Last August I
attended the Men’s Health Fair at Jewish Hospital, as I do every year. One of the stations I visit at the
Health Fair provides eye exams.
After I read the eye chart I was surprised to learn that I have 20/20 vision,
which means my eyesight has actually improved in the past few years. After being told I had 20/20 vision I
held up my reading glasses and asked, then
why do I need these?
In reality,
our vision is affected by a number of factors. For me, lighting is very important. If I have the benefit of good lighting,
I don’t need to put on my reading glasses. Sometimes, however, such as when Tanya and I go out to eat
at a nice restaurant, I have difficulty reading the menu. In nicer eating establishments the
lighting is often dim and the menus reflect what little light there is. Our evening out together is not helped
when I take out my phone, turn on the flashlight app, and hold it over the menu
so that I can read it. Perhaps
that’s one of the reasons why we don’t often go out to eat at nice restaurants. Just as my physical vision is affected
by a number of factors, so is my spiritual vision. I might, on some days, have great insight and understanding,
while on other days I can be remarkably dense and lacking in perception.
This morning
we begin a new series of messages that will take us through the month of March
and into Easter. The title of the
series is What Faith Can See. In this series I will speak about
passages in the gospels that demonstrate how difficult it was for the disciples
and others to understand the words and actions of Jesus. At times, such as in the first portion
of the passage we study today, the disciples could show a great level of
insight and in the very next moment, not so much.
Lest we be too
hard on the disciples, and the earliest followers of Jesus, we don’t always do
that well ourselves when it comes to understanding what Jesus taught, and we
have the benefit of 2,000 years of insight and understanding to help us. All of us are limited in our
understanding because we are conditioned by so many factors, such as our
historical time period, by the society in which we live, by our beliefs, by our fears, and any number of other factors. Despite the fact that we live in a time
that is so much more technologically and scientifically advanced, it is not
necessarily any easier for us to understand Jesus now than it was for the
disciples. As Jesus was constantly
working to open the eyes of his disciples, he seeks to do the same for us as
well.
In our
Scripture text for this morning we come to the well-known story of Jesus taking
his disciples to the area of Caesarea Philippi, where he asked them, who do people say that I am? After listening to their responses,
Jesus then asked, but what about
you? Who do you say that I am? Peter gave a response that showed a
great deal of understanding, as he said, you
are the Christ. Peter was
correct, but only a few moments later he demonstrated a complete lack of
understanding about what it meant that Jesus was the Christ. Jesus, after telling the disciples
about his death, was taken aside by Peter, who
began to rebuke him. Though
Peter had a great flash of insight to understand that Jesus was the Messiah, he
did not understand what Messiahship meant.
Follow along
with me as I read Mark 8:27-37 –
27 Jesus and his disciples went on to the
villages around Caesarea Philippi. On the way he asked them, “Who do people say
I am?”
28 They replied, “Some say John the Baptist;
others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.”
29 “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you
say I am?”
Peter answered,
“You are the Messiah.”
30 Jesus warned them not to tell anyone about
him.
31 He then began to teach them that the Son of
Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests
and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days
rise again.
32 He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took
him aside and began to rebuke him.
33 But when Jesus turned and looked at his
disciples, he rebuked Peter. “Get behind me, Satan!” he said. “You do not have
in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”
34 Then he called the crowd to him along with his
disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and
take up their cross and follow me.
35 For whoever wants to save their life will lose
it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it.
36 What good is it for someone to gain the whole
world, yet forfeit their soul?
37 Or what can anyone give in exchange for their
soul?
So how does our faith help us to see beyond the limits of our
vision? In this passage, there are
two important ways –
1. Jesus Wants to Define
Who He Is.
One of the fascinating elements in this story is the abrupt change
of course that Jesus makes. Up to
this point he is doing things that excited not only the disciples but many
other people as well. He performed
many miracles of healing – those who were blind, those who were lame, those who
were ill, and many more. He fed
the multitude with only a few loaves of bread and a few fish. He poked at the religious and political
leaders, and enthralled the crowds by doing so. Up to this point Jesus did things that lived up to the hopes
of who the messiah would be. How
could a person not get excited about the miracles, the great teaching, the
challenging of so many in authority?
That’s great stuff, isn’t it?
No wonder Jesus had such large numbers of people following him.
