The Christ & The Cross

Mark 8:22-38

Main Idea: Jesus is the King who must be crucified, calling us to a cruciform life of discipleship.

I. The Concern of Blindness (8:22-26)

This healing introduces the theme of “seeing” and “blindness” that runs throughout Mark 8:22-10:52. This healing is unique, as it takes part in two-stages. This has nothing to do with the power of Jesus, but instead as a representation of the “partial” understanding of the disciples.

“In a single event Jesus is giving the blind man mercy and giving his disciples a mirror. Halfway through his healing, the blind man did not yet have 20/20 vision; halfway through Mark’s Gospel, the disciples do not yet have 20/20 vision. They understand Jesus’ mission, but only fuzzily.”
~ Dane Ortlund, Surprised by Jesus

II. The Confession of Christ (8:27-33)

These verses serve as the center point of the Gospel of Mark and the ‘hinge’ of the book. All of Mark has been building to the question: Who do you say that I am? Everything that comes after this moment will be a consequence of this interaction with the disciples.

While Peter rightly identifies that Jesus is indeed ‘the Christ’ (cf. 1:1), it was unthinkable in this context that the Christ would suffer and be crucified. Peter has supplied the proper title but has the wrong understanding of what this means. They did not realize that the glorious ‘Son of Man’ of Daniel 7 was also the suffering servant of Isaiah (Isa. 52-53).

Peter ‘rebukes’ Jesus (the language of exorcism), standing against him in the strongest possible terms. Peter calls him ‘Satan’ because this is precisely the thinking that Satan tempts Jesus in the wilderness, offering the crown without the cross (cf. Mt. 4:8-10). Jesus emphasizes that the Christ must go through all of these events (suffering, death, and resurrection); while Peter finds the cross inexplicable, Jesus teaches it is inevitable.

“One common reason we fail to leave sin behind is that we have a domesticated view of Jesus… Have we unintentionally reduced him to manageable predictable proportions? Have we been looking at a junior varsity, decaffeinated, one-dimensional Jesus of our own making, thinking we’re looking at the real Jesus? Have we snorkeled in the shallows thinking we’ve now hit bottom on the Pacific?”
~ Dane Ortlund, Deeper

III. The Cost of Discipleship (8:34-38)

Jesus will predict his suffering, death, and resurrection three times in Mark (8:31, 9:31, 10:32-34). After each of these predictions, he then immediately talks about the demands of discipleship. In our passage, Jesus outlines three components to discipleship:

Deny Yourself
Take Up Your Cross
Follow Me

“The cross is not only the source but also the shape of our salvation, and cross-shaped living means that all Christian virtues and practices are cruciform.”
~ Michael Gorman

In the “upside-down” life of the Kingdom of God, death is the way to life, loss is the way to gain, and humility is the way to glory. Following Jesus is an invitation to pick up our cross now while awaiting in faith a promised future glory (8:38), seeing that joy and satisfaction are found only in Jesus.

“The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save It. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”
~ C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity