A Light to the Nations

Homily for Sunday, September 15, 2024
The Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost
Mark 8:27-38

At the beginning of each of his commentaries on the books of the New Testament, Thomas Aquinas quotes a verse from the Old Testament that he believes sums up that New Testament book. For example, at the beginning of his commentary on St. Mark’s Gospel,Aquinas quotes from Isaiah chapter 49:

It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
    to raise up the tribes of Jacob
    and to restore the survivors of Israel;
I will give you as a light to the nations,
    that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth. – Is 49:6

I am grateful for Aquinas’ hopeful, “birds-eye” view of Mark as being “a light to the nations,” because as we read on deeper into Mark,drawing closer to the Passion, Mark’s stories seem to become more and more difficult to hear.  For example, last week in the story of the Syrophoenician woman, Jesus uncharacteristically rebuffed the woman’s request to cast a demon out of her daughter:  “Let the children be fed first,” Jesus said,referring to the Jews; and then – in a cringe-worthy line – Jesus added, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”  And in today’s Gospel, Jesus not only foretells his death on a cross, but he also tells his disciples:  

If any want to become my followers, let them take up their cross and follow me.  For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose it for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel, will save it.

And I want to get back to Mark – and also to Aquinas and Isaiah – but first, the author Raymond Carver…

In a review of Carver’s collection of short stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, Geoffrey Wolff of the New York Times wrote:

The stories themselves are not at all confused; they have been carefully shaped, shorn of ornamentation and directed away from anything that might mislead.  They are brief stories but by no means stark:  they imply complexities of action and motive,and they are especially artful in their suggestion of repressed violence.  –  March 7, 1976

With the exception of “repressed violence,” Wolff might well have been writing, not about Raymond Carver, but about the evangelist Mark.  Mark’s stories “are not at all confused.”  Mark’s stories “have been carefully shaped, shorn of ornamentation and directed away from anything that might mislead.”  Mark’s stories, though brief, “are by no means stark” but “imply complexities of action and motive.”

And though Carver’s stories may be “artful in their suggestion of repressed violence,” Mark’s stories are artful in their suggestion of impending, soon-to-be-realized violence.

For example, in today’s Gospel, on one level, Mark’s suggestion of impending violence is obvious:  in today’s lesson, Jesus makes the first of his three Passion predictions (see also 9:31 and 10:33) – “He began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.”  Further (and this, too, is obvious), Jesus said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”  Like Raymond Carver, Mark directs his readers away “from anything that might mislead,” and by these Passion predictions makes clear that being Jesus’ disciple means following a teacher who dies by crucifixion.  

But in today’s passage Mark also suggests a coming violence in subtle and more “artful” ways.  For example, today’s passage comes at the beginning of Jesus’ journey up to Jerusalem.  One of the ways Mark symbolizes the departure from the relative comfort and safety of Galilee is by the disappearance of water.  If the first seven-plus chapters of Mark are set in the lush, well-watered setting of the Sea of Galilee, midway through chapter 8 (from which today’s Gospel comes),the Sea of Galilee and bodies of water disappear, and Mark’s Gospel becomes arid and dry.  Further, today’s passage is the high-water mark of the disciples’ understanding of who Jesus is – “You are the Messiah,” Peter said.  From hereon, the disciples do not understand. In the very next chapter, for example, the disciples:

are said to be “terrified” and don’t know what to say (9:6)

they are unable to cast out a demon, and Jesus calls them, “You faithless generation” (vss 18-19)

And, “They did not understand what he was saying, and they were afraid to ask” (32)

The disciples’ inability to understand who Jesus is is summed up in Peter’s last words in the Gospel:  “I do not know this man you are talking about” (14:71).

Lastly, today’s lesson is the most verbally abusive passage in Mark.  Jesus and the disciples three times tell each other to ἐπιτιμάω, which some translate as “shut up!”  “Jesus ‘shut them up’ / sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him;” “Peter took Jesus aside and ‘shut him up’ /began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, Jesus ‘shut up’ Peter / rebuked Peter.”  

Why would Mark in his Gospel take care to suggest impending violence?  Mark said at the opening of his Gospel that it was, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ.”   How could violence be a part of “good news?”  Paradoxically, one of the ways Mark helps to bring good news is by upending expectations for Jesus.  Mark pulls the rug of expectation out from under:  the pious (the scribes and Pharisees) (2:1-3:6 and 7:1-23), his disciples (8:33), his own family(3:19b-21), and (as we saw last week with the Syrophoenician woman) even out from under those who come to him for healing. By clearing any residual “rubble” from people’s minds about who is the Messiah, Mark “prepares his way” (1:2). By upending any edifice we may have constructed about the kingdom of God, Mark “makes his paths straight” (1:3).  And recall that Mark is thought to have been written around 70AD, the year when Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed by the Romans.  To help his community even begin to make sense of their destruction, Mark upends any conventions and expectations that they may have had for a Messiah, and he “makes the way straight” for them to be open to the Jesus whom God has actually sent, in the situation to which God has actually sent him.  

Mark’s community is not unique in having life as they knew it upended.  All of us have times in our lives when things fall apart.  If we would find “healing,” the goal is not to seek to put things back together in the way we would have them put back together – “those who want to save their life will lose it,” Mark writes; or, as Isaiah writes:  “It is too light a thing… to restore the survivors of Israel.”  Rather, our hope is in letting Jesus be Jesus in all his norm-shattering,expectation-reducing fullness, and to take up our cross and follow.  Only then can God use us and give us to be “alight to the nations” so that (to quote Aquinas quoting Isaiah) his “salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”  May God give us the grace in our suffering-filled world to let Jesus be Jesus, to accept that sometimes we cannot avoid suffering, and that – in a strange,strange way – as we faithfully follow this Messiah who will be crucified, God will use us to be “a light to the nations” so that his “salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”