Sun Kwak, “Attention Economy”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMSGTZzdsiw

TEXT: Mark 8:27-9:1

[27] And Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi. And on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” [28] And they told him, “John the Baptist; and others say, Elijah; and others, one of the prophets.” [29] And he asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Christ.” [30] And he strictly charged them to tell no one about him.

Jesus Foretells His Death and Resurrection

[31] And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again. [32] And he said this plainly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. [33] But turning and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.”

[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.”

[1] And he said to them, “Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God after it has come with power.”

SERMON: “Attention Economy”

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the Disney movie Up. There’s Doug, the dog, who whenever he sees a squirrel, he yells — Squirrel! And from there, he loses track of whatever he was doing, because his attention has been diverted. And it’s comical, and I know for myself, I’ve often thought about my own children when it comes to this tendency to get distracted. But Herbert Simon, who won a Nobel Prize, who was an economist, a psychologist, and a sociologist in the late 20th century, noted something he dubbed as attention economy. That in fact, it’s not just young children and fictitious talking dogs who struggle with a limited attention span. But in fact, all humanity, including the most mature and seemingly focused and disciplined among us struggle with attention — because while we can control to the best of our abilities what’s happening inside of us, we can’t do the same for what happens outside of us. I don’t know if you knew this but they now say that the average human attention span is eight seconds. And to put this in comparison, the average attention span for a goldfish is nine seconds. I don’t know how they measure this, but we are now officially disallowed from making a mockery of goldfish for their short attention spans. But back to Herbert Simon. He described attention to be a bottleneck in human thought. Because of how much we’ve increased our access to information, this has dipped into our second to second resource of attention. Simon writes: “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” There is seemingly this inverse relationship between information and attention. And with this near infinite space of information now stored somewhere in the cloud, it’s not information but attention that has become a human scarcity today. And because of this known scarcity, our barometer for what our hearts have been habited to value in the day to day are the things that most easily grab our attentions — whether it’s a notification from our phones, or a cry from a young child, or a glancing look at something revealing, or something material that we want and don’t have. The problem with all of this is not just that they’re tempting but these are readily accessible and abundantly available. We are a distracted generation, because there’s just so much out there that we can attain at the tip of our fingers.

And we’ve been saying from the start that the Gospel of Mark is written almost like a film, a movie that takes us from scene to scene. And I want us to picture here how Mark is putting these scenes side by side. You have in one scene Peter in verses 27-30 of our passage telling Jesus, “You are the Christ.” And this is as true of a confession that we can get about Jesus. But then, what do we see with Peter in the very next scene? He who just said that Jesus is the Christ, he tells Jesus that he’s getting the story wrong — that he isn’t to suffer and to die. In fact, he pulls him aside to rebuke him. And so, what does Jesus tell him? Get behind me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man. And these two things are put side by side, because it’s so easy to lose our center. Because not just on a practical day to day level but also on a spiritual level, I think Peter shows us that our spiritual attention span is also often short-circuited. Because there are a wealth of idols and gods and spiritual advertisements that try to get a hold of our souls. And don’t we know this? How many times have you said or have heard said — It’s just so hard to get away to pray for five minutes. Our minds are so convoluted with an array of on ramps to access this infinite source of information that distract us away from what’s truly center. And without the practice of decompressing and doing as Alistair Begg always says — making the main things the plain things and the plain things the main things. Without the commitment to this practice, we’ll get lost in the noise around us as well. We all, like the disciples, like Peter, will fall into trap of a spiritual attention economy if we aren’t conscious on what we keep at center amidst all the noise that surrounds us. And the key to discipleship is understanding this distinction and understanding what leads to this distinction — whether we call upon Jesus as the Christ or if we walk out of step with the gospel — comes, as we read in verse 33, when instead of setting our minds on the things of God, we set our minds on the things of man.

