The Twenty-Second Sunday of Ordinary Time, August 30, 2020

Matthew 16:21–27

Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly from the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised. Then Peter took Jesus aside and began to rebuke him, “God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you.” He turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”  Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? Or what can one give in exchange for his life? For the Son of Man will come with his angels in his Father’s glory, and then he will repay all according to his conduct.”

The Greek text begins the first verse of this reading with the words, “From that”, that is, “from that time”.  St. Matthew is telling us that at some time following the naming of Simon the fisherman as “Peter”, the “rock”, Jesus began to tell his Apostles about the future towards which he was nearing as they made their way to Jerusalem.  Jesus first lets the momentous teaching about this “rock” on which he was to build his “Church” sink in before the much more shocking announcement of his Passion, Death, and Resurrection.  St. Matthew says that he “began” to tell them this.  He might have meant that from then on he did this, through parables and also directly speaking of these events.  Just after the teaching about Peter as the “rock”, Jesus is transfigured before Peter, James, and John, and afterwards Jesus mentioned to them his Resurrection, which they did not understand, so it is clear that he had not spoken much of this at that time.  This leads to the conclusion that the rebuke of Peter in this reading did not happen directly after he had been named thus by the Lord.  The sequence of events makes more sense if we see this rebuke as taking place as the Lord and the Apostles drew much nearer Jerusalem, or even after they had entered it, when Jesus had become much more explicit about what would happen to him.  Matthew places it at this spot in his Gospel because it is his custom to group his sayings about the Lord according to theme, with less thought to historical order.  The theme here would be Peter’s relationship with the Lord.  This understanding of the events also eliminates for us the jarring effect of Jesus raising Peter to the heights in one moment, and then calling him “Satan” in the next.  There is some time between these events, days or weeks.  We recall another jarring effect that Matthew produces in the last verse of chapter two and the first verse of chapter three of his Gospel.  There, we go immediately from the infancy of Jesus to “In those days came John the Baptist preaching in the desert” — thirty years later.

“God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you.”  The expression Peter uses, the Greek word hilaos, does not mean “God forbid”, which, in any case, would not be an expression Jews would use.  The word itself means something like “merciful” or “favorable”.  In the context here, it could be translated very loosely as “Mercy help us” or the simple ejaculation “Mercy!” which we sometimes hear today.  Peter would not have used the word as an expression of astonishment, but as a sort of a statement, or the prelude to an oath: “No such thing shall ever happen to you.”  Peter may have taken our Lords words about his coming Death as a challenge to see which of his followers would step up to fight for him, just as the Lord had told the Apostles to feed the feed the crowd of five thousand themselves, presumably (in Peter’s mind) to see how they would react.  Peter, the most zealous of the Apostles, is ready to defend his Lord.  But the One whom Peter has rightly named the Son of God does not need his assistance.  Here, as later when Peter unsheathes his sword in the Garden of Gethsemane, the Lord rebukes him.  

His words must have stung and confused the Apostle: “Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.” This is as strong as the Lord’s “Begone, Satan!” from Matthew 4, 2, when the devil tempted him to worship him in exchange for all the kingdoms of the world.  The Lord calls no one else “Satan”, coming only as close as to tell certain of his opponents that the devil was their father (cf. John 8, 44).  To understand what the Lord means by calling Peter “Satan”, it helps to compare this incident with the earlier one, when the Lord faced Satan in the wilderness.  On the first occasion, the devil sought to determine who this Jesus was, “tempting”, or, testing him.  As the Lord’s wisdom and holiness of life became more apparent through the testing, the devil continued to think of him not as divine but as merely human, finally promising him to rule the kingdoms of the world, which the devil plainly thought was the ultimate fulfillment of human desire.  Here, the devil did not — and could not — think as God would think, but only as a man would, or might.  How many times throughout history had he succeeded in gaining the souls of men and women with such a false promise?  This is what Peter does, and he, more than any other disciple deserved such a reprimand because as Jesus had confirmed for him, it was his Heavenly Father who had revealed to him that Jesus was indeed the Son of God, that he was divine.  Peter’s mistake is to forget, ignore, or not think through what this meant, and so to contradict, as though to countermand, the Lord’s will.  For, the Lord did not say that he might “suffer greatly from the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised”, but that he would certainly undergo these things.  Jesus, in his divinity, was revealing the events of the future to the Apostles in order to prepare them for what was to come.  Peter, in effect, is treating Jesus as he would any mere mortal leader of whom he was a follower: he is “thinking not as God does, but as human beings do”.  

Matthew next describes Jesus as evidently referencing that last temptation, for he says to his Apostles, “What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? Or what can one give in exchange for his life?”  As if to warn them that he is not seeking for himself nor promising them “all the kingdoms of the world”, the conquest of which would presumably begin once they had secured Jerusalem.  And when Jesus says “life”, here, he means one’s soul, one’s eternal life.  His speaking of the necessity of their denying themselves, picking up their crosses, and following him means that rather than pursuing worldly power they must renounce it, even as he has.  But in renouncing it, by renouncing their own wills for that of Jesus, they gain their souls and eternal life: “For the Son of Man will come with his angels in his Father’s glory, and then he will repay all according to his conduct.”

Renouncing one’s will for that of Jesus, which is to say, promising Jesus obedience to his will for us, is no easy task.  It is the hardest thing a human can do.  Not even all the angels succeeded in doing this.  It turns a person inside out.  The most graphic display of this is in the vows and promises made by a man or woman upon their ordination or their making their final vows in the religious life.  Nowadays, contracts do not mean very much even at the time people enter into them.  But when a person publicly promises to serve God, it is a powerful sign for all of us that it is something we can want, and must want, to do.