Home By Another Way (Mark 8: 31-38) 3/4/12

          When the Navy and I kissed each other goodbye, I came home to find a job. I was a college graduate and a veteran Naval Officer. I felt confident I would find something nearby to get started in business. I applied for a job with the textile mill in my hometown. I had spent four summers working in the mill during college and I was a hometown boy. I knew I would be hired. Well, I wasn’t. I didn’t have a textile degree, so the mill wouldn’t hire me to work in manufacturing. Actually, they did offer me a job, but in marketing, which required a move to New York City. No other offers appeared, so off I went to the big city. Six months later, I was in Chicago. After a couple years of travel around the Midwest, I had had enough.  Big city life wasn’t for me. I was accepted to law school and enrolled. A few years later, I returned to my hometown and started a law practice. It wasn’t a straight line, but it worked. Through a detour to big city life, I had found my calling for the next 35 years. I had come home, but not in the way I had planned. I came home by another way.

About seven years ago, God started me along another road, this time to ministry. This road also involved detours through more law practice, lay pastor training and even seminary. Along the way, he introduced me to a little church in South Carolina tucked off the main road in Chesterfield County. Now twice a week, I leave my hometown to come to what I am beginning to call home. Once again, I have come home by another way.

          The gospel of Matthew tells a similar story. Magi come from the east following a star in the sky. They stop in the Jewish capital of Jerusalem, for if they are looking for the king of the Jews, where else should one first look than the capital city? They are granted an audience with Herod, who plots to use them as unwitting spies. The Magi will be no help to Herod, for after finding the Christ child, they are warned in a dream not to go back to him. Instead, Matthew tells us that they return home to their country by another way.    

James Taylor wrote a song about Matthew’s Magi story and called it Home By Another Way. In her book by the same title, Barbara Brown Taylor tells the rest of the tale in this fashion: After seeing the Christ child, the Magi did not have the benefit of the star to guide them home. Because of the warning in the dream, they would not be returning by the route with which they were familiar. The maps they had made to get there were of little value to them when apprised of their new journey. They would have to rely on the guidance of God and the kindness of others to find their way.

 In the eighth chapter of Mark’s gospel Jesus makes the first of three predictions of his passion. He will do so again in chapters 9 and 10. He has begun the journey to Jerusalem, both in his teachings and in the slow, unforced march south from the region of Galilee to the city of Jerusalem. He is starting the journey home. It is time to reveal his identity. His time on earth and his ministry are drawing to a close. Jesus knows this all too well. He not only knows his time is short, but also that his disciples still don’t get what is takes to be on his team.  

God is the author of this journey. From the region of the Sea of Galilee as a ministry base to the temple in Jerusalem and a hill called Calvary as the situs for the passion story, Jesus continues his upside down, inside out Messiahship. Referring to himself as the Son of Man, he predicts his own death. Jesus is preparing to go home, but he, like the Magi, is going home by another way. What follows among him, Peter, the disciples and Satan, is both lesson and challenge. It is a lesson of selflessness and a challenge for us to follow. It is not without danger and it promises both a hard road and a narrow entry gate.

Jesus teaches of suffering, rejection and death. It is a new and startling revelation. The disciples are not ready for it. They are following the Messiah. Messiah will come in glory and bring the restoration of God’s people as pre-eminent among the nations. Everyone is looking for a military and political overthrow of the powers that be. They look for a righteous and powerful king like the one foreseen in Isaiah or Jeremiah. Such is the thought of Peter when he takes Jesus aside and rebukes him. He is concerned for Jesus and does not see why Jesus must suffer at anyone’s hands. We would have done the same thing had we been there.

