two digits from the truth

 

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 
St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN, and the MISSION HALL, GLENORCHY

 

on the SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT (February 25^th) 2024

 

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.]