The 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time, September 12, 2021

Mark 8:27–35

Jesus and his disciples set out for the villages of Caesarea Philippi. Along the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” They said in reply, “John the Baptist, others Elijah, still others one of the prophets.” And he asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter said to him in reply, “You are the Christ.” Then he warned them not to tell anyone about him. He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and rise after three days. He spoke this openly. Then Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. At this he turned around and, looking at his disciples, rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”  He summoned the crowd with his disciples and said to them, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and that of the Gospel will save it.”

“Who do people say that I am?”  After nearly three years of preaching and performing miracles, steadily revealing himself to the world, the Lord Jesus asks the Apostles to tell him the opinion of the crowds as to who he really was.  The setting for this question was the region around Caesarea Philippi, in what is now the Golan Heights, a new town built by Herod.  Not many Jews lived there.  Probably Jesus and his Apostles had little company on the road as they returned to Galilee.  “Who do people say that I am?”  We note the boldness of the question.  Who among us would ask such a thing?  But we should ask, Why does the Lord ask this?  What does it matter to him what the people say?  

The Lord Jesus shows himself as the most clever of teachers here.  He could have begun his lesson for the Apostles simply by asking them who they thought he was, but he asks them first who do the others, the non-Apostles who do not have the benefit of his constant presence and the private instructions he gives, think he is.  We can hear the hesitation in their answers to his question.  Why was he asking this?  Where would this lesson lead them?  After eliciting their responses to his first question, the Lord poses a second: “But who do you say that I am?”  By asking two questions like this, he is telling them that they should have a different answer based on their own experience than the people who only heard him speak a few times and perhaps from a distance saw him perform a few miracles.  In other words, he is leading them to a surer truth.  Jesus wants the Apostles to verbalize what they know: both what they have gathered from hearing the crowds speak about him, and what conclusion they have reached for themselves.  He also wants to emphasize to the Apostles that he expects more of them than of the crowds, and that, in due time, they are to teach the crowds what they themselves have learned about him, to make their knowledge perfect.  Besides this, the Lord, questioning the Apostles after they have known him well over nearly three years, wants them to see how far they have come from the days when they, as the crowd, reckoned him as merely Elijah, or “one of the prophets.”  

“You are the Christ!”  Peter’s answer practically leaps out of him.  It is not merely an impulsive answer, but a well-considered one.  For years Peter has looked and listened and talked with the other Apostles.  He has spent long nights awake trying to make sense of his Master and his Master’s unearthly ways.  Who is this?  Who could this possibly be?  St. Luke’s source for Peter’s response gave it incompletely.  As we read in Matthew 16, 16, Peter said: “You are Christ, the Son of the living God.”  The sense is the same.  “Then he warned them not to tell anyone about him.”  Luke does not relate how the Lord at this time changes the name of Simon, son of John, to “Peter”, and that he, the Lord, will build his Church upon him.  Mark does not relate this either; only Matthew tells of it.  It is a curious omission.  Still, we see many deeds and sayings in one Gospel not found in the others.  Only Luke, for instance, gives us the Parable of the Good Samaritan.  It is useful for us to recall St. Ambrose’s teaching that there is one Gospel in four parts, and together they tell us all we need to know.

The Lord’s harsh rebuke, “Get behind me, Satan”, shows us the vehemence with which the Lord wanted to suffer and die for us.  He would not let anything or anyone get in his way.  We remember how he said, “And I have a baptism wherewith I am to be baptized. And how am I straitened until it be accomplished?” (Luke 12, 50).   

“Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and that of the Gospel will save it.”  This is one of the hard sayings that those who would follow the Lord struggled with, and would struggle with today if they paid attention to what he was demanding.  As desperately as the Lord wanted to die for us, so desperately we must be willing to give up our lives for him.  He must become our everything.