Quick Summary:

Our gospel readings in September cluster around the questions: WHO IS JESUS and WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO FOLLOW HIM? And today’s reading from chapter 8 marks a turning point in Mark’s story of Jesus, the moment when the central themes of Jesus’ path—rejection, suffering, death, and rising—are articulated clearly for the first time.

Every society, every culture has its own FRAMING STORY, its vision for understanding how the world works (or ought to). And the FRAMING STORY asserting itself in Jesus’ day was that of the Roman Empire.

As Jesus stands at Caesarea Philippi within site of a temple extolling the ROMAN EMPIRE’S FRAMING STORY, with the vestiges of other, more ancient framing stories scattered around him, he asks his disciples, WHO DO PEOPLE SAY THAT I AM? That is: what FRAME are people placing me in? And then Jesus sharpens the question, making it inescapably direct and personal: WHO DO YOU SAY THAT I AM? In other words, WHAT FRAMING STORY WILL YOU ORIENT YOUR LIVES AROUND?