"Peter Took Him Aside"
Notes
Transcript
The scene in our Gospel reading is incredible. If we weren’t all so familiar with it, we’d call it absurd. It’s one thing for Paul to rebuke Peter to his face, which we hear about in the letter to the Galatians, but for Peter to pull Jesus aside and rebuke him to his face is something else entirely. Let me help set the scene for you in the Gospel of Mark. So far Jesus has been somewhat silent about his plan and particularly about his plans for what will happen when he arrives in Jerusalem. Jesus has been healing people. He has been teaching in parables and proclaiming that the Kingdom of God was at hand, and most people seem to have understood Jesus’ kingdom-language not as he intended it but as they wanted to hear it. They wanted Jesus to come to Jerusalem and by the power of God and the might of the sword to defeat the wicked pagans and purge them from the land. Jesus has other plans, but as of yet, he hasn’t been clear about what those plans were.
But now we come to the Way-section of Mark’s Gospel. Mark began his Gospel by quoting Isaiah and identifying John the Baptist as the one who would prepare the way of the Lord, and now as we come to chapter 8, especially starting in v. 27, Jesus is on the way. The first thing Jesus asks his disciples on the way is “Who do people say that I am?” Then, more importantly, he asks, “But who do you say that I am.” The only answer recorded is that of Peter: “You are the Messiah.” This event is significant enough in the story of the Gospels that it has its own feast day. The Anglican church celebrates the Confession of Peter the Apostle on January 18, and this is a day that that’s significant to me not just because of what Peter says, but also because it’s the day on which I was ordained as a priest.
Given this fact that my ordination date is forever tied up with the Confession of Peter, it’s a bit disconcerting to read what happens next in the Gospel. Peter recognizes that Jesus is the Messiah, a term which, for Peter, likely meant something like military conqueror, and while Jesus affirms that this is the right term, he immediately begins to fill it with new meaning by interpreting what it means to be the Messiah by what it means to be the Son of Man. The text reads,
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.
In the next verse, Mark says that Jesus told them to this plainly. In contrast to the symbolic miracles and the riddle-like parables, now Jesus begins to speak to them plainly about his plan. He says in effect, “This is what it means to be the Messiah. This is what is going to happen when I come to Jerusalem. I’m going to suffer. I’m going to be rejected. I’m going to be killed. And I’m going to rise again.” This, for us, is obvious. We’ve been taught that this is what the Messiah was supposed to do. This is part of the creed that we confess every Sunday. But not so for Peter.
"Peter Took Him Aside"
"Peter Took Him Aside"
Perhaps my favorite part of this story is that Peter took Jesus aside before correcting him. You know, if you’re going to correct the Messiah, the Son of God, you certainly don’t want to do it in front of crowd. That’s not polite! So Peter takes Jesus aside and begins to rebuke him. Can you imagine it? Can you picture that scene? Can you visualize Peter rebuking Jesus for saying that he was going to suffer, die, and rise again? In my head, when I try to imagine it, it’s almost comical. I can’t picture someone telling Jesus that they know better than he does about what the Messiah is supposed to do. And yet, I wonder how often we might do the same thing.
Now, there’s a caveat here. Our Father wants us to bring all of our thoughts and desires to him in prayer and confession. He wants us to plead with him in prayer even when the answer is silence, but that’s not what I have in mind. Jesus says that his path will lead him to the cross, and then he immediately calls his own disciples to walk that same path. He says,
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.
None of us today would dare question Jesus about what it means to be the Messiah. We know that the Messiah was called to walk the way of the cross. But what about what it means to be the Messiah’s disciple? We know that the Messiah’s disciples are supposed to take up their cross and follow him. We know that the way of the Lord is the way of the cross, and yet, and I’m speaking for myself here, it seems more often than not, rather than walking on the way of the cross with Jesus, I find myself taking Jesus aside and saying, “Well, yes, Lord, I get that, I do, but can’t I still be your disciple on this other path? It sure looks easier, and it’s a lot more comfortable, and you know, it doesn’t involve any of that dying to self bit.” When I think I know what’s best for my life better than the Lord, when I think I know what it means to be his disciple better than the Lord, when I think that maybe I’m not called to a cruciform life, I am acting like Peter, and Jesus says to me,
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.”
It is certainly not our natural instinct to live sacrificial lives. It is not our natural instinct to love our neighbors as ourselves. It is not our natural instinct to consider others as more important than ourselves, but this is exactly the kind of life to which Jesus calls his disciples. This is exactly the kind of life to which Jesus is calling all of us.
The Never-ending, Never-failing Love of God
The Never-ending, Never-failing Love of God
And we can live this life for the same reason that Jesus could set his face towards Jersualem and the cross: because we believe in the never-ending, never-failing love of God. Notice what Jesus says. “I’m going to suffer, I’m going to die, and I’m going to rise again.” God calls us to a life of sacrificial love now, he calls us to take up our cross and follow Jesus now, because he knows that there is nothing in this world that can separate us from his love. Paul asks in Romans 8,
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?
As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers,
nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Paul’s point, and this is the point he’s been making all through Romans 8, is that, because of current state of the world ever since the Garden of Eden, the disciple of Jesus Christ is called to enter into the suffering and futility of creation, bring with us the Spirit of the Living God, and there in the midst of the world’s pain cry out to our heavenly father that his Kingdom would come, now only in part, and at the end, fully and gloriously. And what gets us from here to there, from suffering to celebration and from pain to pleasure, is the never-ending, never failing Love of God. God will never let you go. God will not let death be the end of you. Nothing in this world can separate you from God’s powerful, world-changing, resurrecting love.
So, we need to stop listening to ourselves about what we want out of this life, and we need to listen to Jesus. In the same way that Peter did not get to define what it meant for Jesus to be the Messiah, so we too do not get to define what it means to be Jesus’ disciple. He calls us to take up our cross and follow him wherever he leads, even to death, because even death cannot separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Amen.