Isaiah 50: 4-9a. Psalm 116:1-8
James 3:1-12 Mark 8:27-38
The great divide between the Jesus Movement and the dominant party of the synagogues was caused by a disagreement on the understanding of the Messiah.
The recounting of the famous confession of Peter and his misunderstanding which resulted in a rather severe rebuke from Jesus pinpoints this early controversy.
Remember that the Gospels are spiritual manuals which highlight the before and after life of a disciple, before the experience of knowing the presence of the risen Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit.
The early church leaders are trying to come to grips with why many of their fellow Jews did not follow Jesus. Well, even Peter once misunderstood the meaning of the Messiah, and so do lots of other people.
The Messiah of the early church was a suffering servant Messiah, not a king who would come with angelic armies to conquer Palestine and deliver the Jews from Roman rule.
Peter was rebuked for speaking with voice of Satan because of his human understanding of the Messiah. And we can't be too critical of Peter, because we too are all too human as well. We prefer to be with the great winners. We prefer to be Empire Christianity, not suffering and persecuted Christianity.
And historically the church has made quite a shift. Ironically, we as Empire Christianity have been more on the persecuting side than on the persecuted side. Look at the history of slavery and the conquest of indigenous peoples done by Christian Empires.
The human truth is that we are like Peter, we don't really like a suffering servant Messiah. We want to be the ones who have the absolute power to prevent our own suffering, and we are willing to let hurtful things be done by our group of people and country because of wanting to maintain our power position. We have lots of Christians who want to remove the suffering Messiah identity from our current lives. They may say that Jesus died and suffered so we don't have to. Welcome to blessing and prosperity Christianity. If anyone stands in the way of our blessing and prosperity they are persecuting us because God wants us to prosper and be the ones calling the shots.
This kind of Christianity is found in many places in our country today. And many people cannot hear the Risen Christ say, "Get behind me Satan, you are seeing things from a selfish human comfort viewpoint."
It is easy for us to love butterflies and resurrection and try to avoid or forget the cocoon and death phases of life.
We cannot be true to the witness of the early Church, especially to St. Paul, if we try to eliminate the cross of the suffering servant Messiah from our faith.
St. Paul said that he gloried in the cross of Christ. He said that he was crucified with Christ and that he suffered with Christ.
In the field of freedom, the very conditions of God as pure creativity, we have to learn to live with the full range of probabilities in life. And this means we have to learn to integrate loss, death, change, and suffering into our life experience without it destroying us.
And this is where the suffering Messiah and a Cross-centered Christianity comes in; it helps us to be realistic about the conditions in life. The suffering servant Messiah will not let us be naive or pollyannaish about life. Faith is learning how to integrate all of the probabilities of life in a way that makes us better and stronger and in a way that helps us to be those who help the suffering people of the world, rather than be those who cause the suffering of people in this world.
The writer of James gives us a hint about how we can prevent suffering in this life. The tongue is a small muscles but if it is not controlled by a greater inward loving self, it can cause great damage and suffering on a small scale or on a large scale.
On a large scale the tongue represents the worst kind of cruel propaganda against entire races and groups of people. The propaganda of the tongue is what causes the persecution of other people and on a grand scale so that groups of people practice self-justification for their cruelty to others.
On the small scale in our families and micro-communities, an uncontrolled tongue can spew hatred and lies and in subtle ways, not so subtle ways cause havoc in human community.
As much as the writer of James feels compelled to share the horrendous effects of how public communication destroys, we should also work to present what good, loving, just, comforting, instructive, and kind communication can do.
Because the spoken word is so powerful, we should take special care to value the words which we chose publish with our spoken words and with the body language of our lives.
And how can we best use our published words today? With the message of the Gospel of the Messiah. Not a half or partial Messiah. The full Messiah is the suffering servant Messiah who provides us a refuge of identity to integrate the suffering and the death that will surely come to us all in various ways. But the full Messiah is also the Risen Christ, who assures us that death and suffering are not the final events. The Risen Christ is the Gospel of the surpassing experience of life which includes the faith to integrate in hope everything that can and will happen in God's great field of freedom.
And if we haven't accepted the fact that we're in quite an adventure of varied probabilities in this life, let us do so today, and know that we've taken up our cross and are following Jesus in the path of the continual renewal of our lives. Amen.
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