Scripture:
Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.” And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.
Then Jesus began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.
~Mark 8:27-34
If you invoke as Father the one who judges all people impartially according to their deeds, live in reverent fear during the time of your exile. You know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without defect or blemish. He was destined before the foundation of the world, but was revealed at the end of the ages for your sake. Through him you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are set on God.
~1 Peter 1:17-20
Do you, by any chance, remember S & H Green Stamps? I became aware of these little wonders on a visit to my grandmother when I was about 6 or 7. She and my aunt collected them, and I watched, curious, as they pasted them in their little books. For the younger set—say, Gen X folk and later—I know I’m dating myself. But for those among us who, say, collect points for Starbucks or Dunkin, think of these little stamps as really early loyalty cards. You got them at the grocery store or the gas station, just for spending your money there, and when you got home, you licked their backs and placed them in little books. After enough trips to this grocery store you could redeem your book (probably books) full of stamps for a toaster, or a lawnmower… or toys.
Once I understood that toys could possibly be involved, I wanted in on the action. I pressed my mother to get me a book and some stamps, so that I could start collecting and redeeming. Unfortunately, our grocery store at home didn’t give them out, so my little book disappeared into my nightstand, just a few stamps on the first page.
That was the first time I’d ever heard that word, by the way. Redeem. Technically, I’m sure it had been said in church, so I’d probably had heard it before. But if I thought of it at all, it was in the big, vague category of Church Words, and I hadn’t really worried about what it meant. But once the Green Stamps were part of the picture I came to understand: when you redeemed something, you bought it, or you traded something for it. It was an exchange, or a purchase or a barter.
We use those terms, “redeem” and “redemption,” a lot in popular culture. Movies and TV shows often have a “redemption arc” for characters who start out seeming, well, irredeemable… as if they are too thoroughly corrupted, or maybe, too badly broken, to find any fragments of goodness in themselves. But in the end, sometimes, they do—they are redeemed. They find enough goodness within to make a new start.
The idea of redemption or ransom is one of the many ways Christians have understood the crucifixion throughout our history. In this morning’s passage from Mark’s gospel we hear a conversation Jesus has with his disciples in which he is wondering how people see him out in the world. His friends tell him people think he’s a prophet, like John the Baptist or Elijah. When he asks, who do you think I am, Simon Peter replies, You are the Messiah.
Even though we hear it a lot, the concept of “messiah” in is a little tricky to understand. Literally, it means anointed—just like the word, “Christ.” And there are many throughout the Hebrew Scriptures who are anointed—priests and prophets, judges and kings. But here, messiah means something specific: a messiah was a charismatic leader heading up a movement, hoping to overthrow the oppressive Roman empire, and bring in an age of God’s righteousness and justice. In the Monty Python film “Life of Brian,” there’s a marketplace sequence in which we see soapbox after soapbox, with various would-be messiahs standing on them, preaching to the shoppers, a humorous spin on an historical truth: In first century Palestine, there were lots of would-be messiahs. And though the people definitely military and political expectations of these leaders, it becomes clear, in the gospel, that this is not how Jesus is going to do it at all.
Jesus responds to the title “Messiah” by predicting that he will have to suffer, and die, and on the third day, rise from the dead.
If he is a Messiah, Jesus makes it clear: he is a Messiah of a different mold than his followers are anticipating. God’s power will be manifested in Jesus death and resurrection. Just few chapters later in Mark’s gospel, Jesus puts it this way:
For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life, a ransom for many. (Mark 10:45).
Jesus’ death will purchase life. And as the first letter of Peter reminds us, it will be the power of ransom, the power of redemption. In The Message paraphrase, we read,
Your life is a journey you must travel with a deep consciousness of God. It cost God plenty to get you out of that dead-end, empty-headed life you grew up in.
~1 Peter 1:18
It's so odd to think of the cost of sin, of God paying on our behalf—paying for our lives, buying back our souls, but from whom? There’s an assumption that we may have bartered ourselves away, sold our souls to someone, for some thing.
It’s hard for us moderns to imagine what this means. We can see it clearly in the human realm. We can see the cost of sin or brokenness in our families, for example—how abuse begets abuse, how the harm isn’t restricted to one person, but travels down through the generations, unless and until healing can take hold, and wholeness can be reclaimed. We see the cost. We can see the cost that the sin of white supremacy exacts on indigenous peoples, forced to rename and reclaim their personhood at every turn, when confronted with ugly stereotypes in the names of sports teams, and in the sexualization of figures like Pocahontas, and in the erasure of their languages and history. We can see the cost of sin to people. Why is it hard for us to imagine there is a cost to the God who loved us into being and who weeps when we are weeping? Why is it hard for us to understand that we worship a God who is and was willing to pay the price to save us from ourselves?
One author describes it this way:
The human predicament is so dire that it cannot be remedied in any ordinary way. If we fail to see this, then we “have not yet considered the great weight of sin.” Redemption (buying back) therefore is not cheap. In the death of Jesus we see God [Godself] suffering the consequences of sin. That is the “price.”[i]
And if this still seems too abstract, or too unlikely, or too hard to accept, consider this suggestion of another writer, who invites us to see the redemption and ransom of the cross as a parable. (In this instance, I’ll describe a parable as a story or image designed to move us from the head to the heart.) He writes, “the parable of the hopeless debtor redeemed by Christ’s infinite generosity is an excellent parable.”[ii]
It is an excellent parable, a parable of the infinite, overwhelming, and overflowing love of God. This love is at the heart of each word the gospels and epistles preach about the death of Jesus; it is the bedrock on which they stand. It is a love that doesn’t settle for pain and death as the last word. It is a love, at the last, that raises Jesus from that three-day tomb, and us along with him. God has coupled death and resurrection in an indissoluble bond, so that we will know our redeemer died, and lives again, and that we live, too.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[i] Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2015), 287.
[ii] Austin Farrer, Saving Belief (New York: Morehouse-Barlow, 1964), 102-107.