Genesis 17.1-7, 15-16, Romans 4.13-25, Mark 8.31-38
Sourton, Bratton Clovelly, Germansweek, Lent 2, 4/3/2012
What’s in a name? Quite a lot, you would say, if you were parents of a newborn faced with the crucial decision of what your child should be known as throughout his or her lifetime.
What’s in a name? A great deal, if you consider the complete untruth in the defensive playground chant, ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me’. Oh yes, they will, they’ll hurt you a lot, the names that others call you in spite.
What’s in a name? People spend large amounts of their time during their young adult years trying to get a name for themselves, names like Doctor or Sergeant or Company Director. And people in later years occasionally ponder what names others will call them once they’ve passed away - the warm eulogy for the good father, the generous epitaph for the beloved mother are what we secretly hope for.
One thing that we are aware of is that the one who has the power to name a person, has great power indeed. The Queen conveying knighthoods; the principal conveying doctorates, the admirer naming his valentine - each using their power to name to positive effect. By contrast think of the negative power in naming: the business manager renaming a job title so as to make an unwanted employee redundant; the crowd outside a council house shouting ‘paedophile’ to the cowering occupant inside regardless that a court of law has cleared his name of all charges; the occupying military force renaming ancient places to invalidate the native language and subdue the native culture.
We will each be named by others, variously, throughout our lives. And we are all likely at certain points to have the power to be those-who-name, and to choose to use that power positively or negatively. Our readings today are concerned with this theme: in Genesis the renaming of Abram and Sarai at the start of a new chapter in the story of God’s dealings with humankind; and in Mark’s gospel an exchange between Jesus and Peter with some very powerful name-calling indeed.
There was promise in the names which God gave Abram and Sarai, who God addressed when they were in their nineties and told this childless couple that they were to become grandparents to a great nation. God fulfilled his promise by giving the old couple a son. And he named them Abraham and Sarah that day. There was promise in the names Abraham and Sarah - the promise of an everlasting covenant between God and their people. And with their new names this old, old couple preparing themselves for death were suddenly recipients of wondrous new life.
By contrast, there was conflict in the names which Jesus and Peter gave each other in Mark chapter 8. In a village of Caesarea Philippi the exchange between Jesus and Peter was complex and extremely powerful. In brief it went like this:
- First, Peter named Jesus ‘the Messiah’; and Jesus silenced Peter.
- Then, Jesus named himself the Son of Man, or the Human One - and said that he must suffer at the hands of others who would kill him; and Peter silenced Jesus with a rebuke.
- But then Jesus responded by silencing Peter, rebuking him, and Jesus concluded this frank exchange by naming Peter ‘Satan’.
Their exchange began with Peter’s dramatic confession of Jesus as the Messiah; but Jesus counteracted this with his own double confession of himself as the Son of Man, the Human One - and of Peter as the mouthpiece of Satan. [1]
This was clearly a very important exchange, to Jesus in his self-understanding, to Peter in his knowledge of his Lord, and to Mark for the understanding and knowledge of his readers about the true nature and purposes of God.
So what does this this frank exchange, this bitterly-contested naming ceremony reveal to us about Jesus?
I think that Mark wants to show us that Jesus very firmly positioned himself not among the kings of Israel who rule with military and administrative power, but alongside those who suffer at the hands of such powers. Mark wants us to see Jesus as one of those who, seemingly powerless in the face of such forces, carry a power of another kind altogether, a gentle, gracious power fostered by the pure force of nonviolent love. The power of life over death.
Mark wants to show us how paramount this difference is to Jesus by how he responded to Peter when the disciple named him ‘Messiah’. A long time since the promise of God to Abraham and Sarah, that covenant seemingly forgotten, with the people of Israel now in subjection to Rome, the people hoped for a Messiah who would rise with force against the oppressor and use all the mechanisms of military and administrative power to restore Israel’s collective honour. Peter was one of those people, longing for the restoration of Israel, and it dawned on Peter that Jesus was the one. When Peter named Jesus ‘Messiah’ it was the dawning of a joyful recognition that Jesus had the power to save the people - but all he got from Jesus was the command to be silent and listen to the Lord unfolding the reality - that Jesus wasn’t an avenging Messiah, he was the Human One; that Jesus wouldn’t save the people through a show of military and administrative power, but that he would suffer at the hands of those who hold those powers - the elders, chief priests and scribes subservient to Rome - and be killed, and after three days rise again. The power of the suffering One was of a different sort altogether - the power of life over death.