And then it comes to this point, and everything changes. After Peter recognized Jesus as the
messiah, Jesus begins talking about the cross, and not just his cross, but the
cross his followers would have to bear as well. To Peter, it was crazy talk! No wonder Peter was confused. No wonder Peter took Jesus aside and rebuked him! Imagine rebuking Jesus! But Peter did. In Peter’s mind, the kind of talk that
Jesus offered simply wasn’t good marketing. How do you draw a crowd with talk of crosses and death?
So what was Peter missing?
It was, I believe, this – as long as Jesus was doing the things that
Peter liked, he was totally with Jesus.
As long as he was performing miracles, as long as he was healing people,
as long as he was feeding the multitudes, and as long as he was poking at the
authorities, Peter was all in with Jesus.
That was the kind of messiah he could get behind. When Jesus began to speak about things
that were not in Peter’s definition of who the messiah would be, however, Peter
not only resisted, he moved to the opposite side! That’s why Jesus said get
behind me Satan. It wasn’t
just a simple misunderstanding on the part of Peter; he had moved over to the
side of the opposition, because he tried to talk Jesus out of his mission. It’s easy to criticize Peter, but what
about us? Whether anyone admits it
or not, we also want to define Jesus, don’t we? Don’t we also like the Jesus of miracles and healing, but
hesitate when it comes to the Jesus who asks us to take up our cross?
Three weeks from today, on Palm Sunday, we are presenting a play
about this very idea. Titled Jesus Was, Jesus Is, the play examines
the way in which the Biblical characters saw Jesus in different ways and also
their inability to agree on who he was (and by the way, I get to play the part
of Paul in that play, and I need to say two things – first, I’m not an actor,
and second, remember that some of the things I say are the words of the author
of the play and their interpretation of Paul. You’ll know what I mean when you see the play).
It’s easy to define Jesus as the messiah who will always keep
trouble and difficulty at a distance, but that’s not the kind of messiah he
is. It’s easy to wish Jesus would
always be the messiah that feeds that multitudes, that heals the blind and the
infirmed, that raises the dead; but that’s not always the his way. He’ll give us strength and walk with
us, but he will not always spare us from illness and difficulty and suffering
and loss. We want Jesus to be a
messiah who will give us an easy, cushy life, with a constant stream of
abundance and prosperity, but that’s not the kind of messiah he is. We certainly don’t like the idea of a
messiah who not only takes up a cross and we really don’t like the idea of a
messiah who asks us to take up a cross as well.
Jesus is going to do the defining about who he is, not us.
2. Jesus Wants to Define People.
Jesus was
very intentional, I believe, about taking his disciples to Caesarea
Philippi. Caesarea Philippi was a
center of many religions; it was a buffet of religious beliefs and cultural
practices. In Caesarea Philippi
one would find many temples dedicated to the worship of the Greek and Roman
gods and it also had a temple dedicated to the worship of the Roman
emperor. It was the kind of place
that was very far outside the comfort zone of the disciples. In that region, people believed
differently. They talked
differently. They looked
different. They dressed
different. They acted different.
By taking his
disciples to this area Jesus was being very deliberate about exposing them to
the wide range of differences in people.
Differences are tough, aren’t they? We are frightened of differences. We like to be with people who are like us; people who look
like us, talk like us, and believe like us. It’s often said that 11:00 a.m. on Sunday morning is the
most segregated hour in America, and I guess there is some truth to this. It’s not because we don’t like one
another; we’re just more comfortable being with people who are like us. As a congregation we have a little bit
of diversity. We’re probably more
diverse than a lot of churches, but we could use some more. To achieve this, we have to think and
act consciously about diversity, because it doesn’t happen to us naturally.
Being with
those who are similar to us has always been a characteristic about people, even
God’s people. In the early church,
there was actually a large gathering to discuss the differences in people. Acts chapter 15 tells us about the
Council at Jerusalem, which I hope you will take some time to read this
week. The Council at Jerusalem was
a gathering called by the leaders of the church to discuss what to do about all
the Gentiles who were coming into the church. They were from cities and towns that did not have Hebrew names. They were people with different kinds
of names. They spoke in different
languages. They ate different
foods. They believed
differently. They thought
differently. Their cultures were
different. All of this made many
of those in the church very uneasy, even some of the leaders. Peter, for instance, had difficulty
accepting the Gentiles. Acts
10:9-48 tells about the vision Peter has about the animals and his being
commanded to kill and eat of the animals.
