St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN, and the MISSION HALL, GLENORCHY
READINGS
Genesis 17: 1-7, 15-16
Psalm 22: 21-31
Mark 8: 31-38
As you may recall, last week we touched on two
highly regarded recitations of Mark’s Gospel-account that have gone the rounds
of the English speaking world in the decades that I refer to as post Beatles western
society. Will you to be at one of those recitations you would have been
listening and watching 4 just a little under two hours to hear the 11,300 words
delivered. If you were part of a typical audience, and indeed if you were a
part of Mark’s original audiences, you would have been spellbound.
You would also probably have noticed that this
passage in Mark refers back to an incident some hundreds of words earlier. In Chapter
6 Mark relates the occasions on which Herod and others were asked to explain
who they thought Jesus was. Those kind of summary statements are regurgitated
in this scene, But the impulsive Peter is prepared to go one step further.
There is a sense in which he gets it right, but while the comparison is
horrendously unfair to Peter, I’m reminded of moments in which Mr. Trump has
been asked to make some comment about or based on the Bible. Some syllables
emerge, but they seem to be empty of the powerful insight that is granted
Christ-followers through the input of the one we know as Ruarch, Pneuma,
Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity.
And as we journey on through Mark’s Gospel, even
without the references to the Spirit that emerge in John and Luke and Paul, we
will begin to realise that that is precisely the point of understanding to
which Mark is leading us. To import from those other biblical writers for a
moment, Mark’s point is that until we have encountered the full extent of the
descent of God in Christ into human experience, and the ascent of God in Christ
into the unimaginable experience of resurrection, we have no grasp of the Jesus
event or the Jesus message.
And for once our Hebrew scripture reading provides
us with some help, a teaching aid or corroboration from a more ancient time.
Because the story of Abraham and Sarah provides some useful parallels as a
journey from below par comprehension, and in the case of Sarah, bitter
incomprehension, to enlightenment and realisation of the power and majesty of
God. That story too is something of which we will gain glimpses in the months
to come.
But for now, Mark turns to Jesus and his very stark
dealing with Peter’s brash but uncomprehending words. There is no genuine way
to wriggle out of the phrase “Get behind me Satan.” Jesus is simply not being
warm and cuddly, fuzzy and sweet in this moment of bleak contrast between
misunderstanding and understanding. For once I’m helpfully reminded of my Year
5 maths teacher of very unblessèd
memory, who when I brought to his desk my maths book with my attempt at the
answer of what I presume was a reasonably complex question, exclaimed “close
enough” when the answer I reached was only one or two digits from the truth. In
many ways that was the end of my mathematical career, but that is another story.
The point made here is not mathematical but what theologians call “soteriological”
– there’s my Scrabble word for the week – that is to say concerning salvation, or
as I would prefer to say, concerning our surrender to God’s immeasurable and
unquenchable love.
Peter was right, but if I can now be unmathematical,
not right enough. Like the ball of a bowler that shaves the stumps but does not
dislodge the bales, this moment illustrates a miss, not a hit, an empty appeal,
not a wicket.
Jesus of course goes on to outline some astounding
demands of his followers. I for one will admit that I have not accomplished
them. Few do. Some would say none do, I though make allowances for those who
surrender their lives in martyrdom for their faith or for those whose lives are
an immeasurable testimony to faith; I think of a Desmond Tutu or for example a Céire
[kayra] Kealty (you’ll have to Google her!).
For most of us though the journey continues to be a
stumbling, meandering, rather Peterish series of blunders, and for many of us,
and I think of myself, ordinariness. But that is not the point Mark is making. Or
it is, but indirectly. Because in the end the overall story that Mark tells is
of ordinary people who dared to stumble, but stumble in the way of the cross.
Peter got it wrong, and so will we, but he did stumble on, and eventually
becomes the sign of what a life can be invaded by the restorative patient love
of the risen Christ made present through the Spirit of God.
[For those of us at Saint Peter’s the banner above
my head remains as an enigmatic reminder of the transformation of an ordinary
life. While I suspect it is the stuff of legend, it is traditional to believe
that Peter was eventually executed by crucifixion upside down, because he felt
himself unworthy to be executed in the same way as his saviour. It’s a powerful
legend, though somewhat unlikely psychologically, militarily or historically.
The Romans were unlikely to acquiesce to such a request, hastening the
suffering thereby of the martyr’s death. But it stands outside history, a story
inflamed by spiritual possibilities to remind us that all of us who stumble can
open ourselves up, often through repeated stumbling, lifetimes of stumbling, to
be agents of the Reign of God and its proclamation in word and preferably
action.]
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