The Art of Saying "No"

In preparation for my first day leading the bible study at First Presbyterian after the Community of Needs meal on Thursday, I have been digging into the Gospel of Mark. My plan is to go through the entire book over the next few months, and let's hope I can stick to it.

While preparing, I decided to use week one as an introductory week, a time to talk about what we can expect from an in-depth study of the gospel. For this reason, I returned to Eugene H. Peterson's essay Saint Mark: The Basic Text for Christian Spirituality, the first chapter in his book Subversive Spirituality (This essay, in my opinion, should be included in anyone's reading of Mark, whether introductory, cursory, or comprehensive.) While Peterson does a fantastic job of covering the major themes in Mark within 15 pages, my favorite ideas (today) concern Mark 8.27-9.9, a passage which Peterson calls "the 'spirituality' of the text", the convergence of every theme in Mark's Gospel. The theme that stuck out most for me today is found in 9.34-38, which says:

34 And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 35 For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it. 36 For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? 37 For what can a man give in return for his soul? 38 For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

Peterson has this to say about the ascetic call of this passage:

Following Jesus means not following your impulses and appetites and whims and dreams, all of which are sufficiently damaged by sin to make them unreliable guides for getting any place worth going...Grammatically, the negative, our capacity to say No, is one of the most impressive features of our language. The negative is our access to freedom. Only humans can say No. Animals can't say No. Animals do what instinct dictates. No is a freedom word. I don't have to do what either my glands or my culture tell me to do. The judicious, well-placed No frees us from many a blind alley, many a rough detour, frees us from debilitating distractions and seductive sacrilege. The art of saying No sets us free to follow Jesus.