Mark 8:27-38 Commentary

This week’s text is a masterclass in understanding confession and repentance in the grandest sense possible. When it comes down to what we confess with our mouths, what do we believe in our hearts and minds? And what consequences does it have in our lives?

Jesus asks his disciples what they’ve heard other people believe about him. They share that people see Jesus as an important figure like the great prophets, like John the Baptist or Elijah. These prophets invited people to live a new kind of life in step with the teachings of God, but they weren’t offering a new foundation to build those lives upon.

The “Messiah” (Christos), on the other hand, would do that because he would lead them to deliverance. Everything would change. Confessing someone as the Messiah, then, is a statement of intent.

There have been plenty of sermon commentaries (including the ones on this site) which explore Peter’s confession and then his failure to understand the true implications of Jesus as the Christ because he is caught up the dominant idea what the Messiah would do. Jesus doesn’t just address this mental model of the Messiah, he describes the implications for his followers’ lives as he speaks to the crowd.

Jesus’s words are in direct contrast to the way of Peter’s discipleship. Peter could not accept Jesus’s description of suffering and looking weak and dying and rising. Peter was ashamed to hear them come from Jesus’s mouth, thereby ashamed to be associated with them.

After Jesus rebukes Peter in front of the rest of the disciples, Jesus calls the crowd to himself to hear him finish the lesson on confessing his name. For those who will confess the name of the Christ as the Messiah they follow, they will need to accept his way—even if it goes against the picture they had. It will require repenting in the sense of turning from one way of living in waiting to another way of living as a follower.

When you realize the Messiah is here, it’s time to leave everything else behind for where and how he leads you. As Jesus describes it, his followers’ lives will follow a similar pattern to his own. There will be suffering and denial, a rejection of the world’s picture of life and living and an announcement of a new world order. Crucifixion was the punishment for rebelling against the orders that be, so taking up your cross is a sign of rebellion against the things that want to control and dictate your life.

But we don’t just take up the cross; as the work of repentance that comes after confession requires, we turn to something different. In the case of faith and belief, as we take up our cross we hand over our lives to the way of our Messiah without shame of what it will cost us.

Continuously living this way of turning each aspect, experience, life choice, practice, everything, over to the way Messiah is what keeps us following after him. It builds our confidence that we are “on the way” and instills in us the hope of what’s to come. It is our part of living in relationship with the Holy Spirit. As we live without shame in the name of Christ, we will know with assurance that Jesus himself will not be ashamed of us on the day when this world comes to an end and the new world begins.

Peter was able to confess the truth with his mouth, but there were parts of it that he was ashamed of and on which he tried to compromise. Jesus calls all who look for a compromise on his upside-down way to repentance. If we were to put the stories of Jesus into modern day contexts, how many of us would be able to honestly assess our own reactions to Jesus’s ways?

I suspect that many of us are living unaware of the ways our lives and ideas prove that we are ashamed of Jesus’s gospel. What do we think we’re gaining from our compromises? Happy to be satisfied with one or two areas of suffering for the sake of the Kingdom, we might be in need of some rebuking: we don’t just lose part of ourselves, we give up our whole selves to be led to freedom by the Messiah. Only then, in rebellion to everything that we’re tempted to put in the place of God in our lives, will we understand the Jesus way of living: a life of cross-bearing dying and rising without shame.

Textual Point

The other New Testament instances of the word “ashamed” (epaischynomai) are all used in the same sense—and one could argue the same topic—as Mark 8.

• Luke 9.26 is the same account as our text.
• Paul uses it multiple times in Romans and 2 Timothy (Romans 1.16, 6.21; 2 Timothy 1.8, 1.12, 1.16) in relation to the gospel, salvation, and suffering for the mission.
• The author of Hebrews says that Jesus is not ashamed to call those who have been sanctified his brothers and sisters (2.11), and after the great cloud of witnesses list in Hebrews 11, the author says that “God is not ashamed to be called their God” (verse 16).

Illustration Idea

I’ve got a number of friends in a season of job hunting. They’ve lost count of how many hours they’ve spent filling out applications, reworking resumés and writing cover letters, trying to present themselves against unknown competition for a myriad of positions. They’ve talked about how they have to make their material fit the job description by how they describe their skills and experience based on keywords or phrases. They feel the constant pressure to sell themselves—or at least an image of themselves. In an economy that feels like it might be teetering on a recession, the pressure builds. Is this the sort of pressure that Peter felt about who and how the Messiah should be for the Jewish people?