Proper 17 -- Jeremiah 15: 15 – 21; Psalm 26: 1 – 8; Romans 12: 1 – 8; Matthew 16: 21 – 27
A sermon by The Rev. Gene Tucker, given at Trinity Church, Mt. Vernon, IL; Sunday, August 31st, 2008
“Rocky, my hero!”
Today, we pick up the second part of the discourse between Jesus and His disciples in which Jesus had begun the conversation by asking “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” Remember that Simon earned his nickname, Peter, for his response, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God!”
These two passages, Peter’s confession last week, and Peter’s utter failure today are linked together., for they are part of the same scene.
Recall with me that the disciples had parroted back to Jesus some of the answers they’ve heard in their travels, saying, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and some say Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
Then Jesus narrows the question some more, directing its focus squarely on the disciples. He says, “But you, who do you say that I am?”[1]
And it’s Simon who blurts out in response, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God!”
So Simon becomes better known to generations of Christians as Peter (his nickname, essentially), or Petros in Greek, which means “rock”), for Peter is a “rock”
It is on this “rock” (which might be either Peter himself, or the confession of faith) that Jesus will build His church, we read last week.
But now, the “rock”, Peter, has become a stumbling block. Jesus describes the downside of Peter’s s qualities of steadfastness and immovability….They are now in the way of Jesus’ road to Jerusalem, where He tells them He will “suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes.”
And so, we hear Jesus utter some of the most famous words ever spoken, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance (“stumbling block” in Greek) to me; for you are not on the side of God, but of men.”
We should stop at this point and ponder why Peter reacted as he did to this, the first prediction of Jesus’ coming suffering and death (there are three more such predictions in Matthew).
A number of possibilities offer themselves as clues to Peter’s motivation. Perhaps we’d be safe, knowing what human nature is like, in listing the following as possibilities:
- Peter may have heard only the first part of Jesus’ statement about suffering. He may have reacted so quickly that he didn’t hear the part about “being raised on the third day.”[2]
- Did Peter respond out of love? Naturally, we would all shudder at such a statement from a person we’d been with for a long while, a person we’d grown to love.
- Was it selfishness that motivated Peter? Was he looking for a Messiah who would be a military conqueror, the one who would liberate God’s people from the oppressive yoke of Roman occupation?
- Peter might have had his own agenda (certainly, Jesus’ response seems to indicate as much), which might have included ideas about a Messiah that also included his own selfish wish for power and position for himself in the coming kingdom.[3]
It’s clear from Jesus’ response that Peter and the other disciples had a lot to learn about Jesus’ identity as the Messiah, the Christ, the Anointed One of God.
At the point of today’s exchange, the disciples have learned something of Jesus’ identity. The sources of learning up to this point have been Jesus’ teaching and the miraculous works He had done in their presence. Surely, Jesus’ words and Jesus’ acts were part of the divine revelation that Jesus refers to in His response to Peter, “Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.”
But the way of discipleship, the way of the cross, is also part of the learning process Jesus outlines. “Get behind me,” Jesus says. Those are words of discipleship… “Follow me”, Jesus is saying, adding the word, “Satan”. You see, “Satan” is the word for “enemy” in Hebrew. So Jesus seems to be telling Peter “Don’t be an enemy of the ways of God.”
Knowing the ways of God comes through two main sources:
- God’s revelation: God reveals Himself in the pages of Holy Scripture, and in the work of the Holy Spirit who works on our minds and our spirits to reveal God’s nature and God’s ways to us.
- Discipleship: Discipleship is essentially the process of “Living it out”, day-by-day, walking in the footsteps of the Lord, even when those footsteps seem to lead down a dangerous, lonely, and downward path. Remember with me that there would have been no Easter Sunday morning without Good Friday. At times, our walk with God seems to lead in uncertain directions, but one lesson we can gain from Jesus suffering and death is that God is always in charge, and God’s ways lead to results that far exceed our own expectations.
“Rocky, my hero!”
That’s been our theme these past two Sundays, as we watch Peter excel, and then fail. Peter is like the student that no one can figure out….It’s as if Peter could be chosen as the student “Most Likely to Succeed”, but then the one who winds up in Detention for misbehaving.
Peter’s walk with the Lord is our walk….Which one of us hasn’t climbed to the heights of knowing God and proclaiming him in all His glory, majesty and power, only to slip from those heights into the muck at the bottom of the valley below?
Isn’t our walk with God often one step forward, but then two giant steps backward, just like Peter’s?
Aren’t we just like Peter, motivated by selfish desires, by the limited vision of our own agendas, by a misguided love of the Lord that demands that God’s ways be aligned firmly with our own expectations (instead of the other way around), and by a hasty response to God which fails to hear all of God’s message to us?
Aren’t we just like Peter, the “rock” whose worthy characteristics of stability and steadfastness can just as easily be turned into obstacles to God’s workings?
But remember that there was hope for Peter. Peter had to learn to walk behind Jesus as a disciple, following the Lord instead of standing in front of Him, blocking the way. That lesson was, for Peter, perhaps one of the hardest part of learning about God and God’s ways. It is often the hardest lesson for us to learn, as well. For we want to be in control, to have our needs and our agenda taken care of.
The hope for Peter turned out to be the way of the cross, the rocky road of following Jesus, day-by-day, learning and living out the good news of God in Jesus Christ.
For Peter, our hero, was faithful to the Lord, even to the point of death (on a cross, tradition tells us, crucified outside Rome, head down). For that faithfulness, Peter is known for being the “rock”.
This Collect from the Book of Common Prayer (page 56) says it best:
“Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before He was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other that the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
May God grant us the wisdom to learn from His revelation, made known to us in the person and work of Jesus Christ. May God grant us the patience to faithful disciples of the Lord, walking in His ways.
AMEN.
[1] The word “you” is repeated in the Greek for emphasis, as noted last week.
[2] However, we should remember that “being raised on the third day” would have been puzzling to Peter and the other disciples. After all, they had not yet experienced the power of Jesus’ resurrection. Remember, we 21st century Christians have an overall perspective (called the “Reader’s perspective”) that those first disciples didn’t have during Jesus’ earthly ministry.
[3] See Luke 22: 24 – 30, where the disciples argue about who is the greatest among them. This passage is but one of many records of such disputes.
