this anointed one of God. And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.

Transcription

1 George A. Mason 16 th Sunday after Pentecost Wilshire Baptist Church 13 September 2015 Dallas, Texas The Real Messianic Secret Psalm 116:1-9; Mark 8:27-38 And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him. Does that strike any of you as odd? Jesus has been talking to his disciples at a moment in the far north of the country in a place then called Caesarea Philippi and now called Banias. Some of us have been there. It s near the Syrian border. Beautiful clear spring-fed creek that comes out of a rock-faced wall. It was a place dedicated to the Greek god Pan, the god of shepherds and flocks. Pan was depicted as a horned, half goat/half man god and thought to be responsible for fertility. His name gave rise to the word panic, because he inspired wild orgies and chaos that were often frightening probably to women and goats mostly, don t you know?! Right there at Banias, Peter declared that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. It was, in effect, a defeat of fear, a conquering of Pan and a confession of faith. Jesus is the Christ, and no pagan gods or human powers may compete with the power given to this anointed one of God. Shout it from the mountaintops. This is good news. Jesus is the one sent from God that the world has hoped for and longed for. Well, not so fast, Jesus says. Tell no one. What? Isn t this the same Jesus that later gave the great commission to tell everyone, to go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to all nations? What s going on here? A little more than a hundred years ago, a German New Testament scholar named William Wrede puzzled over these words and other similar times in Mark s gospel when Jesus told people not to tell others about him being the messiah. He coined the term the messianic secret. And then he offered several theories about why Jesus didn t want people to tell about him. He thought that since Mark was the first Gospel written, it was the closest to the true historical Jesus and this shows that Jesus was somewhat conflicted about his messianic role, even though later Gospels and the church glossed over his

2 hesitations. Eventually other critics discredited his approach and he moved away from his own messianic secret theory. A more plausible theory was that Jesus wanted to avoid the fame his being messiah would convey. He knew he had important work yet to do in Jerusalem and he didn t want to peak too soon and risk the full plan of confronting the religious and secular powers in the City of David. Maybe so. Two weeks ago, Suzii Paynter mentioned in her sermon an American Franciscan monk named Richard Rohr. He writes on the Christian life from a deeply spiritual perspective. In his book about the two halves of life, titled Falling Upward (which I highly recommend by the way), he suggests that Jesus tells them not to tell others about his messiahship because they were not ready yet to bear the truth of it. They were not spiritually prepared to tell it because they could not yet understand it experientially. And this, I want to suggest today, is the real messianic secret. It doesn t so much have to do with Jesus, as with us. Jesus was prepared to accept his messianic life but the disciples weren t yet prepared to do so because they were still more committed to a way of life in which success had to do more with the love of power than the power of love. Listen to what happens right after Jesus tells them to tell no one about his messiahship. He begins to tell them that that very role would require him to undergo great suffering, be rejected by the religious authorities, be killed, and on the third day be raised from the dead. In other words, Jesus understood in his spirit that the real secret of life is a sacrificial love that is vulnerable to pain and rejection. He understood that there s a way of life that looks like success to the world but ultimately fails. And there s a way of life that looks like failure to the world but is success before God. But Peter took Jesus aside and tried to explain the way of the world to him. He rebuked him, Mark tells us. Rebuked him. Can you picture this? Peter is calling Jesus out for his wrongheaded approach to being messiah. It s like he s trying to run Jesus campaign and he is telling him that being captured and tortured is not his idea of being a hero. His idea of a hero is someone 2

