The Meaning of Messiah

Sermon for September 13, 2009 Proper 19 Text:  Mark 8:27-38 Title:  The Meaning of a Messiah A.  You might remember comedian Yakov Smirnoff, who liked to joke that when he arrived in the US from Russia, he wasn't prepared for the incredible variety of instant products that he found in American grocery stores.  "On my first shopping trip," he said, "I saw powdered milk; you just add water and you get milk.  Then I saw powdered orange juice.  You just add water and you get orange juice.  Then I saw baby powder, and I thought, 'What a country!'" He does have a point, though.  We all love to have everything we need instantly.  We love our fast food.  When we buy something that has to be ordered, we get a little miffed because we can't have it yesterday.  When we see the doctor, we want to see him or her right now!  All this is human nature, and it is as old as humanity. In Jesus' day, people wanted instant salvation.  They wanted someone to come along, and free them from their Roman overlords.  And they would follow just about anybody who seemed to be able to do that.  Josephus, the 1st century Jewish historian, records any number of so-called leaders – dare we say "Messiahs" – who led a group of followers in rebellion against the foreign occupiers.  They always came to a bad end.  The people in those days believed Jesus was the instant salvation Messiah.  They flocked around Him because they thought He was going to mount the white horse and knock the Romans off their high horse.  For a time, His own disciples even thought they could be Cabinet members in His new regime.  But as we shall see in today's passage of Scripture, this is not what true Messiah-ship is all about. B.   This morning's passage has a lot going on in it.  I think, though, that we can squeeze the most meaning out of it by realizing that these few verses address and answer three very basic questions, in this order:  1) Who is Jesus, 2) What does being the Christ (i.e. the Messiah) really mean, and 3) What does being a disciple really mean. When you get right down to it, these are also three of the most basic questions people of faith ever ponder.  The answers to the first two critically affects our own answer to the third.   It is obvious from the way Mark's Gospel is laid out that he thought this incident was a critical turning point in Jesus' ministry.  Prior to this exchange, Jesus and His disciples were in ministry in and around the Sea of Galilee.  After their visit to Caesaria Philipi, Jesus and His followers headed towards Jerusalem.  Before the events of this passage transpired, Jesus concentrates on healing and teaching; He both proclaims and demonstrates that the Kingdom of God is coming in power through Him.  But after these verses, Jesus starts to talk about His death and Resurrection.  In addition, if you add up all the verses in Mark and divide by two, the exact center of the Gospel lands at this story.  So what Mark is proclaiming here about Jesus is of critical importance.   Now we also should notice a few things about the geography of the region, because they are also helpful in understanding the passage.  Caesaria Philipi is located in the area we call the Golan Heights.  Damascus is a mere 50 miles to the northeast. The Golan Heights are beautiful rolling green hills that overlook the Sea of Galilee.  From this vantage point, Jesus and the 12 could see all the sites of their previous ministry stretching out below them.  Caesaria Philipi was at that time also home to a magnificent temple to the god Pan; tourists came from all over to visit the site.  So given all this as a backdrop, Jesus asks his followers, "Who do people say that I am?" What's the word on the street?  What are people twittering about me?  They answer, "Some say John the Baptist" (by this time he was dead, killed by King Herod – maybe he had come back to life!); "others say Elijah" (tradition had it that he would return immediately prior to the coming of the Messiah); "still others say one (of the more ordinary) of the prophets". But then Jesus gets straight to the heart of the matter:  "But, you, who do you say that I am?"  Peter gives both an honest and straightforward answer:  "You are the Messiah," a term which means "anointed one," the divinely chosen leader of the people.  So in answer to the first of our three questions – Who is Jesus – we see that Peter answers correctly.  He is God's anointed one, anointed to perform a divinely mandated plan.   But when we take up the second question – What does being the Messiah mean? – we find that Peter and the others are very confused.  Over the course of the Galilean ministry, the disciples just hadn't gotten who Jesus was.  