24th Sunday 2021
Isaiah 50:5-9; James 2:14-18; Mark 8:27-35
Blooming ‘eck, Peter! You weren’t expecting that, were you? After all, you were only doing your job. According to Matthew, the Lord had just named you as the rock on which He was going to build His Church, and this was your opportunity to show Him what a good choice He had made.
And you went the right way about it. You took Jesus to one side, exactly as He had described how you and the rest should deal with problems: there was no question of making a public fuss. Then you quietly told Him that, with you in charge, this didn’t need to happen.
You must have been feeling that you had done a really good job: your first challenge in your new role, and you had handled it perfectly. Then this happened. You were absolutely humiliated. You were called Satan, you who, just a few minutes before, had been told that God had inspired you. Yet now you were in trouble for not thinking in God’s way. Not only bruised, battered, and humiliated; you must have been thoroughly confused.
To be honest, I don’t think you should take it too personally. You simply happen to have pressed a very sensitive button. With the best will in the world, and completely without intending to, you had tempted the Lord to turn aside from His mission, to avoid the way of suffering: and it was one heck of a temptation.
Did you notice what Jesus did when you spoke to Him? He turned away from you, because He could feel the force and the attraction of what you were saying. Did He want to suffer? Of course not: and you were offering Him a way out, an offer which was hugely tempting.
That’s why He called you Satan. He wasn’t actually speaking to you, but to Satan, the Tempter, who was using you, using your voice, the voice of a friend, and what is a stronger temptation than that? If you really dread something, and your friend tells you that you needn’t go through with it, aren’t you mightily tempted to go along with him? Jesus is fully human, so He would have felt the same. That’s why He turned away from you, and in doing that, He saw the others, and He knew that He had to go through it for them, and for all the others who had gone before them, and all those who would come after them, until the end of time—but it was a close thing.
As for being inspired by God, and then thinking not in God’s way but man’s, that’s a tricky one. You will learn, and your successors will learn, to trust entirely in God, allowing Him to speak through you, and not to trust your own judgement.
Finally, there is one more thing. Don’t forget what Jesus went on to say: that all of us will have to suffer, taking His way, not our own, and carrying our cross in His footsteps.
But don’t worry. He will be with you, and with the rest of us. He will, in the end, give you courage beyond anything you could imagine, and He will tell you to strengthen us all. So don’t be downhearted, Peter. There will be setbacks along the way—massive setbacks, indeed—but you will be a source of strength and encouragement for millions yet to be born.
