In the latter half of Mark 8, Jesus is traveling with his followers, when he asks them, “Who do people say that I am?” (see v. 27).  This sets the stage for a more significant question, “But who do you say that I am?”  Peter answers that Jesus is the Christ (the anointed one of God).  Peter has the right answer, but as we will soon see he really doesn’t understand what that means.

Jesus places a gag order on the disciples, they are not to make this known to others.  Jesus then proceeds to teach his disciples that he, the Christ, must suffer many things, be rejected, killed by the religious leaders and then rise from the dead.  It will be these events that establish him as the Christ, not the premature testimony of the demons, nor the ones he has healed, nor even the testimony of his followers.  Peter, and I suspect the rest, did not like the sounds of suffering, rejection and death.  Was not the Christ going to come as a king to finally deliver the nation of Israel from the foreign oppressor?  Jesus rebuked that kind of thinking, popular as it might have been, it was not the way of God.  The Christ was not to be some nationalistic saviour, but a suffering servant that deliver people from the power of sin.

I have to ask myself whether I don’t slip into the same type of error that gripped Peter.  Do I project onto Jesus what I want him to be, rather than who he truly is?  Would I prefer Jesus to be my ‘buddy in the sky’ that gets me out of a pinch, rather than the Lord who calls me to deny myself, take up my cross and follow him?