Mark 8:34-9:1

Finding Life by Losing Life (2) – Disciples’ Destiny

As happened often enough in Mark’s narrative there was a handy “crowd” of observers in the wings, as it were. By having Jesus address a crowd, Mark was often making the point that the message Jesus was about to convey was not just important but directed particularly at the readers, Mark’s community.

Mark 8:34-9:1 – Take Up the Cross

The fate of Jesus was to be the fate also of the disciples, the ones who would follow him. The disciples were to take up their cross. The word cross seemed to have got in under the guard of Mark: Jesus had not yet explicitly stated that he would be killed by crucifixion.

The Cross as Political Penalty

The modern reader tends not to hear the word “cross” in its brutal starkness. The idea of cross has become spiritualised to refer to all the difficulties and inconveniences that come across the path of the disciple. In the time of Jesus, and of Mark, the word had only one meaning. Death by crucifixion was reserved for political offences, specifically the rejection of the power and authority of Rome, and the undermining of its social order. It was the fate of rebels, and commonly of slaves who rebelled against their condition. The cross was understood clearly as the symbol of resistance to Rome. In this context, it was relevant more to disciples living directly under the rule of Rome throughout the Diaspora than to the immediate disciples of Jesus who so far had not ventured into directly controlled Roman territory (the region of Judaea and the city of Jerusalem). 

To the minds of people of that era, crucifixion was the most shameful, dehumanising and excruciatingly painful and prolonged death imaginable. Jesus warned his followers to be prepared to face the prospect. Mark was giving the same warning to his community. 

In any age, those in positions of social and political power inevitably see the serious following of Jesus as politically pertinent. When lived authentically, it is not a harmless way of life confined to purely private life.

Jesus developed the theme of denying oneself. In dealing with personal in-depth experience it was difficult to find exact language. To speak in paradox was perhaps inevitable – language limped. 

To “Save Life”

What did Jesus mean by “saving” life? The word “save” had been used before in the context of healing where, generally, it had been associated with a response of faith in Jesus and in his message of hope. In that context, it meant health, wholeness. In a sin/forgiveness situation it meant personal reconciliation, freedom from the pressure to sin and removal of the destructive consequences of sinful decisions. 

Understood thus, the saving of life as opposed to the losing of life obviously did not mean preservation from death. Jesus himself was not preserved from death. It meant that death was not an ultimate outcome, but a stage in the process of being saved.

Motivation. Jesus claimed that the motivation of the death was the relevant issue: “for my sake and the sake of the Gospel”.

Death for Jesus’ sake spoke of a personal relationship, not just of admiration (which suggested distance and separation) but of love; and not simply the sometimes overwhelming experience of feeling in love with Jesus but rather the tested response of persevering, committed, forgiving, unconditional and mature love.

Death for the sake of the Gospel would not be a death for a religious slogan. It would be death resulting from living the values of the Gospel, and met and faced with those same values – where persons would die 

• with deep trust in God,
• peaceful acceptance of the limitations of love,
• respect for people and hope in their eventual goodness,
• forgiveness of those responsible for their murder, 
• and freedom anchored in strength and self control. 

Jesus was not referring to death incurred as a result of being captivated by an ideology, the kind of death faced for example by suicide bombers who might kill themselves and others for some religiously defined ideal.

Salvation through death. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews (a contemporary of Mark) spoke of Jesus’ death as his experience of being saved by the God to whom he prayed.

That author saw Jesus’ death as his reaching perfection through the empowering support of this God. He saw it as a process in which Jesus learnt how totally and unconditionally God respected his integrity and love for humanity. Jesus depthed the most intimate reaches of his Father’s heart as his facing into death led him to wrestle in his own depths and to actualise his deepest convictions: he learnt to obey through suffering, and in the process he became fully human, fully alive. As disciples of Jesus faced life and death with this same attitude of Jesus, as they learnt to obey Jesus (in the truest sense of obeying), they, like Jesus, experienced salvation.

Seen in this light, salvation happens in death and through it, not after it. Though Jesus believed in resurrection after death and in the on-going experience of salvation after death, he did not see salvation as some extraneous reward for a life well lived but as the truly human experience of being fully alive: the outcome of the cooperation of the empowering God and the receptive human person.

Salvation - present or future? Was Jesus’ promise of salvation to be experienced beyond the grave, in heaven, in the resurrected lives of the disciples? It is often interpreted in this way; but was that all that Jesus was saying? Was he promising eternal life? Indeed, was his vision of God’s Kingdom ultimately of a Kingdom of heaven?

Heavenly fulfillment was not precisely where Jesus in Mark’s Gospel had focused his attention, not that it was explicitly ruled out. There is a danger, however, in too readily assuming that God’s Kingdom was essentially a matter of afterlife. That view could too easily lead to confining discipleship to the “sacred”, to separating it from any serious commitment to justice, inclusivity, compassion and other values in the real world of social interactions and cultural and political structures.

