Abstract
Mark 8:27-38 has long been recognized as pivotal, perhaps the pivotal passage in Mark's gospel. The truth about Jesus's identity that Jesus himself had concealed from the crowds, he now reveals to his closest followers. However, the truth proves to be confounding, provoking not just questions but active resistance. Peter cannot imagine a savior who suffers and dies. He is so invested in what he assumes is the royalty of the Messiah that he dares to take Jesus aside to correct him. The text says, in fact, that he rebukes Jesus, who, in turn, rebukes Peter, calling him "Satan" (vv. 32-33). Jesus then resumes teaching the crowd what is required of his disciples—cross-bearing. The work of Christ's disciples is to serve (and suffer) with others. We know that Jesus renounces the religious pursuit of political greatness, and yet we find ourselves as a nation and as a church torn apart by a politician who promises to restore "greatness," not just for America but, first and foremost, for American Christians.
I recently attended a conference where we discussed how to survive preaching through the 2024 election cycle. At one point, another participant reminded the room that our preaching did not have the power to change anyone's vote. There was a chuckle throughout the room, which I interpreted as the voice of experience, as pastors wryly remembered their past naivete. I thought, "Surely, we are all older and wiser now." It wasn't until later that I had a chance to reconsider. When had we come to feel these sorts of constraints on our preaching? Many of us felt this in 2016 when we encountered the hard shell of a politicized religious identity suddenly suspicious of any words from the pulpit that might question one's politics. This suspicion made preaching for many pastors a high-wire act. You never knew when an illustration or prayer might generate enough outrage to cause the preacher to lose their footing. The fusing of a political and religious identity brings home the current weakness of the church and our theology to form Christian citizens. Mark 8 highlights this weakness.
Commentators often focus on the question of the identity of Jesus, and for good reason. Jesus asks the disciples, "Who do people say that I am?" After the disciples respond, Jesus asks a more probing and personal question: "But who do you say that I am?" (v. 29). Peter answers, "You are the Messiah" (v. 30). Mark thinks this question is of existential importance. Jesus tells the disciples that "the Son of Man must undergo great suffering and be rejected . . . killed, and after three days rise again" (v. 31). Peter then takes Jesus aside to question him, and Jesus's strong language makes it clear that Peter's denial of Christ's suffering and death is not simply wrong but stands as a temptation. As with so many pericopes in Mark, the issue raised is the significance of Christ's suffering. Jesus declares that suffering is central to his work and ours; we must take up our cross and follow him (v. 34). Peter and the disciples find this impossible to believe, and consequently, they continue to fantasize about their own greatness at the head of a restored messianic kingdom (9:33-37).
Like those early disciples, many of us contemporary Christians deny the centrality of Jesus's suffering, and by doing so, we undermine the disciples' calling to bear the cross. This happens in multiple ways, but two theological trends are especially relevant in our present context. I will argue that two readings, one more typical of conservative evangelical Christians and one more typical of progressive Christians, work to undermine the connection between Christ's work and the disciples' work, between christology and Christian vocation. By undermining the role of suffering in Christ's work, we blunt the moral force of the passage with its call to servanthood and suffering, and thus, directly and indirectly, contribute to Christian nationalism. I begin by offering a brief account of how this undermining happens among some conservative evangelicals who tend to be White Christian nationalists before turning to focus on problematic readings among progressives.
To claim that conservative evangelicals downplay or mute the suffering of Jesus may strike the reader as counterintuitive. Evangelical culture is awash in talk, singing, and even films fixated on Jesus's suffering and dying. Jesus's blood is given lavish attention. What am I talking about then? Despite the devotional attention, many evangelicals understand Jesus's suffering and death exclusively in terms of substitutionary atonement and soteriology. Salvation is understood to hinge on the question: "Have you accepted Jesus into your heart?" If so, your sins are forgiven. A central motif for many evangelicals is celebratory praise for their salvation, often joined by threat of eternal suffering for those who have not "prayed the prayer." They may feel anxiety for "lost" neighbors or resentment against cultural enemies. From this position of insiders and outsiders, "us" and "them," it is only a short step for some evangelicals to embrace nationalist mantras backed by theological claims like "take the nation back for God." Thus, politicized evangelicals may claim Jesus as their savior, but politically, they tend to stand with Peter and his quest for political dominion.
On the other end of the Christian spectrum, some progressive Christians tend to find substi-tutionary atonement less meaningful than other christologies and question the emphasis placed on suffering as part of Jesus's call. Progressives worry about what a focus on Jesus's suffering suggests about the nature of God as well as the implications for human suffering, especially the suffering of the most vulnerable in our society, who suffer not by choice but by circumstance. These concerns are important, but the move to distance ourselves from Christ's mission of suffering is problematic in at least two ways. First, textually, it requires a "creative reading" of Mark's Gospel, a Gospel that often focuses on how the work of Christ and us disciples relates to suffering. Second, theologically, if our work stands at some distance from suffering, then the Christian calling might be imagined as avoidance of suffering. If suffering is an inherent part of human existence, then the attempt to escape all suffering appears delusional and perhaps idolatrous.
The problem we face is not suffering per se but the inequality of suffering–the intensification of suffering among some groups of people. If personal and social suffering is inevitable, then any attempt to avoid all suffering will tend to acquiesce to or exacerbate the inequality of suffering that so bedevils our species. In this way, progressives may contribute to the conditions that generate Christian nationalism among the working class, who resent the economic and political advantages that the upper class enjoys. This is not to say that the inequality of suffering is the primary cause of nationalism, but surely it is a factor.
Such a context helps illumine why suffering is part of Jesus's ministry and ours. Perfect love is inevitably crushed to the ground, Reinhold Niebuhr argued. 1 The Christian vocation is not simply to avoid or, alternatively, embrace suffering. Our call is more complicated than that, but it will involve, indeed must involve, cross-bearing for Christ and the cause of Christ. This does not mean we should seek suffering, as the church father Origen did, or some other overly eager would-be martyr. Instead, it means that we refuse to abandon our neighbors to the whims and wiles of the powers and principalities that seek to segregate suffering.
Preaching in the context of Christian nationalism is daunting. While complicity with nationalism is one temptation, we might add that preaching against Christian nationalism risks being performative unless the context includes suffering. Self-righteous moralizing about Christian nationalism is likely to let progressives off the hook and antagonize conservatives, perhaps encouraging them to identify more strongly with the preachers of resentment. This doesn't mean that progressive preachers should say nothing. Far from it. We might begin by preaching our way through Mark and meditating on Christ's work and ours.
As different as the conservative and progressive readings often are, they share a fatal flaw. They distance us from the work of Christ. The conservative temptation is to claim possession of Christ's suffering and confine it to soteriology. The christological temptation of progressives is their intellectual attempt to shield God and the vulnerable from the dirty business of suffering. Both readings, then, with their attendant christologies, undermine the sacred call of the disciple to bear one's cross. If this is grace, it is grace on the cheap. 2