Jesus now throws out a
substantial challenge to the disciples and to the crowd that are there with
them. It is a call to discipleship, but Jesus offers a clear indication that being
his disciple is not going to be easy. He talks about self-denial and about
taking up the cross. He describes the total commitment that is needed.
When Mark wrote down the story,
he was writing for a community that had experience of persecution and
suffering. Originally the disciples may have struggles with these ideas; but
they had come to be the reality of many Christians. As Joseph O’Hanlon (Mark
My Words) expresses it, “Suffering is not the fate of Jesus alone. It is
the possible fate of all would-be disciples. Jesus calls on the crowd (that
multitude of potential disciples which peoples Mark’s stage) to follow him on
the way of the cross. Mark’s frightened community, trying to rebuild itself in
the aftermath of terrible persecution and betrayal, is reminded that
discipleship and the cross go together.”
This takes us back to the challenge
of understanding just how different it is to follow Jesus from the conventional
expectation of following any important teacher. You do not expect suffering,
persecution and death to be on the agenda. It makes no logical sense to say
that losing your life means that you save it. It is not the way of the world to
deny yourself. Discipleship to Jesus invariably discards any conventional
expectation of what it might be like to
be a disciple.
This segment also mentions
the possibility of shame. There is a mutuality. If you are ashamed of Jesus,
the Son of Man, to take the title that is used here, then he will be ashamed of
you.
The statement that some will
not taste death until they have seen the Kingdom is a difficult one. As O’Hanlon
says, “It may be that Mark is comforting his harassed community with the
thought that their suffering would be short-lived.” But that was not so.
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