Plotting Mark to the Caesarea Foreboding

I ended the last post with:

"To envision the Creation as a landscape of comprehensible references that we can piously call the rightful possession of God is in fact an appalling act of arrogance.  All that we can truly call the rightful possession of God is everything that we think and feel.  This is where the Gospel of Mark is going from here--indeed, this is where it has been going all along."

8:27-9:1)  "And Jesus went out, and his disciples, into the towns of Caesarea Philippi: and by the way he asked his disciples, saying unto them, Whom do men say that I am?"  The disciples list briefly the conjectures abroad about Jesus, and then--in response to Jesus' query about what they themselves think, Peter responds with the famous, "Thou art the Christ."  (Across all these years, it is impossible to know--in the limited context of Mark--whether Peter is answering for himself or for the group.  It is perhaps telling that the only follow-up here is "And he charged them that they should tell no man of him.")

Any notion of stellar performance on the part of Peter is, of course, quashed by what follows immediately.  Jesus predicts his death, Peter tries to rebuke him for that, and Jesus calls him "Satan," "for thou savorest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men."  Peter is thinking as humans think, not as God thinks, and then Jesus gives a discourse on how humans should think.  Humans should reckon their lives as nothing, and should give up their lives willingly in the service of Jesus and his teachings.

Only by such means can true and eternal life be obtained.  Of course, at this point the churches will usually interject that Jesus means we should be "dead to sin," or some such, and can continue to wallow riotously in the earthly blessings accorded to faithful children of God.  This might seem unfair to Christians who undoubtedly hold to the notion that one ought to display at least a modicum of abstemiousness, but a "modicum" (or some such) of this or that does not seem to fit with Jesus' pronouncements: "Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me."

This brings us back to my statement above, "All that we can truly call the rightful possession of God is everything we think and feel."  I would hope to be spared the notion that I espouse "pantheism," in that I attempt--in concert with Peter's assignment--to think as God thinks.  This endeavor, inescapably, will abut the unfathomable mystery of anything but God existing of its own--which of course includes the possibility that what we might call "pantheism" exists in some unfathomable way in the mind of God.  However, Jesus' charge to think as God does has its chief application in trying not to think as humans do--and we humans think of a surveyable universe of distinct phenomena against which we are ourselves distinct phenomena.  In this universe of conceit we range ourselves as pawns or cogs or actors or whatever, and concoct our religious schemes.  It is better that we think of the boundless and volatile implications of God's existence, and in doing so we can remember that we are charged to think as God does--we are not charged with doing that thinking particularly well, as if ever we could.

The main thing about Jesus' teaching here is the necessary embrace of his demand of total renunciation, not--as the churches will have it--the embrace of Jesus as savior, nor--as our natures will disallow--the practice of perfect self-abnegation.  It is the nexus of Jesus as living person and Jesus as living instruction--the divine manifested for the salvation of the world--that is focused upon here:

"For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it . . . . Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation; of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels."

Three times Jesus predicts his fate, and still it seems that the disciples never get the message.  As we will see, however, when Jesus predicts his fate he always foretells the fate of humanity--though all the ages of Christianity seem not to have gotten that message.