Mark 8:22-30 Sermon by the Revd Karl Przywala - Part 1 There are 16 chapters in Mark’s Gospel account. So, where does the midway point come? You can do the math – chapter eight, which is our reading for today. May I encourage you to turn it – it’s on page 977 in the church Bibles, Mark chapter eight, verses 22 to 30. Mark’s is the earliest Gospel account. It’s sometimes regarded as a bit ‘rough and ready’. It’s the shortest: somewhat pithy and punchy; the Greek in which it’s written isn’t the most sophisticated. But that doesn’t mean that it’s without style and structure. Mark has a message he wants to get across and he’s planned out how to do it. This passage, at the heart of his work, is a crucial turning point that he’s been working up to. Something in it is very important to what he wants to say. It’s in the section the NIV has headed Peter’s confession of Christ. Verse 27: Jesus asked his disciples, “Whom do people say I am?” Mark has already provided variants on this. Think back to Jesus’ calming of the storm. Afterward, at the end of chapter four, the disciples asked each other, “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!” At chapter one, verse 27, we read: “The people were all so amazed that they asked each other, ‘What is this? A new teaching – and with authority! He [Jesus] gives orders to evil spirits and they obey him.” The evil spirits knew who Jesus is. Chapter one, verse 24: “A man...who was possessed by an evil spirit cried out ‘What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?...I know who you are – the Holy One of God!’” Chapter five, verse 7: a man with an evil spirit “shouted at the top of his voice, ‘What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?’” Mark wanted us, his readers, to know the answer right from the start. At Jesus’ baptism in chapter one, “a voice came from heaven: ‘You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.” In Mark’s account, the voice speaks directly to Jesus. But Mark wants us to be in on the information. It’s as if we’re watching a drama unfold, knowing something that the characters struggle to grasp. Perhaps we find ourselves egging them on: “Don’t you get it yet?” We’ve got some way to go in our preaching series before we reach chapter 15. But perhaps you already know verse 39. I’m afraid that I can’t read it without thinking of John Wayne, who spoke the verse in the film The Greatest Story Ever Told: “When the centurion, who stood there in front of Jesus, heard his cry and saw how he died, he said, ‘truly this man was the Son of God.’” Mark wants to leave us in no doubt about this fact. Verse 27 of our passage in chapter eight: Jesus asked his disciples, “Whom do people say I am?” Don’t you just love it when someone comes out with, “People are saying”? It’s a way of saying, this is what I think. So what are people saying? Verse 28, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” We might be tempted to settle for this. A lesser Jesus but in good company. I think it’s in the film Paradise Road that the Japanese commandant of the internment camp declares, “Japanese Empire number one, British Empire number ten.” I think I and the friend with whom I’d watched the movie came away thinking he’d been fairly decent to give us number ten slot! Actually, we were meant to understand that the scale only ran from one to ten. People had got it wrong about Jesus. Yes, good company: John the Baptist, Elijah, the prophets. But if we were to settle for this, we’d be underselling Jesus. People do so. They settle for a lesser Jesus. But this doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t fit in with what we’ve been shown about Jesus – what he’s done. And it doesn’t fit in with what Jesus says about himself. CS Lewis wrote in his book Mere Christianity: “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about [Jesus]: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.”
Posted on: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 08:06:43 +0000
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