When Jesus calms the storm in chapter 4, the disciples responded, "Who then is this, that even the wind and sea obey him?"  He had been called a teacher, and had called himself the Son of Man, who has the authority to forgive sins.  In short, none of the disciples had shown any comprehension of Jesus' identity until this point in the narrative.  By now they have correctly figured out that He is the Messiah, but in the very next verses we find that their knowledge of real Messiah-ship is sorely lacking.  As we discovered last week, this is why Jesus tells them to remain silent about the whole matter.  No one could understand what kind of Messiah Jesus was until they view His Messiah-ship through the lens of the Cross.   Jesus 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".  To be the true Messiah, Jesus has to undergo suffering, death and resurrection — there's just no way around it.  It is the only way God can accomplish the salvation of the world!  Then and only then will Jesus be seen clearly as a divinely chosen leader.  So the position of Messiah requires a cross before a crown.  Until he completes these duties, Jesus doesn't want people talking about him.  But Jesus is keenly aware that many people are looking for a military Messiah — God's Commander in Chief — to drive the Romans out of Jerusalem and restore the kingdom to Israel. When Jesus talks openly about his suffering and death, Peter takes him aside and begins to rebuke him. It's inconceivable to Peter that God's anointed leader would have to suffer a humiliating death!  But Jesus quickly turns the tables and rebukes Peter, saying, "Get behind me, Satan!  You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things". Peter began to "rebuke" Jesus, using the same verb Jesus used when he "sternly ordered them" to keep his identity as the Messiah a secret.  The same word describes Jesus' actins to silence the demons he encountered or to describe His calming the wind and the waves of a violent storm at sea.  It's a word that means to strongly correct a person's way of acting or thinking, much like a person might correct a naughty child.  Peter's rebuke doesn't last long, however.  He is rebuked, in turn, by Jesus, again using the same verb. When Jesus said, "Get behind me Satan!" to Peter, He wasn't actually calling Peter the Devil.  But Satan can work through any of us if we don't understand the ways of the Lord, to resist those ways.  The question is, who is in charge?  If Satan is in charge, then Jesus doesn't have to suffer and die; Peter unknowingly reflected this when He rebuked Jesus about discussing His future death and Resurrection.  Of course Satan, working through Peter, doesn't want God to effect a Crucifixion, because that is the only way Satan is finally and ultimately defeated.  Satan is tempting Jesus to resist His God-necessitated death on the cross, much like the way He tempted Jesus in the Wilderness.  Peter was deceived by the Master of Lies.  But as we all know, God is in charge.  Jesus rebuked Satan when He rebuked Peter.  Now we know what being the Messiah really means.  It means that Jesus/Messiah had to die, so all people might have eternal life.  Jesus has to lead; His disciples have to follow after Him.  He leads us to die on the cross, and to rise again in God's love.  And like Him, we too have to journey right behind Him to the Cross.   When Poland was still under communist rule, the government ordered crucifixes removed from classroom walls, just as they had been banned in factories, hospitals, and other public institutions. Catholic bishops attacked the ban that had stirred waves of anger and resentment all across Poland. Ultimately the government relented, insisting that the law remain on the books, but agreeing not to press for removal of the crucifixes, particularly in the schoolrooms. But a certain zealous Communist school administrator decided that the law was the law. So one evening he had seven large crucifixes removed from lecture halls where they had hung since the school's founding in the 1920's.  Days later, a group of parents entered the school and hung more crosses. The administrator promptly took these down as well. The next day two-thirds of the school's six hundred students staged a sit-in. When heavily armed riot police arrived to eject the students from the building, they went into the streets. Then they marched, crucifixes held high, to a nearby church where 2500 other students from nearby schools joined them for a time of prayer in support of the protest. Soldiers surrounded the church. But the pictures from inside of students holding crosses high above their heads flashed around the world.   