Who He Is
Mark 8:27-38
2nd Sunday in Lent
12 March 2006
Stacey Simpson Duke

At the end of Arthur Miller’s sad and brilliant play, Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman’s older son Biff stands at Willy’s grave and says with unusual insight: “He never knew who he was.”  The man had lived his life under a shroud of self-delusion that seemed to extend even to his death.  We feel the tragedy in those words: “he never knew who he was,” and we hope that no one will say that about us.  We mean to know who we are and to make sure others know who we are, too.

In our culture, we place a premium on self-discovery and self-expression.  We expect people to spend a period of time in early adulthood, “finding” themselves, through travel or through switching college majors multiple times, or through experimenting with relationships or substances or whatever else beckons to them.  Others discover in midlife that they either never found themselves to begin with, or that the self they once found is no longer valid, and they enter a time of crisis. If we are caught in a job that doesn’t suit us, or a relationship that no longer fits us, or a way of living that just no longer feels authentic, we feel the dissonance acutely and painfully.  And we work hard to make our homes, our clothes, our cars, our lifestyles reflect if not who we actually are, at least who we’d like people to think we are.

We are people who place a high value on self and on pursuit of self.  In whatever ways we can, we assert our identity.  We want people to know who we are. The funny thing is, in the end we don’t get much say in how other people see us.  However much we work to establish our identity and express ourselves to others, we really have no control over other people’s perceptions.   And we tend to misunderstand each other terribly.  We lay our expectations and assumptions on each other as if they were the stuff of reality, and we have such a hard time seeing people for who they really are.  With so many layers of projection and misapprehension, there is scarcely room for authentic selves.

We have certainly done this to Jesus through history – seen what we wanted to see, made him what we thought we needed.  The people of his day certainly knew there was something extraordinary about him.  When he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?”  they named all kind of great people:  John the Baptist.  Elijah.  One of the prophets.  They were looking at him through old lenses, and they couldn’t see him for who he really was.

Then he turned his question to the disciples.  “But who do you say that I am?”  It is the question put to all of us, really.  Who do you say that he is?  What does his life mean to you? Does his life have any bearing on your life?  Because who we say he is has an awful lot to do with who we say we are.  “Who do you say that I am?” and the question pierces us to the core.  It is a question we have to answers with our lives.

Peter was the first to see the truth.  For one lucid moment, Peter got things absolutely, beautifully right:  “You are the Messiah.”  Just four little words, but in them was everything.  The decisive moment of history had arrived.  The big thing people had been waiting for was here.  Messiah had come – not some forerunner.  Messiah had come, bearing God’s peace in his heart and God’s justice in his hands and God’s whole new world in his very being. 
“You are the Messiah!” Peter exclaimed.  And he was right.

Or, he was right in what he said, but not in what he understood.  The Messiah people were looking for was one who was going to bring their suffering to an end.  A political hero who would start a revolution, crush the Roman Empire, establish a new reality of justice and peace.  A divinely anointed king who would come in power and glory.

But the moment Peter called Jesus the Messiah was the moment Jesus began to reveal to them what the Messiah really was, and it was not what they had expected.  He began to teach that he would suffer, and be rejected, and be killed, and then rise again.  

And Peter couldn’t bear it.  He took Jesus aside and rebuked him.  The word Mark uses here is the same word he uses when he writes about Jesus silencing the demons.  So right after Peter has declared that Jesus is the Christ, he tries to silence him as if he were demon-possessed. But Jesus will have none of it, and he rebukes Peter right back as if he were the one possessed by satanic forces.

Jesus’ prediction of persecution and execution would have justifiably brought shock, and sorrow.  It is not that Peter would’ve been unacquainted with the idea of martyrdom, of creative suffering, of a noble death.  Throughout history we have made heroes of people who have died for worthy causes, and even of those who have been victims of dishonorable ones.  But none of that compares to what Jesus is predicting for himself.  The Messiah has come – the very manifestation of God’s power has come in the flesh – and certainly the Messiah could accomplish more alive than dead. The people expected the Messiah to put an end to suffering, but Jesus was claiming instead that he himself would suffer.  They expected him to become king, but he was claiming that instead he would be rejected.  They expected him to appear in glory, but he was claiming that instead he would be killed.  His claims about himself ran counter to every expectation and hope they had.

