Profit, Gain, and Forfeit


Sunday, March 12th, 2006
Lent 2B
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
Mark 8:27-38

27 Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” 28 And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” 29 He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.” 30 And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him. 31 Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. 32 He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 33 But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” 34 He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35 For 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. 36 For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? 37 Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? 38 Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

He went into the war zone intentionally, purposefully, fulfilling what God had called him to do: to build bridges of peace in the midst of chaos. He and his team members knew the risks. They knew they would be stepping into harms’ way, but what they also knew was that, whatever else they were going to be about, they were going in the name of Christ to offer – and hopefully bring about – peace in the only way that it will really stick – one person, one family, one neighborhood at a time.

They all understood that it was not so much WHO they were up against as it was WHAT they were up against – a lifetime, for some, of terror and violence, of giving and taking death and destruction, of being indoctrinated with a view of the world and of the rest of humanity as being unalterably corrupted, unfailingly cruel, and unwaveringly false in deed versus word. There was little or no room to consider that others might be speaking truth, coming in humble gentleness and humility to share a common bond, because there was – and is – no point of commonality for those who are living and breathing their isolating and individual worlds of hatred and pain.

*****

We find Christ in this morning’s text, having just fed another, second multitude, this time of FOUR thousand, walking along the road to the villages in the area of Caesarea Philippi, engaging his disciples in THE pivotal conversation of the gospel of Mark.

The pivot, defined as a crucial person or thing that is essential to the success or effectiveness of something, is what we find in Peter’s confession found at the end of verse 29. The gospel according to Mark has been leading up to this confession, and it is from this confession forward that the story takes its energy and focus to the inevitable conclusion.

We’ve read, or heard, the story before – Jesus asks the disciples who everyone ELSE says that he is, and after they give him the answers they’ve heard – John, Elijah, or an unnamed prophet in the tradition of the big names from Israel’s past – Jesus turns the question into a personal one – the use of the personal pronoun ‘you’ is emphatic in the question – “who do YOU say that I am?” And from the mouth of Peter we hear the pivot – “You are the Messiah” in Aramaic, “the Christ” in Greek, the word might be different, depending on your translation, the meaning is the same.

Hundreds, if not thousands of books have been written about this confession, the subtlety of meanings, the layers of meanings, the gloriousness of it, the simplicity of it, the faith it required, the courage it demanded, the truth that was in it … there is no shortage of wordage when it comes to dissecting scripture, or the theology underlying it.

Personally, right now in my life, I take the confession as a given. What is continually intriguing to me is the swiftness with which Peter goes from proclaiming the single greatest truth of the Gospel to being called Satan by the very man he recognized AS the Christ.

You see, right after the confession of Peter, Mark tells that Jesus first told them to tell no one about him, again, that “hidden Messiah” we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, and THEN he began to tell the disciples about how he, Jesus, would have to undergo great suffering, be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed.

Peter, who would understandably be a little upset at being informed that his Messiah, his King from the line of David, the anointed one who had come to save ISRAEL, to say nothing of the rest of the world, from the hated oppressor, ROME, takes Jesus aside and starts to correct him – clarifying for Jesus what it is he is supposed to be about to do – conquer, of course – and literally five verses after declaring Christ the Messiah, Peter gets rebuked and called Satan by his very same Messiah, for setting his mind on human things, not divine things.

Jesus then goes on to explain what that distinction is about, sort of.

“If anyone wants to be my followers, let them deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me. For 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. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?”

*****

Another man died this week, and the news of his death coincided with the news of the first man’s death.

This man had at one point in his life achieved what some would consider the pinnacle of power – he was president of his country. He presided over one of the most horrific civil wars in an area already known for its sanguine history. Pictures from internment camps taken in 1994 in Serbia could just as easily have been taken in Poland in 1945, during the liberation of the Nazi death camps.

This man had gained as much power as he was going to achieve, in earthly terms, and he made it to that point using every means at his disposal.

Niccolo Machiavelli, an Italian philosopher and politician, who lived in the 15th century, wrote “The Prince”, a short pamphlet in an effort to gain influence with the ruling family of Florence. In it, the main character does anything and everything TO gain power – clever trickery, amoral methods, placing expediency over everything else in order to achieve his goal of ultimate power.

Waking up to the news of these two deaths yesterday couldn’t have better juxtaposed the point of what Jesus is talking about in the text – Tom Fox on the one hand, and Slobodan Milosevic on the other.

So how could the deaths of two men whom we’ve never met possibly affect our lives here, at Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

On one level, granted, they do not affect us. We knew neither of them personally, we only knew of them at all through what news we heard or saw or read over the last few years or months.

How can we be expected to be touched by their passing?

As with the death of any other person, we would first do well to remember both of these individuals’ families – however radically different environments they might well be in at this moment, they have both suffered loss.

But on another level, we would also do well to take heed of the lives of these two men. Which of the two bears the likeness of Christ more clearly? Which would we be more inclined to admire and model our lives after, and WHY? It might be an easy question to answer, or it might not. Which side do we fall on?

John F. Kennedy said, in reference to the space program, ‘we do the thing not because it is easy but because it is hard’. Sometimes as Christians, we find ourselves doing the easy thing. Coming to church on Sunday morning is a relatively easy thing to do. Sometimes we find ourselves compelled to travel thousands of miles away to a place we’ve never been, to a people we’ve never met, and try to communicate the gospel, by whatever means we can. That might be a hard thing to do. Some of us find the harder thing to do to be walking out the back doors of our sanctuary and live as if what we practice in here means something to the rest of our lives. We are not in an overtly hostile environment. Our lives are not in danger, at least our physical lives. But ultimately that was not what Christ was concerned about – what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? The New Living translation reads “How do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul?” it is the transcendent that Christ is talking about – not only the life we have while we are here on earth, but beyond.

So the question for us this morning is this: Are we willing to die for Jesus, if dying means death to self? That is, after all, who we would be up against if we were to surrender fully to the Lordship of Christ. We sing about it and proclaim it and read about it. But when it comes down to it, do we LIVE it?

Let’s pray.