Aha from Bible Class

Pastor’s walking us through St. Mark’s Gospel in our Wednesday evening class. It’s very good. Tonight we were in Mark 8. He moves through it very slowly and that enables one to see what might be missed. After Peter confesses “thou art the Christ,” Jesus proceeds to unpack for them for the first time exactly what this means. In other words, he plainly teaches them the Gospel: “the Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. And he spake that saying openly.” Openly, clearly, plainly laying before His own for the very first time the Gospel, the kerygma, which THEY were to carry into the world. 

And yet Peter takes Jesus aside and rebukes Him. He does not approve of what he’s hearing from Jesus. Jesus then says the hardest words he ever spoke to anyone: “Get thee behind me, Satan.” Peter was savouring not the things that be of God, but of man. Jesus calls the crowd together and has some hard words about following Him means embracing our own crosses, but then at the tail end of the chapter: “Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation; of him will the Son of man be ashamed, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” Peter was ASHAMED of what Jesus’s words had proclaimed. Did Jesus speak that last bit looking directly at his no doubt blushing Fisherman? And what a joy that if he had been ashamed, he (like St. Paul) would indeed NOT be ashamed of the Gospel in the end; but it would be his joy to announce it any and to all.