And the priest who led the prayer service told a watching world that one should never doubt the power of the Cross. C.  This leads us to the final question the passage addresses, the most important question of all:  What does being a disciple mean?  Here, my friends, is where the theological rubber hits the road of life.  And with what has already been said, I bet you can figure out the answer.  Jesus said to His disciples, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me." That's the key to being a disciple:  one follows Jesus.  But wait!  But wait!  I'm too young to die!, one might ask.  Jesus doesn't ask us to literally climb up on the cross with Him.  But what He does ask – indeed, He demands – is that we die to self.  Jesus invites us to put Him on the throne of life, at the center, not out on the sidelines somewhere, only addressed when we have an emergency.  Jesus invites us to kill our own self-will and self-love!  And in its place, one puts love of God before all things in life.  As He goes on to say in this morning's passage of Scripture, "Whoever loses his life for My sake and the Gospel's will save it!"  In the original Greek, the word for "life" is better translated as "self".  We die to self.  We live for Christ. Now dying to self is not the same as hating myself.  Rather, it's that we find our most authentic way to live when we walk with the Lord and follow His Will for our lives.  This is not always easy to do.  It takes a lifetime of practice.  We keep taking our self-will back after it is surrendered and placing it on the throne of our existences again.  Losing one's life for Christ's sake and the sake of the Gospel  is not always an easy way to live.  It requires us to sometimes take a stand that may be very unpopular.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German theologian whose faith led him to die at the hands of the Nazi's at the age of 39, expressed it this way:  "When Christ calls a man, He bids Him come and die."  In his case, it was a literal death.  For all of us, it's a death of our old self-will and self-centeredness, and a life lived for the Lord. Now here's the crux of the matter.  When we answer the question Who is Jesus and we answer the question What does being a Messiah mean, then we can answer for ourselves what does being a disciple mean.  Who is Jesus?  He is the Son of God, God incarnate, who came to earth as a man to die for us so we might know forgiveness of sins and relationship with the Father.  What does being a Messiah mean?  It means dying so others might live.  What does being a disciple mean?  It means following behind the One who died for me, and dying to self while living for God.  Or, as the apostle Paul puts the matter, "I have been crucified with Christ; it is not I who live but Christ who lives in me."  Being a disciple means dying daily to self, and living daily for Christ.  It means learning about the Lord through being in Church and in Bible studies.  It means praying throughout the day, talking to the Lord, and striving to follow His Will for our lives.  And it means loving others as we love ourselves.  You may know about the annual Ididerod dogsled race in Alaska; it is a grueling 1000-mile race over snow and ice, run for prize money and prestige. You may not know that the race commemorates an original race run to save lives. Back in January of 1926, six-year-old Richard Stanley showed symptoms of diphtheria, signaling the possibility of an outbreak in the small town of Nome. When the boy passed away a day later, Dr. Curtis Welch began immunizing children and adults with an experimental but effective anti-diphtheria serum. But it wasn't long before Dr. Welch's supply ran out, and the nearest serum was 1000 miles of frozen wilderness away.  Amazingly, a group of trappers and prospectors volunteered to cover the distance with their dog teams!  Operating in relays from trading post to trapping station and beyond, one sled started out from Nome while another, carrying the serum, started from Nenana.  Oblivious to frostbite, fatigue, and exhaustion, the teamsters mushed relentlessly until, after 144 hours in minus 50-degree winds, the serum was delivered to Nome. As a result, only one other life was lost to the potential epidemic. Their sacrifice had given an entire town the gift of life. What kind of disciple are we?  The question is answered by posing another question, namely, Who is Jesus Christ to me?  A prophet.  A good man.  A remarkable teacher.  Or is He the Son of God, who loved the likes of me so much that He died so we might live. This is the Jesus we need to follow.  There is no other.  Amen.   Keith Almond P.O. Box 4388 Leesburg, VA  20177 703-344-3569 almond_keith@yahoo.com