Sermon: Peter and Jesus
Sermon delivered at Grace North Church, Sunday, 31 August 2008
© 2008 by Lola McCrary
Please note that it is the custom at Grace North Church that one reading be from a non-Christian source.
A reading from the Confucian scriptures:
Master Meng said…’I like life, and I also like righteousness. If I cannot keep the two together, I will let life go, and choose righteousness. I like life indeed, but there is that which I like more than life, and therefore, I will not seek to possess it by any improper ways. I dislike death indeed, but there is that which I dislike more than death, and therefore there are occasions when I will not avoid danger. It is not those of distinguished talents and virtue only who have this mental nature. All have it; what belongs to such people is simply that they do not lose it.
A reading from the gospel of Matthew:
From that time on, 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?”
In the name of the Divine, source of wisdom, healing and transformation. Amen.
Often when I’m reading the gospels, marveling at the teachings of Jesus, a line will come along that makes me think, “Wow. Why did he have to go and say that?” Since we are trying to keep our texts on Sunday short I have to resist the temptation to edit out those lines when I select readings on the days I talk to you.
Get behind me Satan. That’s pretty harsh. It seems to me that Peter was simply trying to be supportive. Perhaps the same way any of us would caution friends against a dangerous course of action. By the way…this is the first time in the gospel that Jesus says that he thinks he might be killed. This is the first time that his friends and students hear this. I sometimes find that the way that scripture is divided into chapters and verses artificially breaks up the flow of the narrative it contains. Jesus told his disciples about his upcoming death on the heels of the events we’ve been hearing about in the readings the past few weeks: Jesus walking on the water during the storm, healing the Caananite’s daughter after she gave him a piece of her mind. Jesus asking his followers what people are saying about him, and then, who they think he is. In Matthew’s gospel it is Peter who gives the correct answer to that question, and receives praise from Jesus for doing so. As presented in the gospel narrative, these are all remarkable events and teachings witnessed by Jesus’ followers. Heady stuff indeed. To then hear Jesus say he was going to be killed must have been a total shock.
When I was growing up this section of the gospels where Jesus foretold his passion, death and resurrection, was one of the primary ones used to encourage Christians to buck up, offer it up, sacrifice, and not complain about how painful life is. If Jesus was willing to go though all those things to redeem us, we could put up with our own brand of suffering. I find that harsh as well. While Jesus was probably savvy enough to realize he would meet the same fate as his cousin, John the Baptist, it is unlikely he knew in advance how he would die, or predicted a resurrection three days later. Those are most likely additions of the early church writers linking, in retrospect, what happened to Jesus, with a number of other political and religious priorities in their communities.
That doesn’t make the suffering of Jesus, or our suffering, meaningless. But each of us wrestles with the meaning we give to the suffering in our lives, the lives of loved ones, and in the world at large. Saniel Bonder, one of my teachers, says that we shouldn’t court unnecessary pain since life gives us more than enough unavoidable pain as it is.
But it seems clear that Jesus did not see his death as avoidable. He was, like the people Master Meng talks about in our first reading, a man who chose righteousness over life. But the commentaries I looked at, as well as common sense, indicate that this was not a choice without fear or pain. It must have been very tempting to either gather that army and try to overthrow Rome, or go underground and stop throwing his radical-ness in the face of the Jewish leaders.
Then after just being praised for his understanding of who his teacher is, here comes well-meaning Peter giving voice to the temptation Jesus felt to save his life. I can feel for Peter here. There have been times when positive feedback from people I wanted to impress made me cocky enough to next say something...not well thought out. Being praised and yelled at in the same day--never fun.
A scripture scholar named William Barclay said that “Satan” means “the adversary”. In that moment, in the depths of the realization of what was probably going to happen to him, one of his closest friends became Jesus’ adversary. In the light of that, the words to Peter take on a different flavor. Jesus needed those who loved him to back him up, to as we would say today--get behind him, so that he could follow his path of righteousness rather than the natural and normal outcome of his love of life.
I have a very vivid memory, a few years after I graduated from college, of watching a PBS documentary about the civil rights movement called, “Eyes on the Prize.” It was four hours of mostly archival footage of actual events. In my mid twenties at the time, still full of youthful idealism, I sat there with my mouth hanging open and saw people of all ages, races, both men and women, of many religious faiths, walk time and time again into situations where they knew there was a good chance they would be injured, arrested, or even killed, and they did so without fighting back. I was too young in the 60’s to follow or understand the ramifications of the civil rights movement. I realized, with profound surprise, while watching that TV show, that I wasn’t sure I could do what those civil rights activists did. I’m still not sure. Jesus, by choosing righteousness over life was a model to his followers, to many of those brave people facing lynch mobs and hostile police in the sixties, and to those of us seeking righteousness today.
Yet there have been other people willing to die for causes most of us here would consider horrific--far too many of those people, in addition to those we believe died for righteousness. It’s sometimes hard to tell, when in the middle of something one feels strongly about, if it is a form of righteousness, or something with the potential to become a horror. Both anti-abortion and pro-choice activists feel their cause is righteous, for example. Jesus continued to pray about his upcoming death. A week after his anger at Peter for not understanding, he takes Peter, James and John with him while he goes for a little mini retreat that results in the transfiguration-showing his disciples the glory of oneness with the Divine. He was still praying about it as they came to arrest him. So I find-not being as spiritually advanced, or as wise as Jesus--that I want to remember that whenever I hold an idea or cause as righteous, I must, in addition to a tenacity that might some day cause me to choose it over life, hold what might be righteousness with a tentativeness that remains open to continued discussion, prayer, new insights and information.
Let us pray:
Jesus, grant us the wisdom to recognize righteousness and to hold it as more important than life. Let us be wise and loving supporters of each other, and guides, through you and the Spirit, to deeper understanding of what is truly of more worth than the life given us. Amen.