By rejecting the name of Messiah and naming himself the suffering One Jesus was placing himself alongside those powerless ones in the society of his day, ‘people who on the whole had no rights, groups whose development had to be suppressed by all possible means to safeguard law and order in the state.’ [3] But he was doing something unheard of, remarkable, world-shattering: saying that the death scenario which he and other victims would suffer was nothing to the life to be found in sharing his resurrection.
Peter was caught up in the death-power scenario of the world, its military-administrative systems and forces, he had swallowed the lie put out by Satan the father of lies, that there is no alternative to such forces, that the best we can do as humans is prepare ourselves for death. Peter was so caught up in this that his eyes were closed to the possibility of another sort of power altogether. Which is why he rebuked Jesus.
But Mark’s Jesus holds another sort of power altogether, a strong love, a strange peace, such as the world had never seen, and that is what Mark’s Jesus makes eminently clear to Peter in the name he gave him, saying, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’ (Mark 8.33)
The name of the one who keeps the world in death through the power of military-administrative force, through its messiahs and its kings, is Satan.
The name of the one who overcome death through the power of the pure force of nonviolent love, through the loving obedience of his faithful disciples, is the suffering one, Jesus.
Let us be clear - that as far as Mark is concerned there is total opposition between these two powers, there is no accommodation to be made, no compromise to be had between the power of death in the world of Satan and the power of life in the love of Jesus.
To underline this Mark next shows us Jesus teaching us that in order for him to name us his disciples, we must be completely focussed on him, and name ourselves as opponents to the world, its powers and its systems of death. The expression, ‘Take up your cross’ has been greatly spiritualised and taken out of context over centuries of preaching. But as a statement of what Jesus requires of his followers it cannot be clearer. For as the writer Ched Myers puts it, ‘The “cross” had only one connotation in the Roman empire: upon it dissidents were executed.’ [2]
Jesus left Peter and the other listening disciples with no room for misunderstanding when he instructed them to ‘Take up [their] cross’ - the cross was a political and military punishment for those who opposed the forces of empire, the military and administrative establishment, the structures and powers of death. That was then, and is now, the calling for those who want to follow him.
This is very political. It demonstrates to us that to follow Jesus means making a clear choice between two incompatible powers - the power of death or the power of life. That if we choose life then we cannot but oppose the powers of death at large in the world. And that if we do that then we will be made to suffer, alongside others suppressed and punished for their opposition to the powers of the world.
‘Taking up our cross’ means identifying and standing up against injustice in all its forms; but it equally means renouncing the temptation to react by using righteous violence. ‘Taking up the cross’ is an act of radical nonviolent love in the name of, and in the company of, the One, the only One, who overcomes the power of death and will bring us into resurrection life.
Perhaps one of the most powerful ways to take up your cross is to speak up in opposition to those who brutalise others by calling them names - speak up against the playground bully, speak up against the business manager manipulating jobs to get rid of employees he dislikes, speak up against the crowd scapegoating a man proved innocent of a sexual crime.
This is dangerous territory but ultimately liberating. This is why the suffering of the follower of Jesus is nothing in comparison to the life of the follower of Jesus: it is indeed the difference between living under threat and sentence of death and living in the joy of having that burden removed. This echoes the full meaning of God’s covenant with Abraham and Sarah, which Paul expresses in his letter to the Romans (4.17) by saying, ‘God gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.’ The possibilities are literally endless for those named for God, those who choose to oppose the deathly power of the world and instead to write the name of Jesus on their hearts.
Notes
[1] Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man, p.244
[2] Myers, p.245
[3] Hengel in Myers, p.245
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