Mark had shown that Jesus’ own engagement in the world of his day was essentially a here and now involvement. Discipleship was lived in the concrete world where disciples’ lives took shape. Jesus prescinded from consideration of outcomes beyond the grave, not because they did not exist (he believed in resurrection), but because it was only in the “present and the immediate”, rather than in the “not yet and elsewhere”, that the values of Jesus and of the Kingdom took shape.

Mark emphasised the possibility of actual loss of life for the members of his own community. However, he also realised that some would not face that stark outcome. Their losing their lives would happen metaphorically and gradually. 

Jesus asked his disciples to deny their selfishly oriented selves, the spontaneous drives that came from being simply human: the needs for survival, for security, for companionship, for esteem, for power and control. He believed that there was a deeper level of self, a deeper level of the spirit. For this level to develop, time, effort and perseverance were needed. Surface needs had to be recognised for what they were, and at times deliberately foregone. They would have to give way to more genuine, more deeply human needs: precisely the values of the Gospel, the good news that Jesus had come to make real.

The experience of surrendering these needs would be felt as a death to the superficial (but more strongly and immediately sensed) self – like the losing of one’s life. Yet Jesus saw this death as the condition for life at the deepest level.  In Jesus’ mind it would be the absolutely necessary condition for becoming genuinely human.

The choice facing the disciples was then the choice of the superficial needs or the deeper values. Jesus saw it translated into a choice between the attitudes of the contemporary world with its general cultural, social and religious expressions, or the values exemplified in the deeds of Jesus himself and expressed in his teachings..

Even more graphically perhaps for Mark’s community, the choice would have to be made in the law courts, as they would be brought before the political power brokers of their day to face the actual alternatives of death or apostasy. Jesus seemed to have had that “courtroom” background in mind when he referred to the coming of the Son of Man. Daniel’s vision was of a kind of heavenly “courtroom”:

Jesus spoke about his being ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father, in the “heavenly law court” of those who would be ashamed of him in earthly courts. Did this indicate a kind of vindictive response on Jesus’ part? And if the ostensibly offensive words attributed to Jesus were not in fact his actual words (but the accumulated memories or Mark’s own editing), did they pick up the genuine attitudes of Jesus? If they did not, how much of the rest of Mark’s presentation of Jesus was credible?

During Jesus’ trial Peter would in fact deny having any acquaintance with Jesus, not precisely in a law court setting, but in one even less threatening. Jesus did not reject him, but instructed the women after his resurrection to tell Peter and the disciples that he would meet them again in Galilee.

It would seem, however, that in a situation where a former follower in a considered and cold-blooded way publicly rejected Jesus, the outcome would be different. It would not be that Jesus would react maliciously. Rather, Jesus, the utterly committed advocate of human dignity and of freedom, would have no alternative but to accept that option, albeit with profound reluctance. To do otherwise would be to do violence to the person. Jesus could not pretend that a heart turned against him and his values was in fact otherwise. A person could not follow and reject Jesus and his values at the same time. There was no way that Jesus could honestly identify that person as a follower of his. People’s decisions would have their consequences that Jesus could not but take seriously without compromising his own integrity.

In speaking of the stark alternatives facing the disciples, Jesus was not voicing some sort of metaphysical doctrine learnt from books. He was speaking from reflection on his own experience. The unfolding of his public life had led him to explore at greater depth the inner truth that energised him. He knew the experience of facing into what felt like the death of his dreams and hopes, the frustration of being unable to share convincingly with others, even with those he loved, his insights into the hopes of the God he loved so deeply. He wrestled with forgiveness. Perhaps he agonised with uncertainty over the practical steps he would have to take in continuing his mission. Could he risk the likelihood of being prematurely arrested and executed before the disciples had grasped anything much about the truth of the Kingdom of God, the Gospel he yearned to share with the world?

Jesus’ final comment sounds confusing to the modern reader. It would make sense only as Mark described the encounter of Jesus before the Sanhedrin on the occasion of his trial. There Jesus would identify himself as: the Son of Man sitting at the right of the Powerful One, and coming on the clouds of heaven. (Mark 14:62).

Without developing the thought at this stage, Mark regarded Jesus’ death (and resurrection) as the occasion of the “coming of the Son of Man” and the definitive breaking into the world of the “Kingdom of God with power”. 

Jesus had already told this generation that there would be no sign from heaven (8:11-13). The coming of the Son of Man would take place veiled in the messy details of his crucifixion and death.

A proper understanding of apocalyptic literature would suggest that the vision of the Son of Man’s coming with power referred not so much to a parousia in an undefined future but to what was really happening in the here and now at the deeper level. But for that to be recognised it would be necessary to have eyes that see, enlightened by faith and hope.

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