The Messiah has come, and he was not what we were expecting.  This is who he is – one who, though powerful, will make himself vulnerable, will give up all defenses, will suffer, and will finally take up a cross and lay down his life.  The guts of the gospel is this:  the one we claim to follow is a crucified Christ.

That says something about the heart of God, and it means to say something about us. 

In Yann Martel’s haunting novel Life of Pi, 12 year-old Pi, who has decided to explore the major religions of his native India, struggles with the meaning of the crucifixion, which is unique among the religions.  Pi reflects:
“That a god should put up with adversity, I could understand. The gods of Hinduism face their fair share of thieves, bullies, kidnappers and usurpers …. . But humiliation? Death? I couldn’t imagine Lord Krishna consenting to be stripped naked, whipped, mocked, dragged through the streets and, to top it off, crucified -- and at the hands of mere humans, to boot. I’d never heard of a Hindu god dying. Brahman Revealed did not go for death. Devils and monsters did, as did mortals, by the thousands and millions – that’s what they were there for. Matter, too, fell away. But divinity should not be blighted by death. It’s wrong. The world soul cannot die, even in one contained part of it. It was wrong of this Christian God to let His avatar die. That is tantamount to letting a part of Himself die. For if the Son is to die, it cannot be fake. If God on the Cross is God shamming a human tragedy, it turns the Passion of Christ into the Farce of Christ. The death of the Son must be real. Father Martin assured me that it was. But once a dead God, always a dead God, even resurrected. The Son must have the taste of death forever in His mouth. The Trinity must be tainted by it; there must be a certain stench at the right hand of God the Father. The horror must be real. Why would God wish that upon Himself? Why not leave death to the mortals? Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love. That was Father Martin’s answer.”

This is the heart of God – a yearning so fierce that it would take upon itself the horrors that we face, the sufferings we endure, the humiliation, the fear, the indignity, the injustice, even death itself.  This is the heart of God – taking all our pain into his very self, and then taking ever our rejection of his love, which the cross is the very picture of.

Theologian Paul Tillich explained:
When the Divine is rejected, it takes the rejection upon Itself, it accepts our crucifixion, our pushing away, the defense of ourselves against it.  It accepts our refusal to accept, and thus conquers us.  That is the center of the mystery of the Christ.  Let us try to imagine a Christ Who would not die, and Who would come in glory to impose upon us His power, His wisdom, His morality, and His piety.  He would be able to break our resistance by His strength, by His wonderful government, by His infallible wisdom, and by His irresistible perfection.  But He would not be able to win our hearts.  He would bring a new law, and would impose it upon us by His all-powerful and all-perfect Personality.  His power would break our freedom; His glory would overwhelm us like a burning, blinding sun; our very humanity would be swallowed in His Divinity.  One of Luther’s most profound insights was that God made Himself small for us in Christ.  In so doing, He left us our freedom and our humanity.  He showed us His heart, so that our hearts could be won.

The cross shows us not only that God longs for us, but that God willingly leaves the choice to us – we can accept that love, or reject it and keep rejecting it.  God is not a God who forces us into relationship, or into anything else for that matter.

But the Word from the cross is more than a Word about God.  It is a Word about any who would follow.  “If you want to follow me,” Jesus says, “there is one of these for you, too.”  “Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me.”

This runs counter to a lot of popular understandings of the blessed Christian life these days.  For the past 71 weeks there has been on the New York Times’ bestseller list a self-help book by a Christian preacher whose message is that God wants us to prosper.  And by “prosper,” what this author means includes things like vacation homes, bigger salaries, and even - for one faithful and positive-thinking young woman - the Miss America title.  The author assures us, “With God on your side, you cannot possibly lose.”

