Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

By the Rev. Stephanie Paulsell
Susan Shallcross Swartz Professor of the Practice of Christian Studies, Harvard Divinity School
Former Interim Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church

(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Sept. 14, 2024)

Good morning, everyone. It's so good to see you. I'm really grateful to the community and to our ministers for the invitation to be here. It's particularly wonderful to hear the choir. I've been listening online, but there's nothing like being here in this beautiful space as it fills up with your voices. That Helen Keller piece was really beautiful, and it gave me the experience I often have here in the Memorial Church, which is that of the choir preaching my sermon before I preach it, but only better, more eloquent, more beautifully, so that's what I was trying to say. That's what I'll be trying to say, but that was really amazing. Would you pray with me?

Oh, send out your light and your truth. Let them lead us. Let them lead us to your holy hill and to your dwelling. Then, we will go to your altar, oh God, oh God, our exceeding joy, and we will praise you with the harp. Oh God, our God, amen. When my father died last spring, he was in the middle of writing a book about the theological thinkers who had inspired him when he was a student. The preacher and pacifist, Harry Emerson Fosdick, the social reformer, Jane Addams, and the humanitarian physician, Albert Schweitzer. When my mom and my sister and I returned home from the hospital on the day of his death, his desk looked like he had just stepped away for a moment and that he would return to what he was doing any minute.

In addition to working on his book, my dad spent some time every day translating the Gospel of Mark from the Latin Vulgate Bible, which was still open on his desk, along with a dictionary, a grammar, stacks of homemade flashcards, and a cheap spiral notebook where he was writing out his translation in pencil. "I'm going to translate Mark over and over," he once told me, "until I don't have to look up any of the words." When we cleaned out the house this summer, I took dad's Vulgate and the notebook containing one-and-a-half translations of the Gospel of Mark home with me. I also grabbed stacks of unused or partially used spiral notebooks of various sizes that I thought I could make good use of. I now have enough spiral notebooks to last me the rest of my life.

And I keep finding bits and pieces of Mark in them. I picked up one of the smallest notebooks the other day to write out a grocery list, and when I turned the first page I found a chapter of Mark translated verse by verse in my father's familiar handwriting. He must have had a few spare minutes, pulled that tiny notebook out of his pocket, and set to work. I used to talk to my dad about this project of translating Mark over and over. I loved it as a language-learning hack, returning again and again to the same text, hardwiring its vocabulary and its grammatical constructions into us until we suddenly break into fluency. But it was surely more than fluency my father was after. Mark is the earliest gospel, the shortest gospel, and in many ways, the strangest gospel. My father was not only trying to increase his capacity for reading Latin. I'm sure he was translating and re-translating the Gospel of Mark to try to see Jesus more clearly.

What did it mean to him to seek Jesus in a language in which he was not fluent? A language he had to decipher word by word? I wish now I had asked my father about that. I wish I'd asked him what he'd learned about Jesus through approaching him in such a painstaking way. I wished that especially when I saw what the reading for today was, not just a reading from Mark's gospel, but its pivot point, the story where Jesus begins talking with His disciples about who He is and what it means to follow Him. Now, Jesus barrels through the Gospel of Mark moving quickly from one episode to another. "Immediately, He did this. Immediately, He did that.", Mark says. But when we meet Jesus in this story, walking with his disciples on a remote road between villages, he seems to have found his way to a still point, to a pause in the incessant action.

––

––

Not since the scene of Jesus' baptism in chapter one has anyone said anything in this gospel about who Jesus might be. The focus has been on what He does, healing, teaching, reading scripture in the synagogue, feeding the crowds who follow Him, arguing with other religious teachers. But out on the road, Jesus opens a different kind of conversation. He asks His disciples, "Who do people say that I am?" The previously unspoken answers to that question come pouring out. "They find you in the old stories," His disciples tell Him. "People think you're John the Baptist or Elijah or one of the prophets." But Jesus replies, "Who do you say that I am?" Peter is the only one who answers. "You are the Messiah," he says.

Now, other gospels make of this moment a kind of anointing of Peter. He's the one who can see who Jesus really is and he's rewarded for it. "Blessed are you Peter," Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew when Peter calls him the Messiah. "I will build my church on you." Mark tells this story much differently. "Keep that to yourself," Jesus tells Peter. "And focus instead on this. I'm going to suffer and be rejected and killed, and then I'm going to rise." Here, what emerges from Peter's confession of faith is a quick, sharp exchange of rebukes between Peter and Jesus. In his usual spare way, Mark doesn't say much about their motivations, but Peter seems shocked by what Jesus understood messiahship to mean, suffering, rejection, and a criminal's death are probably not where he thought things were going.

The even more interesting question, of course, is why Jesus didn't want the disciples going around saying He was the Messiah. Now, some commentators have suggested that doing so would've brought the violent hand of power down on Jesus before he had a chance to complete his ministry, and so He wants to keep it under wraps. Others have argued that the author of Mark invented the theme of secrecy to explain why Jesus didn't talk about Himself as the Messiah. It's not that Jesus didn't think He was the Messiah, this argument goes. It's just that He kept it a secret. Other readers have argued that Jesus wanted to deflect attention from an identification of Him as Messiah to give Him time to redefine what messiahship might mean. That's the explanation that makes most sense to me, especially in our moment in history.

Reading this story in the midst of election season reminds us of how easily religious ideas can fill up with meaning that attaches them to power and dominance. Even our confessions of faith are vulnerable to being co-opted by power. We hear about the Christian vote and Christian policies, excuse me, and it's assumed everyone agrees on what that means. We've seen messianic fervor over a candidate cross over into actual claims that a candidate is anointed by God, protected by God, intended by God to rule over others. I don't think there's a more dangerous idea in this world.

Now, in Mark's story, Jesus resists having the idea of Messiah fill up with ideas of power and domination by reordering the conversation from who He is to what His life means. Jesus rebukes Peter by saying that Peter's mind is not on divine things, but on human ones. The irony of this is that the most deeply human things are vulnerability, are mortality, are in fact the divine things Jesus seeks to protect from misuse. Jesus' destiny, like the destiny of all of us, leads to death. And yet, death is not the last thing to be said about us. Even in the midst of suffering, rejection, and death, there is life. That's the essence of Jesus' ministry, His gospel, His messiahship, Mark seems to say. God is present in the midst of suffering and rejection and death. God's life pulses through our life and the world through which we move, and God's life gathers us up.

Now, Peter called Jesus Messiah, but there were other powerful names that accrued to Jesus over time, including the name in our reading from the Book of Wisdom, namely, wisdom herself. This feminine image of God's goodness and creativity, the one who enters every generation making friends of God and prophets, might feel difficult to square with the teacher and healer walking to Caesarea Philippi on the back roads in the days of the Roman Empire. But it's an image that has helped Christians make sense of Jesus and who He is. "Wisdom is more mobile than any motion," he Book of Wisdom says. "Her very existence renews all things." And my father didn't get to live long enough to read Mark without looking up any words. But he did live long enough, I can attest, to grow proficient in Jesus' way of love, which does indeed renew all things, and to encounter Jesus again and again in all the places where He is found, including places of suffering. And he laid down tracks of devotion and care on which I hope to follow him all the way to the end. Amen.

Full Service Video