Fr. Troy Beecham
A sermon
Proper 17 A, 2023
Matthew 16:21-28 (NRSV)
"Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, "God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you." But he turned and said to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things." Then Jesus told his disciples, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life? For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done."
Just last week we read about Jesus asking his disciples, "Who do you say that I am?" Simon Peter answered for them all, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." And Jesus answered him, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven."
In one week we hear Jesus praise Simon and give him the name Peter, and the next week we hear Jesus confront him as Satan, commanding Peter to get behind him. What happened and what elicited such a rebuke from Jesus?
All through his earthly ministry, Jesus often said to his disciples, and to people upon whom he had performed a miracle, "Tell no one you know me". What an odd thing for the Messiah to say, the same Messiah who would rise from the grave and ascend into heaven, charging his disciples to proclaim his Gospel to all peoples. Every human messiah, prophet, and ideologue has always done the opposite, thrilling their disciples to make them famous and gather a great following. But not Jesus. So, what changed? What had to change?
The change came slowly. Up to the moment of his crucifixion, his disciples, as with most Jews of the era, were expecting a warrior king messiah who would galvanize the people of Israel and destroy their enemies, restoring the kingdom of Israel and maintaining it with power and strength. As often as Jesus preached about who he was and is, and how the kingdom of God would come about, and as often as he talked about his impending death, it seems that the disciples had selective hearing, just like us. They saw the miracles, the impossible miracles, and all they could see was the power he had. Somehow they missed his humility, and his repeated teaching that God’s kingdom would not come about by swords or human endeavor.
It is understandable that the Jewish people of the age, including his disciples, longed for freedom from the oppression of the Roman Empire. It is understandable how being ground under the heel of an overwhelming enemy can create generational feelings of setting anger, a desire for vengeance, and a heart filled with wrath. It is the same today for hundreds of millions of people living under the oppression of governments based on Leftist ideology or countries engaged in wars. It is entirely understandable to wonder "Where are you, God?" when famine, disease, human trafficking, war profiteering, and all manner of evil seems to go unchecked. We all want a messiah who will get rid of all oppression and suffering.
But Jesus was teaching us something different. As NT Wright so wisely put it,
"When God wants to sort out the world, as the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount make clear, he doesn't send in the tanks. He sends in the meek, the broken, the justice hungry, the peacemakers, the pure-hearted, and so on."
The temptation to seek to redress the problem of evil by human endeavor is strong. We secretly think that God is moving too slowly, or not at all. This makes us profoundly susceptible to manipulation by the evil one into looking for human messiahs or messianic ideologies like the Leftist utopian vision. The problem is that every time these messiahs, prophets, revolutionaries, and wicked political ideologies are enshrined, greater human suffering is the inevitable result.
We are not able to engineer the kingdom of God by ourselves. Only God can do that. We cannot engineer our return to Eden. Only God can do that. To trust that God can, and is, working out his plan of salvation, and bringing his kingdom ever closer, takes the kind of faith that is only a gift from God. And to many people, if not most, this feels weak, inadequate, and even foolish.
Even so, this is what we are called to believe and hope for, even as we are called to put our hope solely in the Lord. Don’t you think Jesus ever had the thought that he could do what his people wanted him to do? We know it was on his mind from his words to his disciples when they and the guards who came to arrest him pulled swords on each other,
"Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then would the scriptures be fulfilled, which say it must happen in this way?" (Matt. 26:54)
That is why Jesus rebuked Satan speaking through Simon Peter, because it offered him a way out from his cruel torture and crucifixion. It was the one thing that tested him, as we see him praying in the garden of Gethsemane just before his arrest, illicit trial, humiliation, torture, crucifixion, and death, a prayer that obviously cost him dearly,
"‘Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.’ And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him. And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground." (Luke 22:42)
If even our Risen Savior struggled, so we continue to struggle. The disciples did not truly learn this crucial lesson until Jesus ascended into heaven before their eyes and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit not many days after. It was only after their ideas of what a messiah ought to do and be had turned to ashes in their mouths, that they could become empty of their plans so that they could be filled with the power of the Holy Spirit, that their eyes, hearts, and souls were opened by the gift of faith given by God to see that God is still sovereign, and God is bringing his kingdom in his own timing. Our ideas of who God should be, and when and how he must act, also have to finally die if we hope the be filled with his Holy Spirit.
Until that day dawns, we are equally called to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus to all nations, teaching them to obey everything that Jesus has commanded, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and living in the awareness that Jesus is with until the end of this age. If any of us are lacking such supernatural faith, let us pray to the LORD our God, that we might fully place all our hope in him, and be given supernatural grace that we might endure all things until the day that the Lord Jesus shall return,
"For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord for ever. Therefore encourage one another with these words." (1 Thess. 4:15-18)
Lord of all power and might, the author and giver of all good things: Graft in our hearts the love of your Name; increase in us true religion; nourish us with all goodness; and bring forth in us the fruit of good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever.
Amen.
