MARK 8 (PART 3)
Read Mark 8:27-9:1
We now reach the turning point in Mark’s gospel. Up to now we have seen Jesus healing the sick and casting out demons. He is obviously someone special and people have recognised that but without fully realising who Jesus is. The disciples especially seem to have been a bit slow in picking up the true identity of Jesus despite being in his presence and receiving his teaching for some time. But now everything changed. Peter realised who Jesus is and from that point on, all that Jesus said and did pointed towards his ultimate mission; his death on the cross in Jerusalem.
Jesus started off with a provocative question to the disciples, ‘who do people say that I am?’ There were several replies. John the Baptist was one suggestion (and Herod thought this in 6:16) or Elijah (there was a belief that Elijah would return to herald the coming of the Messiah, and even today when Jewish people celebrate the Passover festival there is a chair and a glass of wine provided just in case Elijah should show up). But at this point Jesus wasn’t really interested in who other people thought he was; he wanted to know what the disciples thought. And Peter, typically, was the one who broke the silence with, ‘You are the Christ’. And he got the answer right, at last. Note that Jesus didn’t correct Peter, he accepted it as the correct answer and, as we have seen; it is what Mark has been telling us along.
Now that the disciples had figured out who Jesus is, it was time for them to learn what it meant for the Messiah to have come and what the Messiah had to do. The most important was that the Messiah had to die and be raised up after three days (a thought that appalled Peter; he still had a lot to learn!”). Peter, even though he had realised who Jesus is, was still grounded in earthly matters rather than heavenly matters.
The question of who Jesus is still has great importance even in our own day. Many people do not know who Jesus is. Some give him no thought at all, others think that he was a good moral teacher and that he may well have been put to death because his teaching was too challenging for those in authority. To many people Jesus is not even a person but an expression of surprise or a mild swear word. Not many people in our society know that Jesus died on the cross, bearing our sins to enable us to have eternal life. That is something beyond their experience and comprehension and highlights the need for effective evangelism these days.
The passage ends with Jesus saying, ‘I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Kingdom of God come with power’ (9:1) and the Kingdom of God comes into view in the next section when Jesus took two of his disciples up to a mountain top.