Get Behind me, Profit!
This week we find Jesus traveling with his disciples. As often occurs, they engage in conversation that leads us to the lesson of the text. I think about them in these types of passages. Did they ask these questions or is this just a way to get the story out? We often think of the disciples as starting their stories at the moment we see Jesus pick them up by the side of the water or wherever Jesus first encounters them. In fact, Mark gives us the least of their backstory in any of the gospels. Mark just says Jesus, “called to him those whom he wanted, and they came to him.” It’s like they floated in from space. Their journey begins in this story when Jesus calls them, but it is not the only thing they have ever done. They’ve mostly grown up in the areas that Jesus is working in, and they are probably Jews who have a decent sense of the beliefs and culture of their time.
If you were reading this (or probably hearing this) when it was still pretty recent, then these disciples would probably seem a lot like you. They are what we now call “Audience Stand-in Characters.” They are characters in the story who are meant to ask the questions that you, the audience reading this, would have asked had you been there. You can think of Watson in Sherlock Holmes. The stories wouldn’t make much sense if there was no Watson for Sherlock to explain what happened.
This is important to think about as we go into the story because it helps to explain why Peter acts in the way that he does, and what the story is trying to tell the reader of the day. With a sense of why the characters do what they do, we’ll have a better sense of how this story might call us today.
In this story Jesus asks the disciples who “people” say Jesus is (people meaning the general public and not the disciples). They have lots of ideas, but we are meant to understand that none of them are correct. Then Jesus asks who “you,” meaning the disciples, say Jesus is. Peter responds with what we are supposed to know is true already, that Jesus is the Messiah. Then things get interesting.
Jesus starts talking about how he will be betrayed, rejected, murdered and rise again. Peter, standing in for the reader at home, knows that the idea of the Messiah has been talked about in his culture for much longer than he has been alive. He knows that a Messiah is supposed to come and save them from the terrible state of being a conquered people. The Messiah is supposed to come with force and bring the power back into the hands of the Hebrew people. If Jesus is saying he’s going to die, then that does not go with his expectations of what a Messiah is, and the readers and listeners of the day would have thought the same thing. This is not what I expected.
So, as a good audience stand-in, Peter says, “Wait, what? You can’t do that!” to Jesus, and Jesus replies with essentially, “Yes, I can and much more.” Jesus tells Peter that he has his mind on human things. Peter’s expectations are human expectations, and the people of the day had human expectations too. Jesus’s expectations are radical expectations that aim to change everything. Jesus explains that he plans to turn everything in the culture upside down. If you want to follow him, you have to let go of what society says you need to do and commit to following Jesus. This may get you no profits here on Earth, and this may wind up getting you killed. This was just as counter cultural then as it is now. People of this time, just like people today, mostly wanted to stay safe and amass enough to get by pretty well. And yet Jesus says to his disciples, if you follow him you won’t get much stuff, and you might get hurt. Even now that is a pretty difficult ask.
What Jesus gives in return is more of his upside down logic. The person who tries to keep their life will lose it, and the person who is willing to lose their life will save it. It’s a fundamentally different understanding of how to live than what the people were taught then and what our culture teaches today. I love that he actually uses the word profit. “Profit is good,” is one of the main articles of faith of our modern capitalist culture. If a person does something for someone, they should profit from their labor, and that is a good thing. Jesus says, if you are focused on what you can profit, that is potentially a terrible thing. Jesus asks a lot of his disciples, and this request is probably even harder for most of us to accept today than it was for Peter to accept that Jesus would die.
For the modern reader, living in a capitalist system, our audience stand-in would not be bothered that Jesus was going to die. We’ve been taught that all our lives. We know how this story ends. Our audience stand-in would yell, “Wait, what? You can’t do that!” When Jesus asked them to deny themselves, and Jesus would respond, “Get behind me, Satan.”
Happy Labor Day!
People are greater than profits, and worker rights are human rights! Two very Christian values.