Listen Up

“I’m doing the talking here.” That’s a classic power move in a contentious conversation. It is not the most effective tactic if you’re trying to deescalate a conflict. In a personal relationship, this is one of the few phrases that might beat out the more common “you need to calm down” for the title of “Most Likely to Achieve the Opposite of What You Want.” Which makes sense, because it’s an aggressive assertion of power, authority, and control over the person you’re talking to, which is a very unhealthy dynamic in a personal relationship.

But if even “I’m doing the talking here” is too passive for you and you want to go straight to the nuclear option to wipe out any questions or debate about your approach or disagreements with it, you can’t do much better than “Get behind me, Satan!” I mean, just imagine it. You’re sitting around a conference table in a staff meeting as the boss is walking through a PowerPoint deck about their vision for the company’s direction, and when you start to question it, their response is to scream, “Get behind me, Satan!”

And it doesn’t matter that the boss is saying some pretty off-the-wall sorts of things; which they are. After all, you’ve just seen slides with headers like, “Competition to Overwhelm Us and Execute Hostile Takeover,” and “Senior Leadership to be Purged Without Severance,” and the only good news is a conviction that somehow, on the other side of all that, the company will miraculously start up again and be better than ever. I mean, at a minimum, I’d be asking some clarifying questions in that moment, wouldn’t you?

And honestly, I would hope that I’d have the guts to take the boss aside during a coffee break and say, “your business plan can’t be bankruptcy and dissolution. This doesn’t make any sense. We just had the best quarterly profits we’ve ever had! We need a vision and a strategy for expanding our product line and our market share. Don’t you have that?!?” And what would you do if, in response to that well-intentioned aside, your boss screamed out, “Get behind me, Satan! You’re not looking at this the right way!!!” Probably at least start updating your résumé, I would think.

Which is why I think we need to cut Peter a little more slack than we have been conditioned to do as Christians. If you’ve spent much time in churches, you know that Peter is probably the most visible of Jesus’ close disciples, but he is not the sharpest tool in the shed. If it’s possible to get something wrong, Peter usually figures out how to do it. This case, though, seems different. What he’s doing is entirely reasonable, even courageous, under the circumstances.

Unlike so many people who would just focus on getting through the meeting without making eye contact when their boss started spouting some truly disturbing and nonsensical ideas, Peter has the guts to actually do something about it by confronting Jesus with his concerns. He even makes the effort of not contradicting Jesus publicly, but takes him aside in private so that he can express his dismay about the direction Jesus is taking things without undermining Jesus’ authority in front of others.

And we have no reason to think that his dismay is anything other than genuine. First of all, Peter would be concerned about Jesus himself; while Peter has more than a few flaws, there’s no doubt that he loves Jesus and would be greatly disturbed to hear this talk about Jesus enduring great suffering and rejection and even death, and to hear it not through the grumblings of jealous opponents, but from Jesus himself. “He said all this quite openly,” Luke tells us; he’s teaching them publicly, not warning them privately. It’s not a secret contingency plan he needs them to be ready for; it’s the actual plan that he wants them to know.

And this is not the plan that Peter or any of the other disciples signed up for. They thought they were working with an entirely different plan, which Peter declared openly to Jesus just moments before the events in our passage today transpired. Jesus asked his disciples, “who do people say that I am?” They responded with different ideas circulating around: “John the Baptist, and others, Elijah, and still others, one of the prophets.” Then he asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” And it was Peter, of course, who stepped up and said, “You are the Messiah.” That’s the plan that Peter believes is in motion in and with and through Jesus. And then Jesus responds to Peter by telling all of them not to speak to anyone about him being the Messiah.

That seems a little odd, right? After two thousand years of Christians telling everyone about Jesus being the Messiah, hearing Jesus tell his own disciples not to breathe a word about it feels very unusual. And Mark makes clear that Jesus is not messing around with this command. The English says that he “sternly ordered” the disciples not to say anything; but it’s more than that. It is the same word that gets used to describe Jesus ordering demons to come out of possessed people; it’s a word of absolute authority, a word that essentially means, “Be quiet; I’m doing the talking here. Now listen up and do what I say.”

