Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. The text is the Gospel reading from Matthew 16.
Last week, we read about Peter’s
answering Jesus’ question, “Who do you [the disciples] say that I am?” Led by
the Spirit, he confesses Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the Living God (16:
13-19). Jesus then praises Peter’s confession and pledges that He will build
His church on that confession.
That’s what makes this week’s
reading so startling – so much so that it makes our brains go, “Wait…what just
happened here?” In a very short time, Peter went from being a great confessor
of Jesus-as-Messiah to being not just a tool of the devil, but as if he were
satan himself!
Why did Jesus say this? What
happened to cause such a fall?
Matthew says, “From that time
Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem
and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and
be killed, and on the third day be raised.” Recent events, which included
the feeding of the five thousand, Jesus saving Peter from a watery grave, Jesus
commending the faith of the Canaanite woman, and other miracles were leading
people – including the disciples – to think of Jesus more and more as an
earthly powerhouse, a potential royal dynamo who could challenge Rome and
restore Israel as it was under David. Jesus could deliver the goods with bread
and fish in surplus-a-plenty. Add His ability to control creation, heal the
sick, and captivate the crowds with His words, and what a king He would make!
So, Jesus’ plain language,
stating that He was going to Jerusalem to die and rise, must have startled the
Twelve. Don’t be too hard on them; consider how we react when we hear of a
terminal illness for a loved one. There’s denial, there’s disbelief, there’s
determination to do everything to avoid dying. If that’s true of us, so also then
Peter, who truly loved Jesus, dares to try to dissuade Jesus from doing what He
said He must do. And that was the problem.
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| James Tissot, Get Thee Behind Me, Satan!. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=57497 Used with permission. |
Must: it’s a small word, but a
key word. “Jesus began to show His disciples that He must go to
Jerusalem and suffer many things.” The cross is ahead – period. There can be no
shortcuts, no round-abouts, no bypasses. The way of salvation for the world
goes through the cross. The cross is where payment for the sins of the world
would be made. Remember last week’s word, propitiation, the blood covering?
That can only happen through the cross. Life is in the blood, Deuteronomy says,
and at the cross Jesus’ life-blood would be shed and taken. The cross becomes
the perfect altar for the singular sacrifice of the perfect Lamb of God who
takes away the sins of the world. The cross would be the place where atonement
is made for the sins of the world. The cross is also the place where satan
would be defeated, where death would be destroyed, and three days later, where
even the gaping maw of the grave would silenced in the resurrection of Jesus.
And satan would do anything to
stop Jesus’ ascending to Jerusalem, to the people who would put Him to death,
to the cross. Satan tried it early in Jesus’ ministry, going head-to-head
against Jesus in the wilderness, tempting Jesus for 40 days with hunger, trust,
and power – again, anything to distract, anything to deter Jesus from the
cross, from God’s plan of salvation. Satan triple-temped Jesus with, “If you
are the Son of God,” and Jesus thrice answered with Scripture, finally
commanding the devil to “be gone.” “You shall worship the Lord your God, and
Him only shall you serve.” In Luke’s narration of the temptation, he adds a
brief note, “And after he ended every temptation, the devil left him until an
opportune time…” (Luke 4: 13). In the mouth of one of the Twelve, in the
well-intended but terribly misunderstanding and misguided intention of Peter,
satan made his sneaky reappearance, once again trying to deter Jesus from the
cross.
Anything, anyone who would get in
the way of Jesus’ going to the cross is an instrument of satan. Anything that
prevents Jesus from completing God’s plan of salvation and the fulfillment of
the kingdom goes the way of hell. That would be just fine for satan. No cross,
no substitutionary atonement, no death means no defeat for him.
So when Peter, confused,
flummoxed, and flustered, tries to deter Jesus from going to Jerusalem, to the
Jewish leaders, to His cross and death, he is doing not the things of heaven,
but the things of hell; not the things of the Father, but the things of satan. Point
for point, the words Jesus spoke to Peter only a short time earlier are
replaced: Earlier, Peter was called blessed; now, Jesus says, “Go away, satan.”
