James 3.1-12, Mark 8.27-38
The Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity, 13 September 2015
Queen Camel , West Camel, Corton Denham
What’s in a name? Quite a lot, you would say, if you were a parent of a newborn faced with the big decision about what your child should be known as throughout their lifetime. [1]
And, in the playground, if you ever found yourself chanting, ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me’, you’ll know just how deeply untrue that is – the names people call you do hurt.
We spend large amounts of our time during our young adult years trying to get a name for ourselves, names like Doctor or Sergeant or Company Director. And people in later years occasionally ponder what names others will call them once they’ve passed away – the warm eulogy for the good father, the generous epitaph for the beloved mother, are what we secretly hope for.
One thing we know is that the person who has the power to name another person, has great power indeed. The Queen conveying knighthoods; the principal conveying doctorates, the admirer naming his valentine – each using their power to name to positive effect. By contrast think of the negative power in naming: the business manager renaming a job title so as to make a disliked employee redundant; the politician renaming refugees as ‘economic migrants’ so as to harden public opinion against their plight; the occupying military force renaming ancient places to invalidate the native language and subdue the native culture.
Other people will call you and me names, variously, throughout our lives. And we will also, at certain points, use our power to be those-who-name, use it either positively or negatively. The power we have to name is the focus of today’s bible readings: James’ forceful passage on the potential in our tongue to bless or to curse; and in Mark’s gospel an exchange between Jesus and Peter with some very strong name-calling indeed. An exchange underpinned by the key question which we might ask ourselves today: what name are you calling God?
The conflict between Jesus and Peter in a village of Caesarea Philippi was all about the name Peter was calling God. Their exchange began with Peter dramatically confessing Jesus as the ‘Messiah’; but in reply, Jesus called himself the ‘Son of Man’, the Suffering One, and when Peter rebuked him about this Jesus called Peter ‘Satan’. ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’ It’s probably not the response you’d expect. It certainly wasn’t what Peter expected.
For Peter was a man of his time, living in an occupied territory with the people of Israel in subjection to Rome. And Peter was a man of the people, like everyone else hoping for a Messiah who would rise with force against the oppressor and use all the military and political power he could muster to restore Israel’s collective honour. As one of the people, Peter longed for the restoration of Israel, and it dawned on Peter that Jesus was The One. When he called Jesus ‘Messiah’ it was Peter expressing the joyful recognition that had dawned on him, that Jesus was The One with the power to save the people.
But all he got from Jesus was the command to be silent and listen to the teacher unfolding the reality – that Jesus wasn’t an avenging Messiah, he was a Son of Man, a mortal just like Peter; that Jesus wouldn’t save the people through a show of military and political power, but that he would suffer at the hands of those who held those powers in that society – the elders, chief priests and scribes subservient to Rome – and be killed. This Suffering One would, however, after three days rise again. The power of this Suffering One was of a different kind altogether – the power of life over death.
By rejecting the name of Messiah and calling himself The Son of Man, a Suffering One, Jesus placed himself alongside all the powerless ones in his society, ‘people who on the whole had no rights, groups whose development had to be suppressed by all possible means to safeguard law and order in the state.’ [2] But he didn’t stop there. He was introducing something unheard of, remarkable, world-changing: teaching that the deadly scenario which he and other victims would suffer was nothing compared to the life to be found in sharing his resurrection. ‘For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it,’ he said.
But why call Peter ‘Satan’? Tell him he’s misguided, maybe, for thinking Jesus a Messiah; correct him politely, perhaps, but call him ‘Satan’? Jesus must have had a firm reason to use an such extreme name against the one who had just expressed such faith and confidence in him.
Well, elsewhere Jesus describes Satan as ‘the father of lies’, ‘a murderer from the beginning [who] does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him.’ [3] And here he is teaching Peter that, as a man of his time, Peter was caught up in the power scenario of the world, its military-political systems and forces; Peter had swallowed Satan’s lie that there is no alternative to such forces, that the best we can do as Sons and Daughters of Men is take up our role in the endless fight for position and power, which is the way of the world. Peter was so caught up in this, that his eyes were closed to the possibility of any other sort of power.
In Mark’s gospel, as far as Jesus is concerned there is total opposition between the power of death in the world of Satan and the power of life in the love of Jesus, there is no accommodation to be made, no compromise to be had between these two powers, between these two names.
And there is prophetic potency in this uncompromising position. For if we take a look at the world’s history we very quickly see that our Messiahs always let us down.
We see that the One who would rescue Germany through National Socialism became the Führer of the Final Solution;
– that the Ones who would abolish class conflict through Communism became the rigid and repressive rulers of totalitarian states;
– that the Ones who would build the great British Empire became the exploiters of countless slaves;
– and that the Ones who power the economic system which is the idol of our times have become the destroyers of the earth’s finite resources and the champions of yawning human inequality.
