Shifting Mid-Mark
Reflections on the Lectionary for September 15th
Mark 8:27-38—the gospel text in the lectionary for September 15th—is a famous passage. In both the lectionary site I just linked to and in one of the bibles on my desk right now, this section is called “Peter’s confession.” (Another of the bibles on my desk calls it a “declaration about Jesus,” which is kind of a sanitized way to put it, I think). If you have spent any time around churches or reading the Bible, you’ve probably heard this passage described as a climactic moment of clarity on the part of Peter, and maybe even as a moment of dawning realization for Jesus himself, as Jesus’ identity snaps into place. Jesus’ question to his disciples might have been a rhetorical one, or it might have been an honest question, one that Jesus himself wanted to know the answer to. The instance of the “messianic secret” motif in 8:30 suggests that even if it was an instance of clarity, Jesus was still not fully prepared to announce it to the world. This might tell us that Jesus’ question was an honest one that he himself wanted to know the answer to, and not a pop quiz designed to test the disciples.
But I want to focus on a different aspect of this passage—one that might not be as frequently discussed. This passage often gets understood as a climax to the narrative and a moment of crystallizing clarity, but I think we should also understand it as a hinge in the narrative, as a pivot point around which a few things turn. It’s not only a place where the Gospel of Mark’s story reaches an early crescendo (if it is that), but it’s also a place where the tune slightly changes, and some new notes start to float through.
I see two new tunes or new notes appearing in this passage—neither exactly for the first time in Mark, but for the first time in the way they show up here. These are 1) the shift away from Pharisees as Jesus’ opponents and toward the “elders, chief priests, and scribes” as Jesus opponents, and 2) the shift away from understanding Jesus primarily in the tradition of prophets, and toward understanding Jesus primarily in the tradition of messianic or kingly figures. These might seem like subtle things, and they are. But I think they’re also important and consequential for our reading of this passage and our understanding of how Mark is telling Jesus’ story.
First, the shift from Pharisees to “elders, chief priests, and scribes” as Jesus’ opponents. It’s worth saying up front that all four of these categories—Pharisees, elders, chief priests, and scribes—show up across the Gospel of Mark. And sometimes they show up together in conflated ways, as in 7:1 which has “Pharisees and some of the scribes” and 2:16 which has “the scribes of the Pharisees” (though in that verse some manuscript variants change the “of” to “and” so that it reads “the scribes and the Pharisees,” probably trying to harmonize style across gospel texts). But if you zoom way out and look at the Gospel of Mark as a whole, and if you pay close attention to who Jesus’ opponents are throughout, you’ll see that this passage in 8:27-38 marks a shift. (I’m indebted to Lawrence M. Wills’ notes in the Jewish Annotated New Testament for pointing this out). Up to that point in Mark, Jesus’ primary opponents are Pharisees, most pointedly in 3:6 where “the Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.” But that’s the only open and outright hostility on the part of the Pharisees toward Jesus in the entirety of the Gospel of Mark; elsewhere the Pharisees engage Jesus in what seem to be honest questions and some verbal sparring (including in 12:13 where they try to “trap” Jesus in his words, which turned into the question about taxation). Jesus and the Pharisees in Mark are mostly conversation partners; they might not always agree, but they do seem to share an understanding of what ought to count as good-faith debate. The Pharisees and Jesus seem to view each other as a reliable sounding board for discerning truth.
Although they had earlier in that passage in 3:6 conspired against Jesus, after this passage in 8:27-38 the Pharisees only appear as Jesus’ conversation partners, not as his enemies. And beginning in 8:31, some new opponents come into view: “the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes.” From this point onward in the Gospel of Mark, the Pharisees recede as opponents and this new coalition of religious and political functionaries takes center stage. Look at Mark 10:33, where Jesus predicts that he will be “handed over to the chief priests and the scribes,” or look at 11:18 where “the chief priests and the scribes…kept looking for a way to kill him,” or 14:1 where “the chief priests and the scribes were looking for a way to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill him,” or 14:53 in the trial scene where the arrested Jesus is taken “to the high priest, and all the chief priests, the elders, and the scribes” for interrogation. Suddenly any opposition to Jesus is attributed to this group, in one form or another, and the Pharisees mostly recede into the background.
This might not seem like that big of a shift, but it is. Twenty centuries later, it’s easy for us to flatten out all the characters in this drama, and it’s easy for us to assume that people like the Pharisees and the chief priests must have been allies and aligned in their interests. But that was by no means the case. Just like in any society or system, including our own, first-century Judea had factions and shifting alliances, and Jesus lived right in the middle of all of that. Broadly speaking (very broadly), the Pharisees were a popular reformist group on the outside of institutional power; they didn’t tend to hold priesthoods or civic functionary positions, and they critiqued the people who did, on the basis that they were insufficiently pious and holy, and perhaps too beholden to their own privilege. The “elders, chief priests, and scribes,” meanwhile, were establishment folk. They were the old guard, the entrenched power.
