“Get behind me Satan.” This has become my go to phrase when I’m out for a training ride on my bike and I decide that I want to try and at least keep up with, if not pass other cyclists out on the road. No matter how many times my cycling coach shows me the evidence that easy riding is essential for building my endurance without getting injured or burning out; that I need to stay within a prescribed heart rate or wattage zone, I’m always tempted to go faster and harder; to prove that I am just as fast or powerful as that guy who just passed me. So I repeat this little phrase when I’m tempted to go faster than my prescribed zone: “get behind me Satan.” Follow the plan. Do the work set out for you and you’ll find far more benefit than if you try to follow your own poorly thought out urges.
As silly as this might sound, there’s a really good reason I use that little phrase: it’s a powerful rebuke against our ego and the way our ego - filled as it is with pride, envy, jealousy, and insecurity - can mislead us in doing what is good and right for us. In our Gospel lesson today, Jesus is telling the disciples exactly what he must undergo: I will undergo great suffering and be rejected by my own people - the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes - and be killed and after three days rise again.” He says this quite openly with his disciples and Peter says to him: “Jesus, stop, what are you doing, you can’t think that, you can’t say that.”
Now of course there are a whole range of reasons that Peter might have rebuked Jesus for what he said. Just like us in our churches, Peter is likely worried about the worldly success of this little band Jesus has brought together: there’s no way to have success in this world if our leader’s teaching is rejected. He’s a failure. We’ll be failures. We won’t accomplish our mission. But if he’s arrested and suffers and even dies, well that would be humiliating for all of us. This powerful one isn’t even capable of saving himself? How on earth could he save all of us and the Jewish people as he promised he’d do. And then there’s the whole fear thing that might come into play: wait, what, “you’re going to rise again on the third day.” Are we talking resurrection here Jesus? Are you really associating yourself that closely with God? Are you blaspheming God in saying this? Maybe Peter doesn’t fully trust or understand who this Messiah really is, or what it actually means for the Messiah to have come amongst them. Or maybe he’s afraid that the Jewish elders will condemn Jesus’s open statement as blaspheme and bring all of them under scrutiny; maybe they’d be rejected or are fearful of the civil or legal authorities.
But Jesus is getting at something quite specific in rebuking Peter. Peter: you’ve proclaimed I am the Messiah, the one promised by God. Who did God promise would come? Let’s look at Isaiah: “For he grew up before him like a young plant and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering[a] and acquainted with infirmity, and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account. Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases, yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.” This form of the so called, suffering servant, in Isaiah is echoed throughout all the law and prophets of Israel as a testimony of Jesus’s coming. We see Jesus in Abraham, the father’s willingness to sacrifice his only son, Isaac; but Jesus’s release of Isaac from the condemnation he and every other person is under, when Jesus becomes the lamb that God provides to Abraham. We see Jesus releasing Jonah from the tomb of the whale when Jonah sins in refusing to show mercy to his enemies (remember that he is swallowed by a whale when he fails to go and warn the Ninevites to repent and turn to God because he thinks they are more wicked than he is and he wants God to crush and destroy them.) He’s spat out by the whale onto dry land - picking up the themes of God saving humanity from the flood of their own sins and self destruction, and of saving the Israelites from physical slavery to the Egyptians and spiritual slavery to sin - and eventually will see the Ninevites repent and receive God’s mercy. We see Jesus in Job: a man of God’s own heart who has everything taken from him by God, but then restored to him for his faithfulness. In other words: over and over and over, throughout the entire history of God with the Israelites, we see the very Person of Jesus Christ foreshadowed in different situations and people. So if indeed Peter is following God as any good Jew should, he should know that God will come into the world not with power or force or money, or coercion or any of the things that swells our ego into a pride filled, self protective sin-spewer.
God coming into the world does not take on the world’s ways but overturns them. The first in the world are the last in God’s kingdom. The last in the world are the first in God’s for one reason: they approach God with humility. Out of humility they can set down their own ego driven ways, the ways of the world, their agendas, their measures of success and instead, “deny themselves and follow Jesus by speaking the truth in and with love.” Amen
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