While they were all amazed at his every deed,
Jesus said to his disciples,
“Pay attention to what I am telling you.
The Son of Man is to be handed over to men.”
The disciples amazement at the mighty deeds of Jesus seemed to have the additional effect of lulling them into complacence and making it difficult for them to pay attention. They had recently failed to cast out a demon, but Jesus resolved that situation for them. They thus shifted back into the mode of passive observers content to relish the actions of Jesus with less direct involvement on their part. Jesus handling issues and solving every problem could lead to the subconscious hope for a hassle-free and comfortable life where Jesus would always act in that way, in it would not be necessary to reckon with individual failures because Jesus would always show up to make things right.
The passive attitude to which the glorious actions of Jesus seemed to lead was not a place in which they could learn what he wanted to teach next or understand what he wanted to tell them. For this reason he began by saying, "Pay attention to what I am telling you". He wanted to wake them up and help them transition from something unimaginably good to something unimaginably difficult. He knew that humanly this juxtaposition was hard to navigate and understood the temptation to shape one's attention to only receive the wholly positive and pleasant. But not everything Jesus had to say would be immediately positive or pleasant. And in fact, the main message of Jesus was not the surrounding miracles and mighty deeds, which were more like side effects of who he was, and demonstrations of the authenticity of his claims to authority. Or they were like previews of something that would come in fullness only on the far side of the dark hour after the resurrection. But in any case, they could not be the exclusive subject of one's focus or attention.
The Son of Man is to be handed over to men.
Jesus desired his disciples to have a more wholistic understanding of his mission, that it was not only focused on miracles, but especially on mercy, mercy which he could only bestow on the world through offering himself as a sacrifice for sin. This understanding of Jesus was necessary for anyone who wanted to be his disciple since disciples would need to take up their own crosses to follow him. He wanted disciples who could shift attention from miracles to mercy as God directed them in the midst of their concrete individual circumstances. He knew the temptation to live in only one mode, pure affirmation, or pure negation. Pure affirmation was obviously out the window in the sense of being able to focus only on pleasant feelings. But the cross was not a pure negation. It did not mean the triumph of suffering and death, but the opposite. There was a way to hold the tension of miracles and mercy in mind simultaneously when proper attention was paid to the cross. Because then the cross would be revealed to be an even greater affirmation of life and creation than anything the more simplistic miraculous manifestations could convey, because the cross led inexorably, and, importantly, irreversibly, to the resurrection.
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