Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

Peter’s confession in Mark 8 that Jesus is the Messiah comes from an inner longing that’s suddenly expressed in the form of a conviction. His confession is something like turning to someone you’re dating, meaning to respond to their question, “How was your day” only to absurdly blurt out for the first time, too soon, and for no good reason, “I love you!” Suddenly your heart is in your hands, all your hopes, dreams, every good and precious and breakable thing in you terrifyingly exposed, laid bare, and vulnerable. Peter reveals his heart and his hope to Jesus here: “Who are you?” he seems to say, “You’re the Messiah. You’re everything good I’ve ever thought it was possible to hope for.”

Jesus then says “that he must undergo great suffering [...] and be killed, and after three days rise again.” This is when Peter takes Jesus aside to rebuke him. And can you blame him? I imagine Peter was too stunned by “suffering” and “be killed” to actually notice “after three days rise again.” So I imagine he says something to Jesus like: “You’re everything good I’ve ever thought it was possible to hope for. This is a fact. So needless to say: you can’t suffer and be killed. You’re the Messiah. Got it? You can’t accept my confession and then trample all over it. You can’t validate my hopes only to dash them. So get with the program, Jesus.”

All of which is to say: This is a moment of deep terror for Peter. He gets an inkling here that the reality of Jesus’ identity might be different than he’d expected...so he’s going to insist on his understanding of things, because this subversion of his expectations looks, to him, like a disaster in the making. And it is. All those fragile breakable hopes and dreams and longings turn out to be in more danger than he could have previously imagined. Surely Jesus would not crush these hopes and dreams.

It turns out Peter’s understanding of Jesus’ Messianic identity was governed by a particular expectation: the Messiah was the Davidic king who would restore the nation; a new conquering hero; a new righteous and divine violence to purge the land of Roman / foreign influence; a new change in the balance of power; a new kind of death-centeredness that looks like goodness because it appears to be for us or on our side.

Only...there is no new kind of death-centeredness, let alone a good one. So while it might seem at first a harsh thing to say to a friend or a loved one, it’s no wonder that Jesus responds to Peter’s rebuke with, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” Because Peter’s vision of the Messiah ultimately means a continuation in a divine register of the old violence, death and sin-sickness under which the world already suffers.

But Jesus is no violent death god. In fact, Jesus will accept death--our death, our violence, our sin--in order to let finite death exhaust itself in the depths of his endless divine life so that we, death-infected humans, might receive the deathless divinity of God. Such is God’s love for us.

And such is Jesus’ love for Peter when, in a salutary act of great kindness, Jesus breaks Peter’s heart.

How might we ask God today to mercifully break our hearts open to the Reality of Love that both destabilizes and too wonderfully exceeds our expectations? What practices of prayer, meditation and engagement might we take on to prepare our hearts to be sites of the inbreaking deathless Life of God?

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+