Merry Christmas, all! Thanks for your companionship on the journey this past year. May we know the truth of Emmanuel, God with us, more and more clearly with each passing day!
And He gave the disciples orders to tell no one that He was the Messiah. From then on Jesus began to point out to His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders, chief priests, and scribes, be killed, and be raised the third day. Then Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him, “Oh no, Lord! This will never happen to You!”
But He turned and told Peter, “Get behind Me, Satan! You are an offense to Me because you’re not thinking about God’s concerns, but man’s.” (Matthew 16:20-23)
Jesus chose Caesarea Philippi as the place and time to unfold his intentions for the future more clearly than he had ever done before. He did so in private, telling only his closest disciples of his plans. This unfolding rose to the level of a prophetic act, declared, as it was, at the very gates of hell; facing north — toward the Gentiles, the giants, the world beyond Israel’s borders.
In this single declaration, Jesus confirmed his identity as Messiah and divine Son. He declared his plan to build a new people, an ekklesia formed around a new covenant, with Peter — chief of the apostles — as a foundation stone, much like Moses was in the old ekklesia. His people would be filled with revelation from the Father and empowered to manifest the very heavens in their teachings and acts. They would beat down the gates of death, and they would prevail.
This was a messianic vision of astonishing breadth, a plain affirmation at long last that Jesus had truly come to fulfill all that the Prophets foretold.
God would indeed set his king upon his holy hill of Zion. He would make a new covenant with the house of Israel and write his law on their hearts; no one of this new people would need to be instructed to “know the Lord,” for they would all know him, from the least to the greatest. Life would overcome death.
But the time hadn’t come to reveal this at large, so Jesus instructed his disciples to keep it secret. And then he told them something else — that he would soon suffer and die. The religious authorities with whom he’d been butting heads for some time would move violently against him.
He would, he said, “be raised the third day” — but by the time he got to that detail, it seems the disciples had largely stopped listening.
Peter Steps Up
Peter, this new Moses, filled with a bracing new sense of his own importance in the plans of God (“I say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church”), his own ability to hear from God (“Blessed are you, Simon Bar Jonah, for flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my Father who is in heaven”), and his special prerogative to interpret the will and word of God (“I will give you the keys of the kingdom, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven”), knew immediately what he was supposed to do.
Jesus was beside himself, and it was clearly Peter’s job, as his newly commissioned lieutenant, to bring him back to earth and remind him of the facts of the Messiah’s mission — to rule and reign, to bring new dedication to the Lord and his Word, to cleanse the people, to drive out Israel’s enemies.
There was, maybe, also some visceral personal reaction at play here. Jesus and Peter had a close relationship. When my friends start telling me they want to die, I usually tell them (with more or less tangible compassion depending on the circumstances) to buck up and stop being so morbid.
This of course leads to one of the most dizzying conversational reversals in history. Jesus, who had just said all of the things he had just said, rounded on Peter and snapped, “Get behind Me, Satan! You are an offense to Me because you’re not thinking about God’s concerns, but man’s.”
Sickness and Scandal
Possessed of earth-shattering revelation, a real call from God, a real mission, and real authority, Peter nevertheless vastly overestimated his own understanding of the situation.
To a degree, he also overestimated the state of his own heart. He thought his concerns and God’s were fully aligned. He was wrong.
As human beings born into Adam’s fault, we don’t see our own situation clearly. As Jeremiah told us, the heart is “deceitful” and “desperately wicked” (Jeremiah 17:9). In Hebrew these terms are less indicative of total moral depravity than they are of frailty and complexity. The word translated “deceitful” might be better rendered “crooked” (or “not straightforward”). “Desperately wicked” is more literally translated “incurably sick.” This is why Jeremiah’s cry is not “who can justify it?” but “who can know it?”
Peter didn’t know his own heart, much less God’s heart. He couldn’t discern the mind or will of God in this situation even though he was sure he could. He didn’t know his heart was sick. Instead, his attachment to his own ideas blinded him to the greater light that was shining as Jesus prophesied of his suffering and death.
As the kindest man who ever lived, Jesus did not often call people “Satan.” It’s a name that reaches back through the darkest shadows of history, a name that means “adversary.” But he recognized a power speaking through Peter in that moment.
The power was, I think, especially dangerous because it spoke through Peter’s mouth. No temptation is harder to resist than one that comes through someone you love and believe in, and no one loved or believed in Peter more than Jesus did.
