointed leader would appear and lead remained quite open to confusion and contest.

The nature of being “Christ” is contested within this story too. When Peter’s accurate acknowledgement of Jesus’ messianic status becomes the point for Jesus to elaborate, a clash of understandings emerges. Note, by the way, that Mark has either no knowledge of, or no interest in, the scene Matthew adds here where the “keys” are verbally given to Peter —always Simon Peter up to this point for Matthew—along with the “new” name of Peter or “rock.” Mark has neither this “investiture” story nor the name change; for Mark, Peter’s name changed when he was called to be among the twelve (see 3:16). Here Peter simply represents the possibility—or rather the likelihood—of thinking we know the significance of Jesus yet really having no clue. Calling Jesus “Messiah,” believing in him (or thinking we do) is not the solution we assume; following him, being “on the road,” will be the correct answer.

Jesus’ elaboration on his identity as “Christ” involves an odd shift of language, since he speaks not about what will happen to “the Messiah” (or “to Jesus” for that matter), but to the “Son of Man.” This term has appeared only a couple of times before in this Gospel (2:10, 2:28) but will recur more often now. In Hebrew and Aramaic the idiom “son of x” is initially just a way of saying that someone belongs to the category “x.” Ezekiel is notably addressed by God as “son of man” (or “human being”) just as a way to emphasize his mortal human status in the conversation with the divine; he is a human, one of us.

However most scholars see this use of the term in Mark as echoing the Book of Daniel, where a heavenly figure with human appearance (a “son of Man”) was described as receiving dominion from God during a conflict between good and evil (Dan 7:13). This phrase is invoked by Jesus to suggest that the same sort of apocalyptic struggle between good and evil described in Daniel’s visions (and of course in the Revelation to John) is also going on here. So while it still has connotations of “one of us,” the title suggests a specific, representative human figure who will be glorified by God in the midst of a cosmic combat. Jesus’ coming contest is not merely with human authority figures, but a struggle between invisible as well as visible forces. Of course this has been emphasized in other ways earlier in Mark’s Gospel, such as in Jesus’ contests with demonic powers; but Rome’s occupation, local forms of oppression, as well as disease and human need, are all part of what he will overcome.

Peter, from the “Arian” Baptistery, Ravenna. Wikimedia Commons.

Now however Jesus suggests this cosmic struggle is how messiahship will actually work. Another element of Jesus’ prediction confirms that his vision draws on the kind of apocalypticism depicted in Daniel: the resurrection. The expectation of a resurrection from the dead was not for an event that would take place in the regular course of history, but only as a part of the end of time, the great final struggle between good and evil. While in this conversation it seems to get lost amid the gloomy and shocking note of the Human One suffering and being killed, we are being shown here too that Jesus does not see his struggle as a merely personal, political, or religious one, but as God’s definitive intervention in history.

This is the first thing Peter misses, the real nature of the struggle and its scope. Even more difficult for him (and perhaps for us) however seems to be how the Christ who is the Son of Man has a destiny that foregrounds suffering and death. In contrast to his urging silence about his identity as the Christ, Jesus by contrast speaks openly (v. 32) about the fate of the Son of Man. The nature of messiahship is thus a surprising fact that must be known, while Jesus being the Messiah is an obvious reality that must be kept secret. This contrast in communication strategies for these two truths parallels Peter’s mistake; he has the right word, but no idea what it means.

Peter thus rebukes Jesus for offering this deeply unappealing picture of his destiny, and hence such a dispiriting definition of messianic identity and call. Peter’s own notion of what it meant to be Christ represents one existing and classic view, that of the Messiah as a new Davidic king who would ride out in triumph to rid Israel of its occupiers and oppressors, and live gloriously and without suffering. We will see in the remainder of the Gospel that the place of David as a figure of Messianic hope is indeed relevant. Yet this means Peter is at least as much wrong as he is right when he calls Jesus “Christ”; like for so many others since, here it is a name much evoked, yet which turns out to be without substance. Peter’s alternative account earns the harsh judgement that he speaks for Satan, which again reminds us that a battle with more than human dimensions is being undertaken here.

Jesus’ own account of his messianic identity as the Human One is shocking, but does not come completely out of the blue. Isaiah’s famous “Servant songs,” passages which depict God’s servant—perhaps Israel itself personified—as undergoing suffering before vindication, are one key source for thinking differently about how divinely-appointed leadership might work. Appropriately the Roman and Revised (Track 2) lectionaries give us part of one of these passages for the first reading, from Isa 50.

If this were not enough though, Jesus teaches the disciples—with the crowd invited in close (v. 34), so this is not being keep quiet—that this confronting story is not for the Human One alone. Instead the revelation of true messiahship comes with a remarkable (and surely off-putting) invitation to follow him (again, “on the road,” at least by implication). The call to “take up the cross” in particular now points the finger at the Roman occupying power, whose distinctive instrument of torture the cross was. Centuries of mis-reading this image must be noted; Jesus does not invite us to offer our various forms of suffering to God—or rather, this is not the point here. Discipleship, he suggests, is at least by the world’s (or Peter’s) standards struggle, risk, insecurity, shame, and vulnerability to suffering.

The hope and reward of discipleship are not personal success, nor for that matter the smooth progress of a moral arc bending towards justice, but a promised divine reversal of the apparent course of history. Hope for Israel and for these Galileans (and for the readers) lies, Jesus says, not in triumphant progress towards comfort, freedom, and prosperity, but in the paradoxical path that leads through Cross to resurrection. This does not mean that Jesus’ invitation is any less politically or socially significant, let alone that it is only about post-mortem existence; it means that the power of God is not to be identified with what we think of as success. This theology of the Cross will occupy the second half of the Gospel, as Jesus and the confused disciples continue “on the way.”

1. Morna D. Hooker, The Gospel According to Saint Mark. London: A. & C. Black, 1991, p. 200.