Get Behind Me

Peter has just called him the Christ. This is the next thing in the book.

Mark says Jesus began to teach them, and the word began is carrying weight. Up to here it has been healings and arguments and crowds. From this point the book is headed somewhere, and where it is headed is a death. The Son of Man must suffer many things, he tells them, be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, be killed, and after three days rise again. Must. Not might, not is at risk of. Must. Mark adds that he said it quite frankly: no parable, no picture to work out later, just plain words on a road.

Then Peter takes him aside and starts to rebuke him. Just after giving the best answer anybody gives in this book, he walks Jesus aside, the way you would quietly manage a colleague who has said something unfortunate, and tells him off. He is not being wicked about it. He is defending somebody he loves from something terrible, which is what most of us would do.

Jesus turns round, and Mark says he looked at the disciples first. Then he calls Peter Satan, and tells him he has in mind the things of men and not the things of God. That name met him out in the wilderness. Now it lands on a friend, out loud, in front of everybody.

Why so hard? Because Peter is offering a Christ with no cross at the end of him, the same offer that met Jesus in the desert, arriving this time in the voice of somebody he trusted.

He calls the crowd over, so what follows is not just for the Twelve.

If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me.

Nobody standing there needed that explained. They had watched men carry crossbeams along the roads outside their towns, walking to their own executions. Save your life and you lose it, he says. Lose it for his sake and for the gospel and you save it. What does a man gain if he wins the whole world and forfeits his soul?

Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?

An old psalm says that nobody can redeem another person or pay God a ransom for them, because the price of a life is more than anyone has. That is the arithmetic under the question. The passage closes on shame: whoever is ashamed of him and his words now will find the Son of Man ashamed of him in his Father's glory.