Thursday of the Eighteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Can you imagine what it must have been like to be Peter in the story we encounter today from the Gospel of Matthew? One minute, Jesus is telling Peter that he will make Peter the cornerstone of his church. He even promises Peter the keys to the Kingdom of heaven! Next thing Peter knows, Jesus is rebuking him and even calls him Satan! What can account for this dramatic turn?
To answer that question, I think we have to go to the questions that Jesus poses to his disciples. First, he asks them: “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they reply: John the Baptist, Elijah, a prophet. None of those responses get it right. Then he asks the disciples directly: “But who do you say that I am?” And Peter answers: “You are the Christ, the son of the living God.” Peter gets it right. And Jesus is pleased. So pleased, in fact, that he blesses Peter, tells him he will be the cornerstone of his church, and promises him those keys to the Kingdom.
But what does that mean? What does it mean to say that he is the son of the living God?
Matthew’s Gospel wastes no time in telling us. The son of God is the one who must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly, and be killed, and be raised.
Peter responds—No! That can’t happen. Jesus is the son of God! How can it be that he must suffer and die? Jesus rebukes him for his misunderstanding and, in doing so, tells us something very important about what it means to be a human being. Like Peter, we are forever tempted to think not as God does but as humans do.
And when Peter was thinking about Jesus, he was thinking of him the way humans of his day thought about kings and other gods: invincible, not suffering, strong, never weak, victorious, never the loser. What Peter missed was that it was precisely because Jesus was the son of the living God that he had to go to Jerusalem, suffer, and die. Only through his suffering could he reconcile us to God once and for all. Jesus, of course, has it right: any effort to get in the way of his suffering would, in fact, be an obstacle to what God was doing in the world.
As I read this story today, I have to be honest that I would have felt exactly the same way Peter did. I would not have wanted to face what was coming for Jesus. And I would have wanted Jesus to figure out how to avoid it. Even worse, like a lot of other people in Peter’s day, I’m pretty sure I would have wanted Jesus to ride into Jerusalem on a thoroughbred ready to battle the powers that were and emerge victorious. In other words, I would have been thinking like humans are always tempted to think.
Jesus, help me to notice when I am thinking as humans do—when I am all about avoiding suffering and can only think of victory over my “enemy.” Help me to resist the temptation to follow the ways of the world and, instead, follow you. Amen.
- Sue Trollinger