The vision is an analogy to the Gentiles, and Peter’s resistance of
them, and God telling Peter to accept them. The verses after the vision tell the story of Peter’s coming
to terms with accepting the Gentiles, but it was not an easy matter for him and
it did not happen all at once.
Peter and Paul had a conflict over this issue, with Paul even writing in
Galatians 2:11 that when Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face,
because he was clearly in the wrong.
Paul noted that Peter would sometimes change his attitude depending upon
whom he was with. If Peter was
with people who were Jewish, he was less open to the Gentiles; when he was with
the Gentiles, he was more open to them (Galatians 2:12-14 – 12 For before certain men came from James, he used to eat with
the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself
from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the
circumcision group. 13 The other Jews joined him in his
hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray. 14 When
I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to
Cephas in front of them all, “You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and
not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish
customs?
The Council of Jerusalem was a very momentous
gathering in the life of the early church, because the leaders of the church
were considering whether or not they would require
certain things of the people coming into the church. Would they be required to abstain from
certain foods? Would they be
required to follow certain religious days? Would they be required to believe certain things? Looking back at this gathering, it is
hard to imagine that they would even consider imposing so many things upon
people who were new to the church, but again, is it any different today? Just as the early church struggled to
adapt to people of different cultures and thus wanted those people to adopt the
church’s culture, we sometimes do the same today. If you haven’t noticed, every church has its own culture and
often does not recognize that they expect conformity to that culture from
people who come into the congregation.
I believe that in taking his disciples to an
area that was filled with such a diversity of people Jesus was making a very
powerful point, and that was that we must not allow our differences to prevent
us from welcoming and loving people.
Our differences often keep us apart, but we should never be afraid of
those differences and we must not allow those differences to keep us from
welcoming and loving people in the name of Jesus. We love people because Jesus did. Jesus loved without limits and without constraints. Jesus had no qualifications attached to
his love. There was no list of
regulations to which people had to conform.
Reading
through the gospels we find that it is on this point – his love and acceptance
of all people – that Jesus received the greatest amount of criticism. The religious leaders did not
appreciate Jesus’ open embrace of people.
He was criticized for associating with “sinners” and had no hesitation
in gathering with and loving the outcasts (Luke 15:1-2). He had no qualms about accepting and
loving the woman taken in adultery (John 8:2-11), the Samaritan woman at the
well (John 4:1-27), and Zacchaeus, the despised tax collector (Luke 19:1-10). He did not shy away from those with
leprosy, as would have been accepted at the time (Luke 17:11-14). It is easy for us to feel uneasy about
embracing and loving those who are different from us, and those whom society
deems as unacceptable, but to walk in the way of Jesus means we must love as he
did.
Without realizing it, we often like or affirm people based on
whether or not they affirm and agree with us. Psychologists call this confirmation
bias, and it is very much a part of our current cultural climate. We turn to news outlets that affirm
what we already think and believe.
We read books and articles that reflect our point of view. We associate with those who look like
us, talk like us, think like us, and believe like us. How often do we consciously and deliberately put ourselves
in places and situations where we are with people who are different?
This is what Jesus did when he took his disciples to Caesarea
Philippi. He took them somewhere out
of their comfort zone. He took
them somewhere where people were different. He took them somewhere that would make them uncomfortable. And he did so to make the point that
they were not to define people according to their differences, but in the way that
Jesus defined them, and that was as people who were valued, accepted, and loved
by him.
Years ago, when I was much younger, I had a job that placed me in a
setting that I did not like. It
was different from much of my life experience, and some of the people that were
my coworkers were very different from me.
In my first weeks on the job I hoped that I could find another place of
employment, but gradually I came to understand that God had placed me there,
and by placing me there I had an important lesson to learn. I came to love the people that I worked
with, and when I left there to return to seminary, I was sad to leave my
coworkers, because I knew it was unlikely that I would ever see any of them
again. I have thought of my former
coworkers many times over the years, and when I think of them I thank God for
placing me in that job, a job that taught me a great deal about people. I needed to learn how to love people
who were different from me, and in the thirteen months that I worked there I
learned a great deal about how to have that kind of love.
Faith can help us to see beyond the limits of our vision. Faith can help us to see Jesus for who
he really is and it can help us to see people in the way that Jesus sees
them. This is the kind of vision
we need. May we learn to see
beyond the limits of our vision!
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