Who do people say Jesus is?
And why is "taking up our cross" actually quite the scandalous revolting thing to do?
A sermon originally preached for the people of Jubilee Episcopal Church on September 15, 2024
And Jesus asks his disciples: who do people say that I am?
Who do people say Jesus is?
When I think about Jesus asking us this question today, “who do people say that Jesus is?”
Well, to be honest, I feel deeply sad and worried.
Because don’t people say Jesus is the harsh condemning words on a billboard that claim pregnant people seeking healthcare are murderers? Is Jesus the fiery promise of eternal conscious torment for being gay? Is Jesus a Christian Nationalist who, when a made-up story is spread about an immigrant community being so hungry that they are resorting to eating household pets, is Jesus the one we think gives us authority to demand that these “outsiders” be cast out? Is that who people say Jesus is?
Or is Jesus perceived as a good person whose followers have gone sour? For in the words attributed to the Mahatma Gandhi, “I like your Christ, but I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are not much like your Christ.”
Or do we say Jesus is our convenient deity, the lukewarm comforter whom we pull out of a box in times of crisis, but whom we otherwise keep on the back burner as an afterthought when the humdrum of sports schedules and deadlines take priority?
It begs the question: who do we say Jesus is, by our words? By our actions? By our silence?1
And this shame that I feel when I think about how much Jesus has been dishonored and how often his message of love has been weaponized to hurt and kill people, these feelings make me far more empathetic to Peter when Jesus turns to him and asks: and who do YOU say that I am?
Because Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.” Now, we know Jesus Christ the Messiah as sort of the full name of Jesus. Peter isn’t technically wrong, so why does Jesus rebuke him?
Because Peter is calling Jesus the Messiah in the context of Peter’s greatest military hopes. Peter feels the boot of empire is on his neck, on his people, Peter has seen how the Roman Empire shames and kills his own fringe ethnic and religious minority, and he sees the might and power of God in Jesus Christ and says: you, you are the one who is going to rise up and crush our enemies, and take back our rightful throne, and reign all hell upon the people who have done this to us.
Peter is mad. He wants vengeance. He wants the world to know the power of Jesus is on his side. And this is frankly incredibly rational and understandable of him to want.
But Jesus pivots and says he, as the Human One, the Son of God, is going to suffer and die and rise again. When Peter protests because this is not the image of rebellion he’s hoping for, Jesus shushes him, in words I can only ever hear in a sassy southern accent, “Get thee behind me Satan!”
And then, the audience shifts. This is an easily overlooked detail, but Jesus moves from talking with his disciples — his closer friends and followers, a group of people who love him, who care about him, who are curious about his message, who financially support him and travel with him — to the crowd.
That oft-overlooked main character of the Gospel: the crowd who followed Jesus. A crowd of needy and hungry and demanding and irascible and argumentative people. Some people in the crowd love Jesus. Some people in the crowd are curiously skeptical of Jesus. Some people in the crowd hate Jesus.
And to all of them, Jesus says: if you really want to follow me? You have to take up your cross.
Now we hear this, in a sanctuary with at least a dozen crosses hung on the walls and behind the altar, and we nod at the inevitability. Jesus died on the cross, we have to take up ours, yes yes yes, we’ve heard this before. We know this bit, Jesus! We’ve heard this part before: take up our cross, our particular calling and burden, and follow you.
But the crowd had not heard this before.
And Jesus had just said what was possibly the most offensive and horrifying thing he could says, period. I can almost see Peter, shaking his head into his palms, muttering “this is gonna be so bad for your PR for the revolution, Jesus …”
Because to the crowd? The cross, that Jesus wants them to take up? The cross was a weapon of war waged against the crowd by the Roman Empire to shame and silence slave revolts.
For this bit of historical context, I am delightfully indebted to my dear friends Dr. Kyle Sanders and Rev. Hannah Pommersheim, a power couple of a Classics professor and Episcopal priest. And when I asked them this week about their thoughts on this passage, Kyle reminded me that the Roman Empire was a very “death positive” society, meaning, dying in an honorable way was something people aspired to their whole life long. And equally, dying in a dishonorable way was something to be avoided at all costs.
And so the Roman Empire used killing people via crucifixion — hanging them, naked, on a cross, in public along roadways, to die slowly usually over the course of days — to shame them and their families. This is why Jesus is crucified — it was the empire saying he was nothing more than scum. For the first few centuries after Jesus died, Christians were thought of as extremely shameful people; Romans mocked Christian tombs by graffitiing them with images of Jesus as a “donkey man,” an allusion to his dual nature and his entrance into Jerusalem on a feminine, non-militaristic animal, a donkey.
So there is extreme irony when Jesus continues on to say, not only take up your cross, this shameful and painful way to die, but:
“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.”
I’ve heard this verse quoted as justification for shoving Jesus down everyone’s throat, including this very week at the State Board of Education meeting, where Rev. Hayden and I testified against teaching a certain kind of confessional Christian faith in public schools.
This verse was implicitly used to say, basically, if you are not constantly talking about how Jesus saved you, even and especially if it makes other people uncomfortable, and if you are not constantly trying to “save” other people, then you are ASHAMED of Jesus. And if you’re ashamed of Jesus, Jesus will be ashamed of YOU when it matters most.
But let’s remember: Jesus was literally just talking taking up your cross to follow him, directly connecting being his disciples to this a shameful slave criminal death.
So to take up our cross and follow Jesus is not about shaming or coercing other people.
To take up our cross and follow Jesus is not about wielding our power,
or dominating the conversation,
or forcing our views on others,
but instead taking up our cross and following Jesus
means living our lives such that we make the powers and principalities of this world uncomfortable
because we know and name them for the farce that they are. We flip the shaming script on its head.
The big, bad, bully of the Roman Empire killed Jesus in the most humiliating and painful way possible. And Jesus simply sauntered right out of the grave, three days later, to keep on spreading his message of healing and love and liberation for all.
So the question remains: who do you say Jesus is?
Who do we say Jesus is? In our words? In our actions? In our communities?
Who do we say God is?
Because our God took on the most shameful death not to condemn us, not even to condemn his enemies who put him on that cross, but to show us: you can lose everything — everything — in this world, but God will still be here, giving us life more abundant and free.
Amen.
1 Rev. Dr. Courtney V. Buggs, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-24-2/commentary-on-mark-827-38-6
SO GOOD. I have been pressing pastors for years to say more about this, how strange and scandalous the "take up your cross" refrain would have sounded to Jesus' friends and followers. Just plain love how you unpacked the scandalous nature of these words here - brava.