A friend lent me a remarkable book called “King of the Confessors”. Thomas Hoving tells the story of how he acquired for his museum a magnificent artifact of medieval Europe, an altar cross carved in the mid-12th century by an English monk near Bury St Edmonds and St Albans. Who are the “confessors”? And who is their king?
In the book, told by the way much like an adventure story, we learn that the monks were being referred to as the confessors and Christ as their king. That fits in very well with the Confession of Peter recounted in the Gospel of Mark (Mark 8:27-38).
To the disciples Jesus posed the question, who do people say that I am? And many people were ready to say he was a prophet like Elijah. Or a complete fraud, to some others, I suppose. The real problem for the powers that be -- indifferent to his true identity -- was that he was a security threat, as people took him to be the hope of a newly restored Israel.
This makes sense of Jesus’ admonishment, frequently in Mark’s gospel, to keep it quiet, once someone recognizes him for who he really is. After all, if people said he was a prophet or a king or worse yet the Anointed One long expected, then the Roman occupiers and those who went along with them would be in the soup. As indeed they were.
The gospels present the disciples and Jesus as confronting more than human enemies, as they faced spiritual as well as material opposition and they spread (and showed) the coming of the peaceable kingdom embodied in the prophesied champion and then in the people. What Jesus does is announce, to no one’s pleasure, that the Messiah is also to be a Martyr.
And so the book of Mark contains repeated warnings that the Son of Man must suffer and be killed and then raised from the dead. And that to follow him means to follow him through this excruciating procedure.
So the Cross is central to the paradoxically good news that Jesus and his followers bring. And to join them is to join them on a journey not around but through the suffering that he must endure. “Can’t we just skip Good Friday and go to Easter?” Is it good news that the answer is no?
JRL+
The Rev. Dr. John Leech is ordained in the Episcopal branch of the Jesus movement and has served as a pastor in northern California and western Washington, and now in southern Arizona.
An earlier version of this essay appeared in the Arizona Daily Star, September 26, 2021, p. E3, with the title, "The confessor and the king."
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