3 who doesn t get caught by the enemy. He likes winners not losers. (Sound familiar?) Jesus is talking crazy, Peter thinks. Jesus is talking crazy, we still think. But no, Peter was the one talking crazy. As are all of us when we buy into an understanding of life that is forever committed to winning by winning. Jesus rebukes Peter back and makes it clear that the way up is down, that you can t be raised until you fall flat on your face. Rohr makes the point that the big transition from the first half of life to the second occurs when we have met that moment in our soul. He thinks it s either something that happens to us or it s something we ourselves do to mess up big time a divorce or a job loss or a bankruptcy or a death or diagnosis or a stupid decision or denying Jesus three times before the cock crows. Sooner or later we will all be there. We will all experience something that will awaken us to the futility of making a life for ourselves that is only about winning. Sooner or later we will meet that moment and we will need the grace of God to remind us that we are all of us sinners and failures and we will none of us get out of this life alive. What then? Then and only then will we be in the position to experience the real messianic secret Jesus wants us to get. Then and only then will we realize that we have hope after loss and life after death. Then we will know that no sin, no embarrassment, no foolishness really ruins us forever, because God is the only one in the forever business and God is good at God s business. David Gregory was on top of his world when he was named in 2008 to replace the irreplaceable Tim Russert as the host of NBC s Sunday morning news show Meet the Press. But with ratings dipping in 2014, NBC dropped him. That fall from grace dropped him into a spiritual crisis. Like all the rest of us, as long as life is moving us generally on an upward trajectory, we don t come seriously to grips with the heart of what s important and enduring. We are so busy building the container of our identity, we don t pay attention to the contents that go into the container. George W. Bush tried to help right after Gregory got the job. While visiting with him in the White House, Bush asked 3

4 Gregory How s your faith? It s exactly the kind of question we ought to be asking each other right after a big success. The problem, of course, is that we aren t likely to listen until we ve had a big failure. Gregory was a cultural more than a religious Jew. He married a Methodist, and she agreed to allow the children to be raised Jewish. But as they moved through middle age, she found herself going back to church. And after Gregory s big career fall, he found himself both exploring his own Jewish faith and joining her at church. He s written a new book on what he calls his unlikely spiritual journey. Based on the real messianic secret I would counter that it is really his likely spiritual journey. In a Wall Street Journal piece this week, Gregory put it this way: I had put effort into figuring out who to be so that I could succeed as the host of a Sunday news show. But last year when I lost that job, which offered me satisfaction and a high profile, I had to find out who I was without cameras or prestigious titles. This hasn t been rosy or easy. It has been faith that steadied me. The humbling loss turned out to be a gift, because I have seen how many fresh opportunities for growth and happiness await even if it hasn t gone according to my plan. Most plainly, I understand: In joy, pain and even in personal failure, God is close. Gregory closed his article by citing a passage of Scripture from Isaiah (46:4) that his Jewish teacher Erica Brown wrote to him in a note on his last day at NBC. God says through the prophet: I am He, I am He who will sustain you. I have made you and I will carry you; I will sustain you and I will rescue you. It s a word we need to hear for the second half of life, really. It s a word we may only be ready to hear in the second half of life, really. And yet, I want to say to you today, that we need to hear it in the first half of life too. There are so many people walking around in a stupor after falling or failing, after losing or getting lost. They don t know where to turn because they ve been so busy gaining the whole world they ve been losing their soul. They look at the cross as a symbol for losers and they don t know that it s the ultimate symbol for the only kind of winning that matters. 4

5 Which is why need to learn these truths from the cradle to the grave, even if they may not hit home until we hit a pothole along the way. And it s why this morning when I gave Bibles to first-graders in Sunday school, the verse we turned them to was in Isaiah, very close to the one David Gregory was turned to at age 45. God says through the prophet, Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. We need our heads to be filled with that powerful truth as early as possible so that when later our hearts are cracked open by pain and suffering, it may fall into our readied hearts that will finally understand. not a spiritual gospel. It s also why we don t preach a security gospel. There s too much preaching that seems to suggest that Peter is in charge of Jesus mission. But if we follow Jesus closely, he will teach us the real messianic secret. Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life my sake, and for the sake of the gospel will save it. That s the real secret, see. The way up is down, and only when your down can you see the way up. The good news is always this, there is no such thing as falling from grace when we follow Jesus; there is only falling into grace. Amen. This is why we come to church from the cradle to the grave. We are never to young for church and never too old. We may not understand everything we learn right away, but we will be better able to bear it when the bearing comes. And this is also why we don t preach a prosperity gospel here. For one thing, the very phrase is an oxymoron: there is no such thing as a prosperity gospel. If it s about worldly prosperity, it s 5