Late August and September have a strange feeling to them. The air is slower and sleepier than all summer before, but underneath you can feel the energy building – cool air to shock us out of the heat, the work of harvests and new school years and new beginnings just as the natural world enters its preparation for laying fallow. Each season has its own moment for assessing where we are at and where we are going, and today’s Gospel passage gives us that opportunity in this season. 

In today’s Gospel, we experience a Jesus who is always trying to direct people toward living in the way that makes a more beautiful and just world a reality. Jesus shows his way as the opposite of the rule of empire. Let us use this day to ask ourselves what that looks like in this season.

The first lines that stand out to me in this Gospel are Jesus’s question to the disciples, and his reaction to their response:

“Who do people say that I am?”

Peter answered, “You are the Messiah!”

But Jesus gave them strict orders not to tell

anyone about him.

When I was in divinity school, I remember discussing this passage in a Bible course. My professor, Dr. Brigitte Kahl, a scholar of the New Testament, explained Jesus’s reaction as the opposite of how the powerful of the Roman Empire conducted themselves. Caesar, Herod, and Pontius Pilate never lost an opportunity to proclaim and exert their dominance over others. In response to the rule of Rome, Jesus begins to think and act under a different set of rules. Throughout the Gospel of Mark, Jesus constantly asks the crowds who gather (Mark 3:7-12); the people he heals (Mark 1:40-5); and the disciples not to say anything about his supposed divinity. 

There are several possible reasons for his insistence: Trying to evade detection and retribution from the Romans; the possibility that Jesus himself did not claim to be divine at all; or an insistence that the work he was doing – the movement he was building – were not about him at all, but about teaching people to turn toward each other in the face of great oppression. All three of these possibilities could be true. I want to focus on the third possibility and how it connects to another standout line from today’s Gospel passage:

If you would save your life you will lose it, but

if you lose your life for my sake, you will

save it.

For many of us in our modern lives, we read this passage and wonder how much we ‘have to’ give up if we want to follow the path that Jesus lays out. There are many ways to lose your life – to actually die for the message of Jesus, which many of his disciples would go on to face; or to experience social losses, familial losses, sacrificing perhaps a career, money, a certain kind of life. The Christian world is full of people on each end of the spectrum, those giving up nothing, and in fact taking more than their share, and denying the goodness of life to other people; and those who have removed themselves from the everyday functioning of the society around them, living in poverty or degradation in the name of God, and thinking that others should do this as well. Perhaps Jesus’s call in this passage isn’t for one extreme or another, or even for something in the middle of each extreme. Perhaps Jesus is talking about a way of living that grounds us in our togetherness as people, and that respects each person, including ourselves. 

The entire Gospel today, when we view Jesus as a connector, a movement builder, shows a person who hopes to create a world that is the opposite of the Roman Empire they suffer under. We might call this world the kingdom of God. We might call it a people’s movement. It is a world of solidarity with one another’s difficulties, of seeing ourselves in the other and the other in ourselves, and a world in which what matters most isn’t Jesus’s exceptionalism, but the fact that he is one of us, he is with us, and he believed in this world we can build together, against the oppressive rulers of our time.

What I read here is that building the kingdom of God isn’t about denying ourselves all worldly pleasures, or removing ourselves from the world that is. It’s about living in the spirit and image of what we think a kingdom of God should look like. It often comes down to that little word, solidarity. When we live in solidarity with those around us, we will find that life according to the rule of empire and capitalism doesn’t usually give us wealth or prestige, and we will have to accept the loss of those things. But we will find that those things usually have to be lost in order to save our lives, and live into the things we know, deep down, matter most of all. The things that make life full and worth living. Solidarity means love, it means courage, it means caring for the self so that you can care for the other. If we choose the rule of the empire, we lose our connection to those things.

I recently finished reading The Golden Gulag by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and in the conclusion there is a paragraph that floored me. I wish I had read this book years ago. Maybe even as a third grader, just because it seems so foundational. (Also to say this paragraph is being taken out of context, but it still is telling for what I want to contemplate on.) 

“The bottom line is this: if the twentieth century was the age of genocide on a planetary scale, then in order to avoid repeating history, we ought to prioritize coming to grips with dehumanization. Dehumanization names the deliberate, as well as the mob-frenzied, ideological displacements central to any group’s ability to annihilate another in the name of territory, wealth, ethnicity, religion. Dehumanization is also a necessary factor in the acceptance that millions of people (sometimes including oneself) should spend part or all of their lives in cages” (243).

I could not help but think of the readings when I read this. Losing oneself. Losing one’s humanity. Dehumanization. I want to contemplate on this fact of the dehumanization in the world. Of Palestinians by the ideology of Zionism. By Congolese by the ideology of capitalist extraction and racism. By Haitians in Springfield Ohio by xenophobia, racism, and fear mongering propaganda. 

Perhaps we need to reflect and contemplate on the context in which we live. Sit with the gravity that dehumanization is. How we see loved ones around us losing themselves to this, because of hatred growing in their bodies. How we see other loved ones have their humanity ripped from them. How we have lost ourselves to the dehumanization of others. How we have been dehumanized.

How best can we align ourselves as the dehumanized, with those that have had their humanity ripped from them? How can we resist being lost? How can we resist the loss that is genocide? How can we refuse to lose?

Aysenur Eygi was killed last week in the West Bank protesting new and illegal Israeli settlements. She was a Turkish American who had just recently graduated from the University of Washington, and apparently had participated in campus protests there as well. Her community describes her as someone with a deep and fierce sense of international solidarity. Within her was held the world. In the West Bank, the Palestinian people held a funeral service for her. The lives lost seem an unimaginable number to mour,n and the courage of the Palestinians and those like Eygi seems too large to honor.