The cost of Messiahship

Mark 8:31-9:1 The cost of Messiahship (see Mt. 16:21-28; Lk. 9:22-27). Jesus taught his disciples that he would suffer many things —rejection by the religious leaders (who, as we have seen, were his enemies), a violent death and a rising on the third day.
Peter rebuked Jesus (32). We are staggered at his impudence; but have there not been times when we too have questioned God’s way of working and suggested to him another pattern, closer to our way of thinking? We cannot afford to criticize Peter. Jesus, usually so gentle and patient with his disciples, was very outspoken on this occasion. Words like Simon Peter’s, trying to turn Jesus aside from the cross, show Satan’s thoughts, not God’s. This was the temptation that Jesus had faced and conquered in the wilderness and would conquer again at Gethsemane. He would not yield to it, and neither must his followers. This is the reason for the stern warning of v 34. ‘No cross, no crown’ is as true of Christians as it is of Christ.
Did Peter object to Jesus taking this path [p. 964] because he was afraid of the path for himself? To take up the cross was a sign of accepting a shameful slave’s death, in the eyes of the non–Christian world, and was a real possibility in the case of members of the Roman church in persecution. The image is of a condemned man on his way to the place of execution, shouldering the cross–bar of his own cross and walking through the mocking crowds, just as Jesus did on the way to Calvary. To deny self means refusing to follow any natural inclination, however innocent, that runs contrary to Christ’s path for us. (It is something far deeper than going without sugar in Lent, as some Christians do.) Yet this is the only path to true spiritual life; to do anything else is to lose ourselves eternally. In this sense, loss is gain and gain is loss.

There is, however, a great promise linked with these stern words: those who walk this path will see, even in this life, the power of the kingdom of God realized (9:1). In the immediate future, this would be on the mountain of transfiguration (described in this next chapter); in the more distant future, it refers to the resurrection and ascension of Christ and the pouring out of the Spirit at Pentecost; and finally, no doubt it refers to the wonder of Christ’s second coming. Like most prophecies it has several different ‘layers’ of fulfilment.