The reason he does it seems to be because he knows that he will be a very different Messiah than most people are expecting or wanting, and they’re not going to like it when they find out. Among other things, that would explain why Jesus then teaches the disciples about the suffering and rejection and dying that he’s going to be doing as Messiah, because he’s trying to at least let them know that he has no intention of being a warrior-king to drive out the enemies of the Jewish people and reestablish their rule over these lands, which is the most popular role anticipated for the Messiah.

Peter may not have expected all of that, necessarily, but he was certainly expecting something better than a Messiah who’s going to be rejected by the leaders of his own people and tortured and executed by the occupying forces of the Roman Empire. He wants a Messiah who is going to be welcomed, not rejected; who will triumph, not suffer; who will live and reign in power, not die in infamy. He thinks Jesus is so off-base in claiming this suffering and dying route that he takes him and rebukes him for what he’s just said.

It’s the same word used to describe Jesus sternly ordering the disciples not to say anything. Peter is figuratively performing an exorcism on Jesus because he thinks Jesus is acting so crazy, it’s as if he is possessed by a demon. And it is at that point that Jesus, in turn, rebukes Peter (the same word again), literally telling him to get in line, behind Jesus where he belongs as a disciple.

And then he goes on to specify what it will demand of them to stay in line and follow Jesus as the kind of Messiah that he is: it involves self-denial and suffering and rejection as well, he says, but it is only in being willing to give one’s life in this way that one is truly able to save it, because in doing so we give our lives over into God’s hand, and it is God alone who can bring welcome over rejection, and triumph over suffering, and life over death.

I think this is one of the most important passages in the entire Bible when you consider how much evil has been done in Christ’s name by refusing to listen up when Jesus is talking here, by refusing to accept that Jesus triumphs through suffering and dying for others rather than through the dominance and subjugation of them. Among many other things, this passage is a definitive rejection of the heresy of Christian Nationalism that is plaguing and threatening our world in so many ways right now, from domestic politics here in the United States to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Christian Nationalism, regardless of the nation that it is claiming, is the attempt to gain control of the political, religious, and social life in that nation with a particular expression of Christianity, usually by claiming to restore something that has been lost or taken away, or to combat something which threatens to do so. For Putin, it’s all of the above: he’s not only trying to reclaim the political influence of a “Greater Russia” through lands that were under its control in the Soviet era, but he’s melding those nationalist ambitions with much of Russian Orthodox Christianity’s desire to not only stand as a bulwark of “Christian civilization” against the “decadence of the West,” but for the Patriarch of Moscow to stand preeminent in the Orthodox world.

This has been an underreported but crucial dimension for understanding the war. For centuries, that Patriarch has tried to rival the traditional leader, the Patriarch of Constantinople, and to do that, having a deferential Patriarch in Kiev, where Slavic Orthodoxy began in the 10th century, would be a huge asset. The invasion of Ukraine is not only a Russian Christian Nationalist enterprise, but it most certainly is that.

But history, right up to the present day, is filled with examples of Christians who not only refused to listen to Jesus, but made up a Jesus that was exactly the kind of Messiah Jesus says here in Scripture that he isn’t: one that privileges certain nations over others and baptizes their goals as his own; one that is more concerned with securing power than self-denial; one that encourages his followers to destroy their enemies instead of loving them; one that encourages his followers to protect and pursue their interests at all costs instead of losing their lives for his sake. Jesus would rebuke every one of those arguments and so many more, though, insisting that the arguers get behind him and listen up, because they are setting their minds on human things instead of divine things.

As we continue our journey through Lent, and especially as we ordain and install new leaders this morning, this story is a powerful reminder of just how easy it is for any of us to set our mind on human rather than divine things, and just how dangerous it can be if we do. It is an invitation to lead by following first, because only then will we know the way.

And it is a gift in reminding us that even when we do step out of line and start telling Jesus what kind of Messiah he should be instead of listening up to what he says, we are not sent away nor told that we have to try harder to find our way to Jesus again; rather, we are simply invited to get back in line, and to follow Jesus where he goes on his ministry of love and grace and resurrection once more, listening for the opportunity to join in whenever and wherever we find him at work; which is almost always a very short wait.