Faith is not about being perfect
Faith is not about being perfect The Rev. Bingham Powell In this long season after Pentecost, we are 17 weeks into it, we have been hearing stories from the Gospel According to Mark. We have been working our way through Mark’s telling of the Gospel, and we have been hearing stories of Jesus’s teaching and healing, stories of calling Disciples, gathering people around him. We have heard news of him spreading about, and people wondering who this guy is. This has all been taking place in the region of Galilee, which is the area around the Sea of Galilee. But today we have moved out of that section of the Gospel, which is about the first third of the Gospel, and have moved into the middle of the Gospel. One of the indicators that we have moved is that we are in a different geographical place. We are now in Caesarea Philippi, north of Galilee, and Jesus is with the Disciples. This section of the Gospel, this middle chunk, is book-ended by two stories about the physical healing of blind people. In literary criticism, when there are two book-ends like this, it is pointing to something that is in between them. So what does it mean to have two stories of the healing of blind people on either end of this middle section of the Gospel? I would argue that we have these two stories of healing of blindness because what Jesus is doing in this middle section is trying to heal the blindness of the Disciples. He is trying to open the eyes of the Disciples to understand who he is and what it is that God is doing with him in this world. We begin to hear about the cross and the resurrection, and we will hear it time and again through the next several weeks, in various ways, with implications about what that means for us and our faith. This section starts out with Jesus asking the question that everyone has been asking, who do people say that I am? I wonder if Jesus is testing his Disciples: are your eyes open, Disciples? Do I need to heal any blindness here? But in answer to his question, the Disciples say that some say you are John the Baptist, others say you are Elijah or one of the other Prophets. By the way, Herod, in the story we heard several weeks ago, thought that Jesus was John the Baptist “who I killed”, raised from the dead. Then Jesus asks the Disciples, then who do you say that I am? Peter steps forward and says, you are the Messiah. Remember that Mark gives us the abridged version of all these stories, because a longer version says, you are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. Jesus says A+, Peter. That is fantastic. You got it right. In the other Gospels Jesus says, you, Peter, will be the rock on which I build my church. That’s pretty impressive. Peter got it right, and he is important for having done it. Then the Gospel goes on to say that Jesus explains what that means. He starts talking about having to die and be raised again. This scandalizes Peter, so Peter pulls Jesus aside and asks, what are you saying? You can’t say this. This is not what the Messiah is all about. Jesus rebukes him and says, get behind me Satan. That rock on which Jesus is going to build his church is now the rock on which people will stumble. Peter goes from being right to being wrong. He goes from understanding to not understanding. I am going to argue that Jesus is going to use this middle section of the Gospel trying to convince the Disciples of what this is all about. He is going to try to open their eyes, heal their blindness, and is not going to succeed. We know where this story goes: the Disciples continue to misunderstand Jesus and what he is all about. This Peter, who gets it right and then gets it wrong, is going to get it right again. Then he will get it wrong again, then right, then wrong, then right, and then he dies. That is the story of Peter. A lot of back and forth. We will talk about all the stuff that Jesus is trying to open the Disciples’ eyes to see in the coming weeks. But today I want to focus on Peter. Peter is understood to be th