The setting of our passage is Caesarea Philippi, and it’s an intentional place in the context of what question Jesus asks. This was a place built by Herod, as a tribute to Caesar Augustus. And one of the things that Herod was remembered for was his architectural abilities. He was a city planner and had many impressive building projects. But this was his magnum opus, fitting for how he wanted honor Caesar Augustus. And this city was truly an artistic masterpiece, and it not only honored Rome, but it smelled and looked Roman. I’ve noted before that in his biography, among the many titles that Caesar Augustus had espoused for himself were Son of God, Savior of the World, the High Priest. And fitting to this, there were icons everywhere here in the city. Everywhere you looked in Caesarea Philippi, there were images of Caesar and of Rome. But Caesar wasn’t the only one worshiped here. It carried with it a deep history of idol worship. Prior to Herod building the city, it was the center of pluralistic worship, previously named after the god Pan. And in Israel’s history, this was the northern most region of Palestine, and thus, it was the region of Mount Hermon. And so, it was right next to and rising above the Mediterranean Sea, which was about 9,000 feet tall. And the snow that would melt off of the mountain would fall and compose what would make up the Jordan River. And so, not only was this history filled with pantheistic worship, but even further back in its history, this was the first sanctuary of Canaanite worship to Baal, at the base of Mount Hermon.

And so, with all of these images and smells around, here is Jesus asking these disciples — Who do people say that I am? It’s not just about Jesus asking them of his identity. But as Gandalf had asked Faramir — Where does your allegiance lie? And how do you hold to it? For here were these disciples who had just wavered — saying Jesus was the Christ but then, moments later, trying to pull him away from his mission, which in the words of Jesus, was the manifesting of something Satanic. Where does your allegiance lie? And so, he calls to them in verse 35 — If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. And consider the audacity of these words. In this city, where there were images of Caesar everywhere, here Jesus takes the central emblem of Caesar’s dominance — the cross — and he tells these disciples in essence, “If you’re going to follow me, you’ll be an enemy to this great kingdom in Rome.” And in fact, everything that they were taught and had learned over the years would be overruled by something greater. Because this word to deny carries with it a greater thrust than just turn someone away at the door. But this Greek word is to disavow any association with. And it’s actually the same thing that Jesus predicted that Peter would do the night before Jesus would take upon the cross — that he would deny Jesus. Where he would say in essence — I have nothing to do with that man. And here, as Jesus calls for a self-denial, it’s to call them to detach themselves even from what was the most innate allegiance.

It’s not just something better but something different altogether. This was a different kind of kingdom than those of human fabrications, because it was centered around the suffering and not the conquest of its central protagonist. Tom Wright talks about the cross and resurrection in analogy to this beautiful painting. And the analogy is that there is this painting that is so immaculate, worth more than your entire house. But the furnishing in your home doesn’t match this painting. And so, you have two options. You either have to get rid of the painting, in order to keep your furnishings and your life the way it was. Or, you realize the worth of this painting. And you reconfigure your furnishings to a completely new dwelling place in order to shape your dwelling place around this painting. And here’s what Jesus is confronting his disciples with. The cross and the empty tomb are coming, as he’s teaching them. And it’s worth more than everything they have in their lives. And so, what would they do with it? Because if they were to embrace it, as they understood its worth, it would lead them to change everything about who they were and what they were about before. There were no categories that they had at their disposal to fit what this represented. Everything would have to be reconfigured and rebuilt from the ground up.

And I know we tend to be hard on Peter. But I want us to ease up a little bit here. Because what Jesushad just said to them, as he’s teaching them, as he’s unpacking what it means for him to be the Christ, once again, they had no categories for. It’s like nothing they’d ever heard before. They didn’t ever anticipate a suffering Messiah. They had prophecies of a Suffering Servant, but no one really thought that this would be the same one who would bring political relevance back to Jerusalem. The Messiahwas supposed to come and rule and be victorious and bring glory. And so, here’s Peter pulling him aside, going — Whoa, whoa, rabbi, slow down. We didn’t sign up for this. We didn’t sign up to follow a leader who’s going to get executed by the State. We’ve seen people like that before. You’re supposed to be different. Because he didn’t understand — that while his death would look like yet another loss, this was different, because Jesus was different. And I’m not sure any of us would have thought any differently. It’s why Jesus had to not just tell them but teach them. He had to fill them in on something they’d never anticipated. And it made no human sense to jump into what he seemingly leapt into. For he must suffer. He’s not saying that he would incidentally suffer. But at the heart, at the core of what it meant for him to be the Christ was that he came to suffer. Just as he told John the Baptist — You must baptize me, in order to fulfill the Scriptures. Just as he told Nicodemus — You must be born again, order to see the kingdom of heaven. Here, he’s telling his disciples — I must suffer, if I’m truly to be the Messiah.

And I mentioned before that Jesus didn’t respond by saying that the Christ must suffer. Because this was after Peter had said that he was the Christ, which he was and is. But actually, Jesus doesn’t use the word Messiah for himself, but he uses a whole different word for this description. We’d mentioned before that the Jews would have been aware of a Messiah, a coming king in the line of David, a coming prophet greater than Moses, a Servant of the Lord, a Suffering Servant, and here this Son of Man. But no one thought that all of these would be one person. Because there wasn’t this expectation that this Messiah would be God in the flesh — just an extraordinary man that God would use. But here, we get a peek into what Jesus says in Luke 24:27 — that all the Scriptures, the law and prophets are fulfilled in him. Everything points to him. And when Jesus calls himself the Son of Man, this was one of his favorite titles to use of himself, because it reminded him of his purpose, his mission. We first see the title appear in Daniel 7:13-14, where this Son of Man is shown to approach the Ancient of Days. We read there — And behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a Son of Man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. The picture here is that he’s approaching the bench in a courtroom. And upon being presented, with all that he’s put before the Ancient of Days as evidences for what he’s done as the Son of Man, what do we read in verse 14? And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.

And what Jesus is telling these disciples — I’m this guy, this Son of Man. And in order for me to attain this dominion, this kingdom, this victory, there’s something I must do. I must suffer and be killed and be raised to be presented before my Father. And when we read back in our passage, in verse 31 that the Son of Man was to be killed, this was no wording that was fitting for a king. This wasn’t a word used to describe a martyr’s death or one who was valorously slain on the battlefield. But this was the brutal language of animals who were sacrificed, where they were helplessly and brutally slain. This was language of substitution, where one had to step into the place of another. And because of our sin, because of our estrangement from heaven, because of the guilty record the Father had full view of behind the bench, this was the necessary part of the mission that he was to present to the Father for everlasting victory. That he certainly suffered, that he certainly died.

In closing, you think about attention economy. Jesus knew that his disciples would have diverted attention. But look at the dichotomy between Jesus and his disciples. Jesus shows his disciples that even when they forget and go from one side to the other, Jesus never would. And you think about all the information that he had — the record of our sins, every movement away from him. And wouldn’t all of that information have diverted his attention? Yet, he also has records of his promises — to the Fatherand Spirit, and to his people. And so, not once would he waver. He would stay faithful and resolutely committed to his mission. Teaching them and reminding himself — The Son of Man must suffer. Remember that, in the midst of all of these competing affections tugging at your hearts. Jesus has committed himself to your life. Because the question that Jesus asks in verse 38 — What does it profit a man? That word for profit is one used in financial transaction. And what is it that Jesus would definitively proclaim from the cross? The closing of a financial transaction — It is finished. In the Greek, τετελεσται, which was understood as paid in full. The word put on the corner of receipts that validated your purchase of all on the receipt once and for all. Not only the list of sins paid for but the names of these sinners. Jesus paid in full. Every time we waver and fall in our sinning, may you and I be reminded that Jesus paid in full. That we can be brought back because of how he has purchased our way in.