Jesus invited the disciples and a nearby crowd to follow him.

It feels obvious, since they were somewhere north of the Sea of Galilee. The disciples wouldn’t have been there unless Jesus had gone up there and they followed him.

But Mark is at the midpoint of the gospel he’s writing, and the story is starting to turn. There have been lots of healings and feedings. There have been great short stories that are fun to remember and tell. A reader who doesn’t know how things are going to end would be pretty engaged with the hero.

But the story suddenly gets darker.

Jesus tells the disciples that he’s going to die. Actually, he teaches the disciples that he’s going to die, suggesting that there was more detail than the one sentence Mark shares with us. It was so sudden that Peter wanted Jesus to tone it down.

Jesus invites the disciples and a crowd to follow him, which they already are doing. But the invitation connects back to that sentence about dying.

Jesus says, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

Maybe the teaching Jesus did a couple paragraphs earlier included the detail about dying on a cross. Maybe it didn’t. But the listeners certainly knew what a cross was. And to have it as a part of following changed the story.

They had been watching Jesus. They had been listening to Jesus. They had been traveling to conferences, buying merch, putting bumper stickers on their trapper-keepers where they were keeping lecture notes. They had been posting memes, liking posts.

And now Jesus was telling them that he was going to be killed by the people in power and that following him might lead them to the same end.