Satan had tempted Jesus before — all the way back in Matthew 4, in the wilderness before Jesus’s public ministry began. There he had repeatedly tried to make Jesus shortcut his calling and use power to get what he wanted. Jesus had another path in mind.
Jesus told Peter that he was an “offense” to him in this moment. The word “offense” is the Greek skandalon, which literally means a stumbling block: it is a thing in the road that causes someone to trip and fall, to force them off a path.
If Jesus had listened to Peter in that moment he truly would have been listening to Satan; he would have stumbled off the right path and gone wandering off into darkness like so many human beings before him.
But he didn’t. Like he did in the desert, Jesus overcame.
The Perfect Way of Love
Peter, of course, was left with the sting of Jesus’s rebuke in his ears. For many, such a rebuke would itself have been an offense. “How could he talk to me like that!”: how many people have left churches, families, important relationships over less?
But to Peter’s credit, he believed what Jesus told him. His heart and mind needed changing.
He stuck around.
In this passage, Jesus’s words about suffering and death were the first time he had spoken to his disciples about this part of his plan. They knew Jesus had come to declare the kingdom of God and call people to repent; they knew he had come to heal the sick, cleanse lepers, teach Torah, and even be a light to the Gentiles.
They knew he was the Messiah. They didn’t know the Messiah had to die.
That was part of Scripture too, but somehow, no one had really understood it. Jewish expectations of the Messiah in Jesus’s day ranged widely, and some taught that a suffering messiah would come, but this individual was different from the kingly messiah Jesus clearly identified himself as. (How else were they meant to understand his use of the term “Son of Man,” his Davidic descent, his lordship over creation, his intention to build a people of God that even death would not overcome?)
It was clear that Jesus had come to reign, and the way we humans think, reigning and dying are antithetical. Dying is what happens when you are defeated, not when you win the victory.
In his rebuke, Jesus made it clear that God’s concerns were different from human concerns — that he had come to fight a different battle. Humans thought the chessboard needed to be cleansed of other humans. God had his eye on the demonic realms, on sin, on death itself. Humans thought the Romans needed to be run out of town. God was interested in taking down the gates of hell. Humans — even saintly humans, even Peter and the other disciples — thought suffering was a problem to be avoided at all costs. They saw humiliation as the perfect evil. God thought it was the perfect way of love.
Like Peter, we sometimes find ourselves opposing the way of God even when we don’t mean or want to. Our hearts are complicated, too layered and twisty for even ourselves to understand. Our minds are clouded and darkened by circumstances, by sin, by fear or grief. In order for Jesus to set us free, he may have to tell us to get behind him.
The rebuke stings. But “behind him” is exactly where we need to be. Behind Christ, Satan will flee; he has no interest in taking a subordinate position. But we, finding ourselves humbled and repositioned behind our Lord, are in the perfect position to resume our journey of discipleship and follow.
“Submit yourselves therefore to God,” James tells us. “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you” (James 4:7-8).
The Mission Renewed
Peter responded to Jesus’s revelation of his will by rebuking the Lord. I would express shock, but I’m sure I too have rebuked my Lord — my God — from time to time.
The rebuke flows from my ignorance, my fear, my frailty. It flows from the illness of my heart, so deep that it was once called “incurable.” It shows what a vast chasm sometimes exists between my conception of what is good and what truly is good, what truly is the way of freedom and truth! It puts me on the side of the devil and even allows him to speak through me at times.
But Jesus came swiftly to Peter’s aid. He drove the devil away, and he stuck to his mission. He could not be swayed from it, could not be convinced to take up some lesser torch and abandon the battle he had come to fight.
If he did, how could Peter’s incurable wound ever be cured? How could our ignorance ever be healed? How could our crooked hearts be straightened, remade in the likeness of God?
Jesus strictly commanded his disciples not to reveal any of this to the multitudes — yet. The mission of Christ had to be kept cloaked for a time.
But the day would come when his purpose would be clear to all, and most especially to the devil whose works he had come to destroy. Yes, the Christ would have to “suffer, be killed, and be raised the third day.” It was the only way he could truly go the distance for those he came to save.
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This is Part 249 in a series on the Gospel of Matthew, which you can access here. Unless otherwise marked, quotes are from the Holman Christian Standard Bible.
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