What’s interesting about the way Mark is telling Jesus’ story is that here in the middle of the gospel, right at the moment when Jesus is asking who people say that he is and right when Peter is making his “confession,” some big alliances shifted. It seems that the reformist Pharisees began to see Jesus as closer to their own position, and the people with institutional power began to see Jesus as a threat. In the end, as Mark tells it, it was the people in power who had Jesus arrested and put on trial—though in Mark as in the other gospels it’s Roman imperial power in the figure of Pilate who ultimately sends Jesus to his death. (Though all the gospels try to assign blame for Jesus’ death to Jews in one way or another, the fact that Jesus was crucified on a Roman cross tells us that at the end of the day it was Roman imperial powers, and not his fellow Jews, who killed him). The Pharisees are notably absent in the Gospel of Mark’s arrest, trial, and crucifixion scenes; they don’t appear again in the gospel at all after 12:13. Whatever their differences, the Pharisees don’t ultimately try to kill Jesus, and after this passage in this week’s lectionary, they don’t even conspire against him in any serious way. In fact, in a few scenes across gospels, we see the Pharisees help Jesus, either covertly or overtly.
So that’s the first shift—the shift away from Pharisees as Jesus’ opponents, and towards the “elders, the chief priests, and the scribes.” What about the second shift, the one away from seeing Jesus as a prophetic figure and towards seeing Jesus as a messianic or kingly figure? And is this second shift related to the first?
This second shift is starkly clear in the structure of this lectionary passage. In 8:28, “they” (the disciples) tell Jesus that the people say he is “John the Baptist, Elijah, and…one of the prophets.” That is, the people understand Jesus as a part of a long and distinguished line of prophetic figures who had been sent by God to critique power structures and urge renewed justice and piety. Perhaps that’s why the Pharisees warmed up to him; he was, after all, doing basically the same work they were doing, calling the people back to religious devotion. The choices of John the Baptist, Elijah, and “one of the prophets” as illustrations for this point are good ones. John the Baptist was a recent figure, one very much fresh in the imaginations of Judeans, as a person who criticized institutional religion and civic life from an outsider’s perspective. John was sometimes described in Elijah-like terms, and Elijah, too, would have been a familiar figure to most Judeans. Elijah was long-gone, of course, but he held a place in the popular religious imagination as a truth-speaker and a harbinger of devotion. And the generic “one of the prophets” makes sense; it places Jesus among the group of divine messengers that came from time to time to call people to repentance and renewal. All of those models fit with Jesus’ ministry, which seemed to be a ministry of teaching and prophesying and healing.
But Peter’s response marks a shift. When the disciples at large report that people think of Jesus in prophetic terms, but Peter speaks for himself and declares that Jesus is more like a messiah, the reader is being asked to recalibrate what they think of Jesus. Perhaps up to this point the reader was following Jesus’ story in a way that mostly aligned with the “people” who said that Jesus was a prophet. But once Peter says that Jesus is a messiah, Jesus’ characterization in the gospel shifts to a more king-like pattern, which holds through his arrest, trial, and death.
A “messiah” was already an old idea by the time Peter used it to describe Jesus. “Messiah” came out of a long experience of dispossession by Israel and Judah; time and time again, Israel and Judah’s sovereignty was thwarted by the mega-empires that surrounded them: the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, and ultimately the Romans. “Messiah” literally means “anointed one,” and it refers to the act of anointing that makes the king the king—the ritual that inaugurates someone into the kingship. (Think of inauguration day in the United States, and the moment when the new president takes the oath of office). Anointing became a symbol of kingship, and kingship became a symbol of national sovereignty, resurgence, and independence. At a time when Israel had been long subsumed by the Assyrians and Judah was under the thumb of Roman power, the hope and expectation of a messiah was a powerful thing.
The problem was, as many have pointed out, that Jesus was not a very suitable messiah. He wasn’t a military leader or even especially royal (though both Matthew and Luke try to solve that problem, in different ways, with genealogical proofs). Jesus fit the prophetic model much more cleanly, but the gospels all claim in one way or another that Jesus was actually a king, a messiah, the one who would restore Judah’s fortunes and reclaim David’s throne. Messiah (which in Greek is “Christos,” or “Christ”) became the definitive way to refer to Jesus’ role.
So this story of “Peter’s confession” might be a way of signaling that shift from understanding Jesus as a prophet to understanding him as a messiah—and it might be a device to help the reader begin to understand that shift as well. The fact that this passage is the first moment when “the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes” emerge as his opponents might suggest that Jesus’ kingly identity—such as it was—was threatening to the people who held positions of institutional power. If we think of the system in terms of insiders and outsiders, Jesus felt threatening to outsiders (Pharisees) when he was behaving like an outsider (a prophet), but he began to feel threatening to insiders (elders, chief priests, and scribes) when he began to behave like an insider (a messiah). Suddenly the outsiders didn’t think he was so bad, but the insiders began to figure out how to remove him from the picture.
Maybe all of that complicates the more common reading of that passage, which is that Peter gets Jesus’ true identity and makes a heartfelt confession about it. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with reading this passage as a crystallizing moment of realization for Peter and for Jesus himself—it certainly does seem to be that. But I think, with a close reading, this passage also helps us understand how Peter got to that point, and what the implications of Jesus’ messianic identity would turn out to be.