Jesus returns the favor, but not just to Peter, He does rebuke Peter, but he has turned and is looking at all his disciples. The Greek verb (epetimao) translated here as “rebuke” is the same word used to describe Jesus’ silencing of the demons in Mark 1. It is strong. Why does Jesus turn so hard on Peter and the disciples? Why does he spit out “Get thee behind me, Satan!”   Compare this to the passage about Jesus’ temptation at the beginning of his ministry. Jesus must feel like he is right back there in the wilderness being tempted by Satan. This time the temptation is more subtle, and in that way, perhaps even more dangerous. It comes from a beloved friend. Jesus is asked to take the comfortable route, the safe way. He is asked to exercise dominion over the situation, to summon his power and take what he wants. He does not have to go to Jerusalem at all. He can carve his own kingdom by just snapping his fingers.

Mark tells us that as Jesus taught, he referred to himself as the Son of Man. Only Jesus did this. No one else referred to him by this title. Son of Man is Jesus’ favorite phrase by far when referring to himself. It occurs eighty-one times in the New Testament. When Jesus uses the term, he invokes the Old Testament image created in Daniel 7 of one “coming with the clouds of heaven…” one who has been “given authority, glory, and sovereign power...” And yet, with all this power at his disposal, Jesus is so much more than the title. He is sheer, total humanity in its highest order. In his humanity, he is also you. He is me. He is each of us and all of us, and if he ever is to be able to invite us to take up the cross, he knows he must shoulder it first himself.    

So why is Jesus so mad? Perhaps it is because Peter has hit Jesus’ soft spot. Peter reminds Jesus that it could be so, so much easier. It is as though he is right back in the desert, hungry and tired and frustrated and vulnerable. But our Savior is obedient and our Savior trusts. So Jesus the man summons up his courage and overcomes his fear and again rejects the easy way. He turns on the Twelve, who hold nothing in their hearts but love for him. Like we so often do to our own loved ones out of a desire to protect them, the disciples unwittingly cast the seeds of disobedience at Jesus’ feet, and he not only rejects the idea, but also rebukes the evil intent carried in the suggestion. He trusts our heavenly Father, and our heavenly Father has told him that he must come home by another way…the way of the cross. Home will be found not through the power of the sword, but through the blood of the cross. In the upside down world of our Savior, his strength is found in his submission; his power in his servant hood.  

In Mark’s gospel our Savior asks us to take up the cross. That concept has been watered down over time. Today we might say that if we have arthritis or some other chronic condition, then it is our cross to bear. This is not what Jesus meant. In his book Plain Talk on Mark, Maynard Gutzke challenges us in this way: “You and I are to have this in mind: the way we live and the way we follow the Lord Jesus Christ is so important that if we shrink from it, if we fail to follow him or yield to him, we are sure to suffer the consequences.” A verse from James Taylor’s ballad reminds us of the ever present Satan:

          Well it pleases me to be here

          And to sing this song tonight

They tell me that life is a miracle

And I figured that they’re right

But Herod’s always out there

He’s got our cards on file

It’s a lead pipe cinch, if we give an inch

Old Herod likes to take a mile

What does Jesus want of us? He wants us to be the biggest losers. Tune in every week to the NBC television series Biggest Loser and you can watch a modern day parallel to his teaching. Overweight contestants compete for a $100,000 cash prize which they can win by losing the greatest percentage of weight.  After weeks and even months of exercise and diet and conditioning, the final weigh-in occurs. The winner is the biggest loser. Jesus asks us to do much the same thing in the way we live our lives. If we want to save our lives, we must lose them to our Savior and the gospel. How do we do this? We live not for ourselves but for our Savior, our neighbor, our church. We make investments, not so much in the stock market, but more so in the kingdom of heaven.

The television show is not a bad parallel to the teaching of Jesus. If you want to win the prize, you have to shed the baggage.  When Jesus comes again in glory on the clouds of heaven, wouldn’t it be nice if we have been busy exercising and dieting and conditioning ourselves in His name! Wouldn’t it be nice if we were found to be the biggest losers of our own interests in our attempt to help others! Wouldn’t it be nice if, instead of taking the easy way, we come home by another way? The way of the cross is an offer not of comfort, but of peace; not of security but of danger; not of long life but of the fullness of life. It is the road less traveled, the path less taken. But for those who take up that cross… it has contained within it a peace that truly does pass all understanding…and the retirement benefits are simply out of this world!