In the previous chapter, Jesus taught his students he was gonna die. It was the first time he’d brought it up, and it freaked Simon Peter so bad he actually started to rebuke Jesus for saying so, and Jesus had to rebuke Peter right back. I quote:
Jesus began to teach his students that the Son of Man had to suffer greatly; had to be rejected by the elders, head priests, and scribes; had to be executed; and after three days, had to be resurrected. Jesus bluntly gave this lesson.
Well, now we’re at the point in Mark, right after Jesus freed a demonized boy, where he brought up the subject for the second time.
Leaving that
place , they went through the Galilee.Jesus didn’t want anyone to knowthis , for he was teaching his students. He told them this:
“The Son of Man will be surrendered into human hands.
They’ll execute him.
After three days, the executed one
will raise himself up.”
They didn’t understand the lesson, and were afraid to ask
Jesus about it.
People usually quote this passage to point out how Jesus told his students more than once how he was gonna die. But when they zoom in on one of Jesus’s predictions of his own death, they tend to pick the more dramatic passage from Mark 8—more dramatic because Peter challenged Jesus, and Jesus called him Satan, and oooh, it’s a big deal that Jesus called him Satan. Hope he never calls us Satan. That’d be bad.
The rest of the time, they quote this passage to point out what dunderheads Jesus’s disciples were. Here, he tells them something hugely significant: He’s gonna be killed, but he’s gonna be resurrected. And yet after he was killed, his students appear to have totally forgotten how Jesus said he was gonna be resurrected. Even though Jesus repeatedly told them he would. Man, what lousy, inattentive students.
Well, when we remember the context of Mark 8—how the last time Jesus had talked about his death, he was obligated to call one of his students Satan—we’ll see why his students were hesitant to discuss the matter with him. They figured they were supposed to understand this lesson the first time around. They worried they’d get in trouble when they revealed they didn’t understand it then, or now. Peter, James, and John had seen a vision of the future, where Messiah was in glory, and the Father had said, “Listen to him”—and hearing the voice of God might have intimidated them into keeping their mouths shut. (For once.) The other students, having heard Jesus call Peter “Satan,” might have likewise been intimidated into keeping their mouths shut, and pretending they understood what he meant the first time.
But Jesus’s teaching, as I explained at the earlier passage, went greatly against what they had grown up hearing from the Pharisees in synagogue: They believed Messiah wasn’t gonna suffer, but conquer. They believed nobody gets resurrected till the End. And the next passage, which I’ll get to next week, reveals they thought of the Kingdom as a top-down, masters-get-served kind of system, like they were used to seeing. Jesus was teaching them something entirely different than what they were familiar with. But they didn’t want to get in trouble—they “were afraid,” as Mark put it—so they didn’t ask Jesus for clarification.
Some of this also reflects the typical human reaction towards bad news, or a hard saying: If you don’t get it, or don’t like it, ignore it. Maybe it’ll go away.
Denial is a foolish reaction, but it’s a very common reaction. And to some degree, that’s what we see in Jesus’s students: Denial. Peter told him, “This will never happen to you,” (Lk 16.22) and got rebuked for it; the rest of the students may not have repeated Peter’s statement, but likely they were all thinking it. Messiah killed? Why, then, were they following him, if he was going to be killed? He couldn’t be killed. He was Messiah. He was gonna conquer the world. He must be mistaken, or they must be mistaken—they were entirely sure Messiah didn’t work that way. Even though Jesus was the teacher and they the students, they figured they knew better.
We get that way all the time with hard teachings from the scriptures: “It can’t mean that. It has to mean what I’ve always been told it means.” And so we embrace the easier interpretation… even though it’s bunk, and won’t grow us any closer to Jesus. And you know, sometimes it means we’ll actually stop growing as Christians, ’cause for the Holy Spirit, this hard teaching is something he requires us to grasp before we can go any further. If we can’t, fr’instance, practice forgiveness, no matter how hard it might be to forgive some people, that’s the end of our usefulness as Christians: We won’t grow any further. We just won’t. The Spirit is gonna sit down and wait for us to stop resisting him. Meanwhile, we’re gonna densely wonder why our progress has stopped. We might even invent excuses for it, like “God wants me to stay here for a time.” But there’s no getting around the stumbling blocks on God’s path. There’s only going through them.
Thankfully, the Spirit can help. Jesus’s students finally got what he was teaching after he did get executed, and come back. Sometimes God has to push us over those stumbling blocks. Still, there’s no getting around them.