No cross in that.  No wonder so many millions of copies have been sold.  We would love to believe that following Christ could mean the good life, a life of somehow securing God’s favor and receiving God’s blessing in material form.  How nice it would be to have the assurance that with God on our side we cannot possibly lose.  But Jesus was clear.  If you want to save your life, you’re gonna lose it; if you lose it for my sake, you’ll save it.  For what will it profit you to gain the whole world and forfeit your life?  Deny your self, take up your cross, and follow me.

We resist that and we misunderstand it.  We talk blithely of the crosses we have to bear, when we just mean little inconveniences that can’t be helped.  Or we struggle under real suffering and interpret it as a cross, when it was a suffering we did not choose.  Inconvenience and real human suffering happen to everyone; the cross only comes to those who choose to take it up.  As Baptist theologian James McClendon once wrote, the cross is the cost of following Jesus in a world that does not.

If we want to follow Jesus, a death is in order. The New Testament speaks of it as the death of the old nature.  In the contemporary language of spiritual writers, it’s called “the dismantling of the false self,” which is the self we develop in an effort to cope with the imperfect world around us and to manage our own anxieties, anger, desires, and expectations.  It’s the part of us that drives things, the part that is the god of our own lives.  It’s the part of us that can be small and petty, or grandiose and self-inflated.  It can be greedy, or falsely modest, envious, lazy, or self-righteously angry, prideful or twisted up with anxiety or so, so needy of affection and approval.  It’s the part of us we secretly think makes us who we are.  It’s the part of us that we think would kill us to give up.  It’s the part of us that is killing us anyway.  The Scottish preacher George MacDonald said it well:  “You will be dead so long as you refuse to die.”

We try to change ourselves.  To make ourselves better people.  We promise ourselves that we will be nicer, less selfish, more generous, less needy.  We make our little resolutions, try to discipline ourselves into doing better, being better, but it doesn’t work.  To deny self, to die to the old nature, to let the false self go, is the hardest thing to do, and it doesn’t come about by trying.  We cannot reform ourselves by willpower.  We have to be transformed by God’s grace.  But we have to say “yes” first.  We have to say, “Yes, I will die.”

We look into our hearts and we see that old self sitting up there on the throne of our lives, see our selves at the center of our own universe, and we choose for it to die, and to die daily.  And by the power of God’s grace, that old self climbs off its throne and onto a cross.  It’s a daily kind of death, and we choose it.  We choose it not by forcing ourselves to change or making ourselves better, but by admitting we don’t have the power to fix ourselves and choosing instead to surrender to God.

Of course, this kind of daily inner dying isn’t all that Jesus calls us to.   An inward surrender is a very real death, but if we follow Jesus there will be outward losses too.  In a world that operates by the rules of power, we will be vulnerable.  In a world that beckons us to do what we need to do to get ahead, we will take some losses.  We will risk speaking the truth when it goes against popular opinion.  We will risk challenging the status quo when it’s wrong.  We will seek justice and pursue peace and give ourselves to love in every possible way, and we will get hurt.  The cross is the cost of following Jesus in a world that does not.  It means death to the old secret self that sits on the throne of our hearts, and it means an outward kind of dying too – as we lay down all our old ways of playing by the rules of the world and take up our crosses and walk in his way, his risky way of peace, service, vulnerability, self-sacrifice, hope, and love.

In Jesus, God showed us his tender, bleeding, broken, yearning heart.  He came in love and made himself vulnerable in order to show us that love.  He was not what we expected, but what we needed most of all.  And if we can recognize our need, we can hear him even now, beckoning us into that love, into his way:  deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow.

In our quest for self-discovery and self-expression we find that this way – the way of the crucified Christ – is the way to our truest self, a self grounded in the love of God and the grace of Christ, a self that is dead to the old death-dealing ways and is alive to a new kind of life.  Who we are, who we are becoming, has everything to do with how we answer one question: Who do you say that he is?  We answer with our lives.