Progressive reflections on the lectionary #34

Monday 9th September 2024

Mark 8:27-38: The turning point of the whole gospel

There’s a huge amount we could say about the gospel passage set for this week by the common lectionary. Not only does it contain one of the most famous phrases in the Bible - certainly a ‘top forty’ entrant, if perhaps not quite a ‘top ten’ - but it functions as the key pivot point for the Gospel, packed full of symbolism.

That pivot point is both physical and metaphorical. Geographically, Caesarea Philippi, about 30 miles north of the sea of Galilee, is the furthest Jesus and the disciples get from Jerusalem. This visit marks the point when they turn back toward the city and the countdown begins to the moment of Jesus’ execution.

The location is not insignificant - nothing is in ‘Mark’ whose prose is too sparse to waste any detail. Caesarea Philippi which sits in the territory of ‘Dan’ the northern point of ancient Israel (plenty of stuff here for Hebrew Scripture nerds), it was built (or rather rebuilt) by Philip the Tetrarch, one of the sons of Herod the Great, its (new) name honoured both the ruling Caesar Tiberius, and Philip himself. The site was once a sanctuary of Baal, and remained home to the famous ‘cave of Pan’ - a mystical place of worship and supposed origin of the Jordan river. Coinage of the period depicts Pan. Crucially, having been granted the territory by Augustus in 20BCE, Herod the Great chose it as one of three locations where he built temples to Caesar Augustus and a city grew up around it. Basically it’s a site overflowing with political-religious significance.

So the proclamation of Jesus as ‘Messiah’ (a political-religious title) in this place which has been used to venerate the royal man-god Augustus, as well as Pan, Baal, Philip and Tiberius, sets Jesus up as completely at odds with the ideology of the ruling Herodian dynasty. You could probably spend weeks on this alone.

Also at play is the idea of what the Messiah ‘is’, of course. The Jewish expectation of a military leader who would not just free Israel but reunite the lost tribes is turned upside down by Jesus revelation that his career would involve suffering, rejection and death. This reversal is sometimes described as a “shocking inversion” of the prevailing expectations.

And then we also have that famous phrase: “Get behind me Satan,” which Jesus directs at Peter after his attempt at a quiet ‘rebuke’ of the teacher. So much to talk about there - what ‘Satan’ means for a start (not a person but the personification of an idea); or the three failed attempts by the disciples to ‘rebuke’ people in Mark’s gospel (the children, Bartimaeus, and ultimately Jesus are all wrongly ‘rebuked’) - it wasn’t the place of a disciple to do any rebuking, and Jesus makes that quite clear, reversing their expectations; or the way that Peter in Mark’s gospel might be said to represent the community of people who followed the teachings of Peter at the time of the gospel’s composition.

There’s too much to choose from in this passage, really.

I’m inclined to dwell, heavily, on the Messianic imagery, personally, because I see that as key to understanding the whole scheme of Mark’s gospel - which I read as a profoundly political text. I’m basically obsessed with the idea of Jesus’ upside down kingdom.

What is key, here, is to ensure that whatever slant you might choose you do not rely on the narrative to tell you ‘what happened’ in historical terms. That’s not what these books are about. Look to them, instead, for deeper truths.

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Image: The cave of Pan: Photo by Stacey Franco on Unsplash