Ashamed of Jesus?
In this week’s passage, we join Jesus and his disciples at a turning point. Jesus has walked on water, healed many sick people, fed a crowd of four thousand, argued with religious leaders, and taught. Now he and his disciples — who have witnessed these miraculous acts — have journeyed to the villages of Caesarea Philippi. There, Jesus asks them who people say he is.
We gain some insight into the different way information traveled two thousand years ago in their reply. There were no cameras recording the actions of Jesus, nor reporters writing news columns for widespread consumption. There weren’t even notepads and pens readily available for people to jot down their favorite quotes from his sermons. Those who had not seen Jesus in person were dependent on stories from eyewitnesses or those who claimed to be eyewitnesses or those who claimed to have spoken to an eyewitness. It sounds a bit like the 30CE equivalent of social media.
The replies from the disciples about who people thought Jesus was were not quite on the mark. Some suspected he was one of the prophets. Others thought he was the prophet Elijah, who had left Earth a few hundred years prior. The best of the incorrect guesses was that he was John the Baptist. To the credit of those who misidentified him thus, John had been roaming the countryside for a few years teaching, and there was perhaps a family resemblance since he and Jesus were cousins.
Jesus then asks who they think he is. Peter answers, “You are the Messiah.” And then Jesus “sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.”
Mark wrote the first portion of his gospel to build to this point, which “foregrounds the central question of the identity and role of Jesus,” as Bible scholar Warren Carter writes. So what was so significant about the words of Peter? Why was Jesus so quick to instruct his disciples to keep his identity quiet?
Peter referred to Jesus as “the Messiah,” a term that is probably familiar to most folks, and was recently used memorably in the Marvel movie Deadpool & Wolverine. We have a cultural understanding of what that term means in the wake of the gospel stories, but what did it mean to Peter and the other disciples? At the time, there was not a “majority nor a monolithic expectation among Jewish people” that a messiah would emerge. Literally, the word means “anointed,” to have a commission to, as Carter writes, “serve God as an agent of God’s purposes.” So “to confess Jesus to be the Messiah or the Christ was to recognize his great power and affirm that he, not Rome’s emperor, was anointed or commissioned as God’s agent . . . to establish God’s purposes and empire.”
This view clashed head-on with the beliefs of those to whom the disciples and Jesus were politically subject. For the Romans, the emperor was God’s chosen. He was the one invested with great power by the divine, and he wielded that power in worldly terms by collecting taxes from his subjects, discouraging dissent, and inflicting violence when it was deemed necessary to maintain or expand his rule.
So it was understandable that Jesus wanted his disciples to keep messiah language quiet. The consequences of claiming such a title were significant.
Peter is often given credit for being the first to name who Jesus was, despite the fact that he misunderstood what that identity would entail. We might make the same mistake sometimes, forming an image of Jesus that is easier for us to accept than who he was and is.
There has been a lot of writing in recent years by folks who feel Jesus has been overly feminized, or that his depictions are not as “manly” as they should be. In preparation for this reflection, I explored some corners of the web I typically don’t in order to learn more about the reasoning behind these assertions. As you might imagine, the quality and reasoning of what I found varied. One particular item captured many of the sentiments well, so I thought I’d share some of that writer’s thoughts.
The post, entitled “The Masculinity of Christ in the Face of Effeminate Christianity,” is from the Relearn web site, which publishes, as they put it, “Books for Christendom.” The writer’s hypothesis is that “due to the feminization of Jesus, the cultural hatred of masculinity, and the lack of faithful exposition in the pulpit we have been conditioned to not recognize the potent manliness and courageousness of Christ.”
How does he come to this conclusion? He writes that “history confirms that resolve, courage, and bravery rest primarily in the masculine domain.” He then cites some examples documented by men in male-dominated contexts as evidence for this confirmation, which he suggests is based on All Of The History.
He writes that “Jesus was the epitome of manhood — a stalwart in mission, bold, obedient to the point of death, fearless in His proclamation of truth, sacrificial in His acts of love, and resolved to do His Father’s will. Jesus had force, authority, and control in a way that marked Him as virile and robust.”
I didn’t find anything surprising in the post, but finished with two main takeaways: one is a belief that the author does not know many women (at least not very well), and the other is a hope that he doesn’t have any daughters.
I’ve encountered resolve, courage, bravery, boldness, fearlessness, and sacrifice among as many women as men in my life. In my experience, these are not traits that are determined by one’s gender.
So I differ with the writer on several issues, but he did say a couple things that I appreciated. The first is that in our “culture, we have largely produced a caricature of Christ based on the anemic and soft-smiled Roman Catholic paintings where Jesus looks like He’s just put on a fresh coat of blush and tweezed His eyebrows.” I wholeheartedly agree, but believe this has more to do with the Westernization of the Middle Eastern Jew than with a desire to feminize him.
The other assertion he makes is that “we have made a Jesus in our own image.” I believe we all do that to an extent, because the entirety of Jesus and his message is challenging by design.
