Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Sermons 

Title: "Upside Down and Backward" 

Text: Mark 8:27-28

Of course, because the locks and keys at your own house are so antiquated and so in need of replacement, you have become wise in the ways of keys and locks and doors. You know that there always is a trick, a certain way to jiggle the key in the lock and manipulate the dead bolt to get any door to open. And all your experience and all your tricks are getting you no place fast.

Are you getting frustrated? Are you becoming a little irritated at yourself for failing to see the "obvious" solution to the problem? Are you asking yourself why you ever agreed to do this task for your neighbor? Are you thinking about why you don’t have some WD-40 when you really need it? [pause]

When we find ourselves in such an "impossible" situation, we need to back off a bit and try a different approach. We need to look at the problem from a different perspective. There is the lock on the door; here is the key in our hand. We are making no headway on our own. Do matter what we do, the door does not open.

So, what should we do?

This morning’s lesson from chapter 8 of the Gospel according to Mark offers an answer. If you wish, take a bible from a pew rack, open it up to Mark 8, and together we can take a look at the story. [pause]

After spending some time in Bethsaida, located on the northern end of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus once again was traveling with his disciples. The scene opens with Jesus and his disciples on the way to the villages of Caesarea Philippi, located about 30 miles to the north, in the province of Paneas. That would be about the same as walking from Oak Cliff to Frisco, except that it is much flatter here in north Texas than in northern Palestine. On the way, as he was talking with his disciples, Jesus asked them, "Who do people say that I am?"

If you know a little about the disciples, you will not be surprised to see that Peter was the one who seized the opportunity to answer Jesus’ question. In fact, all three of the synoptic gospels record that Peter was the one who answered him.

Peter replied, "You are the Christ" or "You are the Messiah," depending on whether you are reading the Revised Standard Version or the New Revised Standard Version of the text. It also was typical of these exchanges between Jesus and his disciples that Jesus "charged" his disciples to tell no one about who he is. The RSV offers a rather tepid translation of the Greek verb used in this sentence. The real sense of the verb is much more forceful, and is better translated as "sternly ordered" (as in the NRSV) or even "rebuked." After all, it is the same verb as what appears in Mark 8:33, where Jesus "rebuked Peter." However you take it, Jesus clearly wanted to maintain some secrecy about who he was. This is not surprising in light of the crowds who already were pursuing him through the length and breadth of the land.

In rebuking Peter, Jesus uttered the famous phrase, "Get behind me, Satan." Yet more remarkable is the statement that completes the verse. I invite you to listen to several English translations of this last part of verse 33, where Jesus declared to Peter:

· "For you are not on the side of God, but of men" (RSV),

· "For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things," (NRSV),

· "for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men," (KJV),

· ""You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men," (NIV), and

· "You are thinking not as God thinks, but as human beings do," (NJB).

In every case, you can hear how the side, the things, the mind, and the thinking of God is contrasted with the parallel attributes of human beings.

Next comes a curious reversal of Jesus’ earlier concern for secrecy. He called out to the crowd of people who must have been following at a distance. At his invitation, they surged close enough to hear him, and Jesus said to them, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me" (8:34). Unfortunately, the Gospel does not record the reaction of the crowd, the smaller group of disciples, or even the usually loquacious Peter to this commentary -- but we can imagine that they were mystified.

Consider the scene. Here Jesus is talking to a crowd and to his disciples who already have demonstrated their desire to be his followers. In fact, they had been following him from town to town in numbers large enough to cause him to feel a need to get away from them and to keep secrets from them. Although they may think of themselves as "followers" or "disciples," from Jesus’ perspective the crowd must be prepared to follow in a way that they do not comprehend and that the disciples have just heard – namely, to follow Jesus to the cross.

And now comes the clincher, a set of paradoxical statements that must have left the crowd, the disciples, and even Peter speechless. First, Jesus offers the contrast between saving one’s life and losing it. Then, he ups the ante by adding another condition – losing one’s life for Jesus’ sake and for the sake of the gospel means saving it.

Then Jesus adds a cosmic dimension to the paradox. He asks the multitude and his disciples, "For what does it profit you to gain the whole world, and forfeit your life?" As you can hear, Jesus isn’t offering a nice easy path to those who would follow him. But there was more to the paradox than we can hear in our modern English translations.

The rendering of the Greek verb – which occurs uniquely here in Mark 8:36 and its synoptic parallels (Matthew 16:26 and Luke 9:25) – as "forfeit" fails to do justice to what Jesus was saying to the multitude and to Peter and the other disciples.

Our modern American definition of the verb "forfeit" implies that one surrenders, is deprived of, or gives up some right or property on account of having committed a crime, an offense, an error, or a breach of contract. For example, when persons are convicted of dealing large volumes of drugs, it is common for judges in such cases to order that their personal property be forfeited to the government as part of their penalty. Thus, we modern folk forfeit something by virtue of our own misconduct. A forfeit is a consequence of our own poor choices.

In contrast, the Greek verb (as translated in the RSV and the NRSV, as well as in the NIV) as used in the New Testament was not active, but passive. The forfeit does not happen to you simply as a consequence of your own misdeeds. In the original Greek, the sense of the verb is to receive an injury and to suffer damage, but not because of any crime, offense, error, or breach of contract. You lose your property or your life because of what others do to you, without any prospect of personal gain for yourself.

This begins to drive home the paradox in Jesus’ message to the crowd and to Peter and the disciples. Go back through the steps along the path, as Jesus lays them out:

· Be on God’s side, not on the side of men.

· Lose your life, especially for the sake of the gospel, to gain life.

· Gain the whole world and surely you will suffer undeserved injury and damage.

How are we to make sense of these statements? Recall what Jesus said first to the crowd and to the disciples: "Deny yourself and take up your cross and follow me." Clearly, the cross is the key to life. Like a master key, the cross is all-purpose, good for any situation, capable of overcoming invisible and unexpected circumstances. But even a master key must be inserted in just the right way to open a lock, whether an ordinary lock on your neighbor’s house or the dead bolt on the door to eternal life.

In the end, when you insert the master key into that dead bolt, remember that it goes in not from our human perspective but in terms of God’s way of thinking. Through our works alone, we are incapable of opening the door to eternity. God opens the door so that we may enter.

And how then does the door get opened? God gives us a master key – the cross – and showed us in the life and death of Jesus how to place it in the lock in the door of life eternal. But the key must be inserted in a special way – not in the way of the crowd or the disciples with their focus on human things – but in the way of Jesus with his focus on divine things. In the end, the master key that is the cross does not open the lock in the expected way. On the contrary, it only works in the paradoxical way of Jesus, inserted upside down and backward. Amen.