Mark 8:27-38
I have always heard about the fast-changing weather in the New Hampshire White Mountains, but actually experiencing it was something else entirely. Last summer I spent about a week up in the White Mountains, beginning with three days in the Pemigewasset Wilderness. We got up to the tent site shortly before dark, and had daylight enough to summit the nearby Mount Lincoln. The evening was clear and somewhat cool, and we could see for miles in all directions—but especially north and east, toward our goal for the next day’s hike.
This is some of the most stunning scenery in New England. So naturally everything changed the next day.
Fog settled heavily on the ridgeline, and we weren’t able to see much more than a hundred feet or so in front of us for most of the morning. Peak after peak passed with little more than a gray blanket enshrouding us, oppressive and damp. It was a stunning reversal. Whereas the day before I had measured my view in miles, today it was in feet—checking the granite rocks just in front of me, looking ahead for the next blaze, the next turning. This was the same landscape I had looked down out on yesterday, but it was as though I had been transported to another place entirely.
We all face challenges, seeming reversals of what we thought we knew, radical shifts in the weather of our lives. I had one on my hike, the disciples had theirs in their daily following of Jesus, and I’m sure you’ve had your own version—maybe a crisis at work, or a challenge at home, or a seeming block in prayer. If we’re being honest, we can face these each day as we are invited into fresh encounter: “New every morning is the love our wakening and uprising prove,” John Keble writes. What I think unifies these experiences is that they pose to us three fundamental questions: What am I doing? Why am I doing it? And who am I to be doing it?
The disciples in our reading today stand at a convergence of past, present, and future. And the heart of this convergence is Jesus’s straightforward question to them: “Who do you say that I am?” (Mark 8:29). Seemingly straightforward question.
One answer to this is what Jesus has done. Up to this point in Mark’s gospel, the disciples, and we as readers, have come to know Jesus as many different things, using many different titles. Teacher, physician, Son of Man, bridegroom, lord of the sabbath, Son of God, son and brother, son of the Most High God, prophet . . . these are all ways Jesus is addressed, or ways Jesus refers to himself, or roles he fulfills. They are all ways that the disciples might think about Jesus. They all exist as part of Jesus’s landscape of identity that his disciples may traverse and explore and come to know.
And just as the different conditions I encountered in the mountains elicited different responses—eyes raised toward the horizon on a clear evening, or fixed on the path ahead in fog and dampness—so too do these contours of Jesus’s identity challenge his disciples, and us, to respond accordingly. Jesus’s character in the Gospels is dialogic—everything he does compels us to discern and answer what we will do in response. Jesus as teacher questions established authorities and traditional interpretations of the law and invites us to appropriate afresh God’s commandment to love and accept. Jesus as prophet calls us to turn our hearts and minds and return to God. And Jesus as healer urges us to accept our power to forgive and heal the world.
But there’s a second question here: why? Why are we doing this? Why are we on this rocky path together, why do things differently? The answer to this is in the answer Peter gives to Jesus’s question: You are the Messiah, the Christ, the Anointed One, Peter responds.
Jesus has already shown in his life and service that what it means to be “Messiah” is very different than his followers, as first-century Jews living under Roman occupation, may have expected. Part of that is because of what Jesus has done—teaching and healing and prophesying, challenging and questioning—but also in what Jesus says will be. And in foretelling his death, Jesus foretells not only what “Messiah” will mean for him—that he will undergo suffering, be rejected and killed, and rise again—but what response this will elicit. Just as Jesus models what it means to be a teacher or a prophet or a healer, so too Jesus models what it means to be like him in this identity: “those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” A life lived not for ourselves, a radical reversal of loss and gain—this is what it means to be a disciple, and to respond to the revealing of Jesus as Messiah. Because this is a compelling truth. Jesus as Messiah is a compelling truth. This is why the disciples followed Jesus, why they accepted his commission and followed his example, even unto their own deaths.
But there’s still one other question: who are we? Doing this work, following Jesus—who does this make the disciples? Who does it make us? In our Gospel narrative, this is a question whose answer comes shortly in the future, on top of the mountain.
After trudging through thick fog, across slippery boulders and through deep mud, at the end of the third day we approached the final pair of summits: Mount Flume and, closing the loop, back to Mount Lincoln. The day had turned clear and beautiful, and coming to the top we encountered a small tour group on the path and several couples seated on the rocks, gazing across uninterrupted miles to the far horizon. I don’t know what they were contemplating, but I know what I was. That first night I had seen all that lay in before me. I was now able to appreciate all that I had come through. I was looking out from nearly the exact same spot, but I was not the same. I was changed, and so too was the view.
Three chosen disciples came to their own summit, and were changed there, further challenged by the reality of their encounter with Jesus. We don’t hear the account of the Transfiguration today, but it comes directly after this morning’s reading. Jesus ascends the mountain with Peter, James, and John, who temporarily glimpse the reality behind the reality of Jesus—that he is not just teacher and prophet and healer, not even just Messiah, but God. On top of the mountain, at the Transfiguration, these chosen disciples were changed so that they were able to have an unclouded, panoramic view of who Jesus is.
Who do you say that I am? This is who I am.
What response does this revelation compel? How can we possibly respond?
In finally glimpsing the whole of who Jesus is, the disciples, and we, are able to see who we are. Saint Paul’s letters spell it out: Sons and daughter, brothers and sisters in the household of God, members of the same Body. Fellow heirs with Christ. Through Jesus’ crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension, made partakers in the divine life.
And perhaps something more than that. The Gospel of John goes further than Matthew, Mark, and Luke in identifying Jesus explicitly as the Word who was with God and through whom all things came into being; and if the Word, also God’s Wisdom, the “master worker” in creation (Proverbs 8:30), an “image of his goodness” (Wisdom 7:26; cf. Col. 1:15). Mary Louise Bringle, whose words we will sing in today’s closing hymn, puts it this way: “Through vaulting firmaments of time and curving sweeps of stellar space, God’s boundless Wisdom spun its web of intricate and patterned grace.”[1]
This, ultimately, is our hope and our joy, that our response to our encounter with Jesus is that we are changed, that in our encounter with Jesus we become fully who we are. If in Jesus we find our model for what we do and how we are in the world, if in Jesus we discover why we walk the hard road of discipleship, so too do we discover who we are: sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, made in the image of God, conformed to the image of Christ.
This is our hope and joy: that we are coworkers and collaborators and co-creators in God’s own ongoing creation. That we are, in the words of Wisdom herself, “daily God’s delight, rejoicing before God always” (Proverbs 8:30).
Amen.
[1] Mary Louise Bringle, “With Dazzling Light,” 2002.