Peter had trouble accepting what Jesus shared when he said he would be rejected by some of their faith leaders, then killed. He went so far as to rebuke Jesus. Jesus pushed back, saying, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
This is the turning point in Mark to which I referred earlier. So to where do we now turn? Carter writes that “the focus shifts towards Jerusalem and Jesus’ death on a Roman cross, redefining Jesus’ power and masculinity as vulnerability, weakness, suffering, and defeat.”
Of course this would be a hard thing to accept as a friend and follower of Jesus. Any sort of execution would be awful to consider, especially one designed to be as humiliating as crucifixion. If Peter recognized Jesus as one anointed by God, you can understand why he’d be hoping for a better plan.
Bible scholar Colleen Conway writes that what we describe as “being a man” has always been “culturally determined. At the time when Jesus lived, images of the Roman emperor were plastered everywhere — on coins, statues, and monumental reliefs. Accompanying these visual reminders were many more inscriptions and edicts designed to project and underscore the masculine power of the emperor.” Thus the emperor was the pinnacle of masculinity. Being masculine meant showing “active agency rather than passive submission to others.”
So to punish their worst offenders, the Romans devised crucifixion. It was not only painful, but shameful. “A crucified body — one that had been stripped bare, exposed, and violated — was an emasculated body. It was a body that displayed the ultimate loss of control, coming completely under the submission of others.” And it was to this punishment that Jesus would hand himself over.
Jesus knew that his actions — calling out the “societal leadership, structures, practices, and vision” of the elite — would lead to what Carter describes as the “political inevitability” of the cross. Yet his submission would ultimately expose the limits of worldly manliness and power, even that of the emperor. In revealing God’s plan for a better way of life, Jesus taught that there are higher ideals than having one’s image on coins and statues.
“For what will it profit [someone] to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” If you have to compromise what is most important to realize worldly gain, you’re missing out on the promise of the gospel. In today’s passage, Jesus anticipates some will be ashamed of the path he is taking, and the challenge to embrace the entirety of his message is still something we face today.
Several years ago, I attended a Christian men’s retreat with a guest speaker who shared his image of Jesus, which he pulled from Revelation 1. It includes the following description: “I saw one like the Son of Man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash across his chest. His head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow; his eyes were like a flame of fire; his feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of many waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, and from his mouth came a sharp, two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining with full force.”
The speaker, who later led us in a worship time that included patriotic song lyrics on a screen with an American flag background, liked this conventionally strong representation of Christ. And the way he presented him was as a strong man whose example we as men should follow. We needed to protect our families and exhibit strength. The world was a dangerous place, and we were the last line of defense against those who would do us harm.
I agreed with some aspects of what he was saying. Of course I want my wife and daughter to feel safe, and I would protect them against anything I perceived as a threat to their well-being. But something didn’t sit right about the message of that speaker. He seemed to be implying that defense always equated to violence, and keyed in on the sword from the vision in Revelation. His image of Jesus was different from the Jesus I knew from the gospel stories. I wonder if he was ashamed of the Jesus who was “exposed, vulnerable, abandoned, and crying out in anguish” on the cross. I wonder if the author of the blog post I mentioned earlier was as well; he takes issue with “a Christology where Jesus is portrayed as some divine doormat who passively submits to the cross.”
A fellow Intertwined sojourner recently asked me if I’d be willing to give my life for anyone or for a certain cause. I like to think the answer is that I would. Will that opportunity ever present itself, though? It seems like, for most people, giving one’s life doesn’t often take the form of what we see in movies or hear in stories of heroism. Bless the folks who do place themselves in the path of a bullet intended for another, and those whose duties regularly threaten their physical well-being. For most of us, though, sacrifice looks different. We can wait our whole lives to block a bullet that is never shot, or we can look for the many opportunities that surround us to improve or even save the lives of our neighbors and siblings, albeit in a less notable way.
Jesus did ultimately give his life in dramatic fashion, but that’s not where his sacrifice began. During his ministry, he lived a modest life, traveling rather than settling down in a home. He tended to the physical needs of those around him. He gave generously of his time, teaching and healing. He spoke out against injustice and other harmful ways of living, even when it meant being at odds with those wielding worldly power. I think it’s safe to say his example doesn’t bear much resemblance to that of an action movie star, and it had no regard for an action’s manliness.
Siblings in Christ, the qualities required to follow Jesus do not lend themselves to a specific gender. Putting the needs of others ahead of one’s own can take many forms. Just bring your resolve, courage, bravery, boldness, fearlessness, and sacrifice to the effort, and we’ll see what happens.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
Works Referenced
Carter, Warren. Mark (Wisdom Commentary Series Book 42). Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2019. Kindle Edition.
Conway, Colleen M. “Was Jesus a Manly Man? On Reading Masculinity in the New Testament.” Word & World Vol. 36, №1 (Winter 2016): 15–23.
Partridge, Dale. “The Masculinity of Christ in the Face of Effeminate Christianity.” Relearn. March 21, 2022. Accessed September 13, 2024. https://relearn.org/the-masculinity-of-christ-in-the-face-of-effeminate-christianity/