The name of the One who keeps the world in death through the power of military-political force, through its messiahs and its kings, is Satan.
The name of the One who overcome death through the power of the pure force of nonviolent love, through the loving obedience of his faithful disciples, is the suffering one, Jesus.
So I’m inviting you to read today’s passage as a contemplation of the question, What name are you giving Jesus? What name are you calling God?
It’s an important question for Christians to consider in a world where everyone has a name for God, and where the name we give to God determines what we’re expecting God to do in the world, who we’re expecting God to be. The power you have to give a name to God is a very great power indeed.
Some followers of God call him The Watchmaker, the intelligent designer who set the world in motion; some critics call him The Blind Watchmaker, who isn’t intelligent and doesn’t design. [4]
In a previous sermon I quoted a critic of God, the actor Stephen Fry telling an interviewer earlier this year, ”The God who created this universe, if he created this universe, is quite clearly a maniac, an utter maniac, totally selfish… We have to spend our lives on our knees thanking him. What kind of God would do that?” [5]
We should take account of the critics of God, for often the points they make reflect less on God himself, but on the God whose character has been shaped in their eyes by the names that God’s friends and followers have given him. Consider this: Peter was Jesus’ closest friend and most devoted follower, but when it came to the name he used to describe Jesus, he got it spectacularly wrong. As friends and followers of Jesus ourselves, our concern ought to be with the names we call him – and the effect this has on how he is perceived in the wider world.
One name we often call Jesus, is ‘King’. We might want to consider why; for ‘King’ was a name Jesus never called himself, and it’s very close to ‘Messiah’ in its connotations, a name he vehemently opposed. The writer Polly Toynbee recently published an article on the prevalence of monarchical language in our society, saying, ‘Feudal imagery taints everything: Christianity (and other faiths) set subjects on their knees to worship a lord and king, as if absolute monarchy were the only imaginable symbol for transcendental awe.’ This echoes Stephen Fry’s criticism of God and questions the shape and form and character of God which we Christians have promoted over centuries.
Why do we Anglicans call Jesus, ‘King’ when he never called himself that? Perhaps because our church was founded by a King who wanted to shape religious observance in this country his way; and we have slavishly followed?
Why do we Christians insist on calling Jesus, ‘King’ when he vehemently opposed such a title? Perhaps because somehow we have let the world – that is, the ways of the world which Jesus would call Satan – rule our minds and suppress our imagination about the shape and form and character of God’s power and the ways he expresses it.
John’s gospel records the names which Jesus called himself; as you listen to them, think of the kind of character and lifestyle they express:
“I am the bread of life”
“I am the light of the world”
“I am the door of the sheep”
“I am the good shepherd”
“I am the resurrection, and the life”
“I am the way, the truth, and the life”
“I am the true vine” [6]
And Mark’s gospel records Jesus calling himself the Son of Man, the Suffering One.
This Jesus carries another sort of power altogether, from the forms of power which the world promotes. It is a strong love, a strange peace, [7] and it is expressed in self-giving care for others. Following this Jesus means ‘Taking up your cross’ – and Peter and the other listening disciples knew the cross as the punishment which their rulers reserved for those who opposed the forces of empire, the military and political establishment, the structures and powers of death. That was then, and still is now, the calling for those who want to follow him.
If we will keep calling Jesus our ‘king’ then we will keep following kings and their ways. The same if we continue naming him Messiah, Lord, Accuser, Avenging Judge. But what would happen if we began calling him the names he used of himself, Son of Man, the Suffering One? Would we find ourselves standing up against injustice in all its forms, including the temptation to react by using righteous violence? Would we find ourselves speaking up in opposition to those who brutalise others by calling them names – speaking up against the playground bully, supporting campaigns for business models which show care for the earth and its poorest people, speaking up against society’s scapegoating of others?
The power you have to give a name to God is a very great power indeed. So what are you calling God?
Notes
[1] Based on a previous sermon What’s in a name? preached in Devon during Lent 2012.
[2] Hengel, Crucifixion: In the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross, p.86f in Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus, p.245
[3]John 8.44
[4] Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker presents an explanation of, and argument for, the theory of evolution by means of natural selection. [Wikipedia]
[5] Watch: Stephen Fry brands God ‘utterly utterly evil’, Telegraph, 31 January 2015. Quoted in my previous sermon Reconciling Creation, 8 February 2015.
[6] Henry M. Morris, Ph.D, The “I Am’s” Of Christ. Acts & Facts. 32 (4), 2003, quoting John 6:35,48,51, John 8:12, John 10:7,9, John 10:11,14, John 11:25, John 14:6, John 15:1,5.
[7] Echoes of Larry Norman here, whose Strong Love, Strange Peace, is a devotional song which continues to melt my heart decades after I first heard it.