Peter’s heaven-sent answer was the rock upon which Christ would build the
Church; now Peter stands as a stumbling stone potentially causing others to
trip and fall. Peter’s confession was heaven-sent; now his thoughts are of man,
not of God. Perhaps that last is the most shocking of all: God’s words are
replaced with human thoughts and, no matter how well-intended or loving they
may have been, the authority and power of God is replaced by the fearful words
of man. In that moment, God is not at work. In that moment, satan – in the
voice of Peter - is on the prowl, trying to distract Jesus. Thus, Jesus must
put satan, and Peter, in their place: behind Him. Nothing can stop Him. He must
go to Jerusalem, to the cross.
It’s the climax of God’s plan of
salvation, His heilsgeschicte. He would offer His Son, His only begotten
Son, for the salvation of the world. The cross, then, is not a sudden, tragic
intrusion, a plot twist that catches Jesus off guard. It stands as the very
essence, the focal point, of His mission and ministry. By saying that He must
go, Jesus is demonstrating that He accepts what is in store for Him. He is not
a hapless victim, caught unawares by an enemy or manipulated by His own Heavenly
Father. He sets His face toward Jerusalem willingly, knowingly, deliberately.
Four times in the next few chapters of Matthew, Jesus repeats the same message:
He must go; He must do this, for the salvation of the world and the redemption
of man.
Although Jesus speaks to Peter
harshly, as He once did to satan himself in the wilderness, there is a notable
and important difference. In the wilderness, against satan, Jesus ordered the
devil, “Be gone!” Here, Jesus doesn’t banish Peter, but He does tell Peter,
“Get behind me.” Its as if Jesus is telling Peter, “Stop trying lead me and
instead simply follow behind.” It wasn't Peter's place to stand in front of Jesus, between Him and the cross. Peter is to get behind Jesus.
Behind Jesus. That’s where
disciples belong. That’s where Peter belongs, along with all those who love,
trust and believe in Jesus’ as the Messiah, as Peter had once confessed. The
way of following Jesus, the way of discipleship, is the way of the cross.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the well-known German Lutheran theologian martyred at the
command of Hitler, described this life behind Jesus as “the cost of
discipleship.” We are as inseparable from the cross as Jesus was. Being a
disciple of Jesus means bearing the cross of servitude, of mercy, of
compassion, of setting aside ourselves.
Jesus doesn’t debate the point,
offering neither arguments nor reasons for cross-bearing. He simply calls
people to follow. “Deny yourself” is not some kind of stoic philosophy where
less-is-more. It means get rid of the arrogant notion that we know better than
Jesus how to save ourselves (or anyone, for that matter). “Taking up our cross”
is to follow in the footsteps of Jesus – that is, in faith, to trust Him for
the salvation of the world. It’s being a disciple who follows instead of a
disciple who tries to lead.
And, such thinking is completely
opposite what the Old Self wants to do. That message is as offensive today as
it was for Peter, 2000 years ago. So many wanted Jesus to be the power-house,
the authority figure to counter Rome and give them their hearts’ desires. Jesus
instead spoke of death, dying, and sacrifice. Today isn’t all that much
different. Both the religion of the secular world and the world’s secular
religion teach that bigger is better and affluence makes one more blessed and
being lesser is a sign of being a loser. However, it is the way of the New
Self, the New Adam, the New Eve, the baptized child of God – which, by the way,
is nothing more than the way of the cross.
“Don’t you know that all of us
who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death,”
St. Paul rhetorically asks (Romans 6). We already lost our lives! In our
baptism, the Old Selves are drowned. But we also gain new life as the New
Selves – holy, forgiven, marked with the cross of Jesus – are raised with
Christ. We decrease; Christ increases.
That baptismal promise is not
merely a past-tense memory. Your baptism is a present-tense gift that keeps on
giving, the pledge of eternity with Jesus, of sins forgiven, of His name –
Christian, “little Christ” - emblazoned upon you so that the Father will see
you as His own on the day Christ returns. Your sins will be covered by Jesus’
holiness so that what you have done - even your sins that are confessed, by
grace through faith - is declared holy and redeemed. When the Father sees you on that great day,
He will look at you, not seeing a single sin-stain because of Jesus. To you
will be paid the eternal gifts of His loving grace: forgiveness, life and
salvation.
Jesus told Peter to get behind
him. Baptized into Christ, we are so closely connected to Jesus that we are
inseparable.
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