Dear Friends,
As promised last Sunday, our reading from chapter 16 of Matthew’s gospel continues today. In last week’s reading, Peter declared Jesus “the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” (16:16) And Jesus answered “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” (16:18) Jesus’s ministry was growing, the crowds were growing, and more and more people were recognizing his good works and deeds. The future seemed bright.
Before we explore that future, take a moment for this prayer for illumination:
Lord our God, your name and your word are exalted above everything. As we read your word, we are looking for your light. By the power of the Holy Spirit, renew our minds and hearts so that we may discern your will and respond in faith. We pray in the name of your Son, our Savior. Amen.
And now, begging your forgiveness for this moment of frivolity, comes the 180º turn for Peter…
<clip_image001.jpg data-preserve-html-node="true"> “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.” (16:21) The cartoon above may be a 180º turn from our prayer, but that’s nothing compared to how Peter and the other disciples must have felt as their world turned upside down with Jesus’s words.
It’s hard to imagine a greater shock, especially after the optimism and hope embedded in last week’s reading. This verse is a turning point for Peter and the disciples, and it’s the turning point of Matthew’s entire gospel. It can be seen as an outline for the remaining twelve chapters, and it contains so many surprises, including the extraordinary one at the end of the verse, when Jesus describes his passion and resurrection for the first time in Matthew.
From our post-resurrection perspective, we might consider those last words in verse 21 – “on the third day [Jesus will] be raised” – not as a surprise ending, but rather, the surprise beginning to the story of Jesus the Christ. But if we are to understand this reading, it’s important to try to look at it from the perspective of Peter and the other disciples, as well as the gospel writer Matthew himself.
Re-read at whose hand Jesus says he must suffer. He makes no mention of the Pharisees, with whom he had debated regularly up to this point in the gospel. Nor does he mention the Romans, who alone could have killed him; only they had the power of capital punishment by crucifixion, execution on a cross. He names the elders, chief priests, and scribes, all of whom are powerful members of the Sadducees, the ruling Jewish group who tried to maintain a quasi-peace between the Jewish population and their overlords, the occupying foreign forces of Rome. The Sadducees saw their role as protecting the people, though they were no doubt also affected, perhaps even corrupted, by whatever notion of power they believed they had. In truth, it was always and only Rome that held power in Jerusalem.
Tragically, in the centuries after Matthew wrote his gospel, verses like 21 were to be catastrophically misinterpreted, becoming the reason for anti-Jewish sentiment that grew into outright anti-Semitism. People of faith began to blame the Jews for the death of Jesus, despite Rome’s pre-eminent power, and others used the Jews as scapegoats for all sorts of perceived and propagandized injustices. Even to this day, after the incredible tragedy of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism persists and continues to destroy the lives and security of Jews here and around the world.
To fully understand this reading, it’s important to be aware of when this gospel was written. These were truly perilous times. With the destruction of the Temple and nearly all of the city in 70 C.E., Rome very nearly succeeded in its plan to utterly eradicate the Jewish people from Jerusalem. Thousands upon thousands, nearly the entirety of the Jewish community, had been killed, and most of the few who survived fled into exile. Only a single wall of the Temple remained standing, the Wailing Wall we know of today in Jerusalem. The Jewish community was gone, and the Sadducees no longer existed. In such a time of continuing danger and instability, it makes sense for Matthew to have Jesus preemptively blaming the Sadducees for his coming arrest, torture, and execution. As scapegoats, they’re safe. They’ve vanished and no longer exist by the time Matthew writes. The Jewish people have lost their city and the vital center of their faith.
Nonetheless, hope is emerging from the rubble of Jerusalem in the form of the emerging Jewish-Christian church. But even as he addresses this new community of faith, Matthew is writing at a time of profound danger and despair. In a way, like the Sadducees before the destruction, Matthew is taking on the challenge of trying maintain a new quasi-peace in times even more dangerous than when Jesus walked the earth.
In last Sunday’s reading, Jesus took Peter aside to tell him about the future. This time, it’s Peter who takes Jesus aside when he says, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” Peter is clearly focusing on Jesus’s description of his suffering and death. Having heard Jesus’s terrible prediction, it’s understandable that he can’t comprehend this new notion that on the third day Jesus will be raised.
Just as Jesus’s words have turned the disciples’ world upside down, his response to the man he had just elevated as the foundation of the church was another shocking about-face. “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me” (16:23) Peter, the rock, the foundation, has become a barrier to the mission and salvific destiny of Jesus, all in the space of a single conversation.
But I feel compelled to defend Peter. He’s a simple fisherman. How can he do anything else than think in human terms? He has just heard the staggering outline of God’s plan for his beloved teacher, but how can he possibly comprehend divine things, especially when they contradict all his expectations and understanding? He has just heard Jesus confirm that he is, indeed, the longed-for Messiah, come to rescue the people of Israel from their brutal captivity at the hands of Rome. Peter, like all the people, was looking for a mighty conqueror who would be victorious over the Romans, and now his hero was telling him that he would suffer and be killed, and rise again on the third day. It was all so confusing for Peter at this point that he didn’t even ask what Jesus means; he simply leapt to his defense. “This must never happen to you.” (16:22).
Clearly, Peter was trying to care for and protect Jesus. He loved Jesus; he had happily given up everything – his livelihood, his family, his home, his previous life – to follow him. All of that took great courage, and yet, as we’ll see, Jesus is about to demand acts of even greater courage.
Immediately after Jesus chastised Peter for his unbelief and hesitation, Jesus uttered the three sayings we know so well. Jesus has been preaching and teaching and performing miracles. But now, he’s demanding more than passive acceptance of his teachings; he’s demanding courageous action. He tells all who would follow him to “take up their cross and follow me,” (16:24) that “those who want to save their life will lose it,” (16:25) and he asks, “what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?” (16:26)
Many of us remember and perhaps even cite these words when we talk about our faith. But do we understand how difficult they might be? And do we remember that all three challenges came directly after Jesus broke the news to the disciples of his impending suffering, death, and resurrection? Jesus is moving past his teaching to the demands of faith.
For the disciples, and for Christians in the two thousand years since these words were recorded, these statements can only be fully comprehended through the lens of Christ’s divine resurrection. And that’s what Jesus gives his disciples and us when he so shockingly predicts his passion and resurrection. Without that faith perspective, these challenges make little sense to the human mind; with it, they make all the difference in the world.
I’ll focus today on just one of the three challenges. Jesus said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” (16:24) We post-Easter Christians can’t help forming an image of Jesus hanging on a Roman cross, tortured and suffocating until he died. But the disciples haven’t yet experienced Easter week. They’re hearing for the first time about what’s to come, and unlike us, they more likely heard these words exactly as Jesus spoke them, without the filter of years of knowledge of the resurrection.
Try to put yourself in their place, and read that verse very carefully, as if, if possible, for the first time. “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross…” (16:24) We are not to take up the cross, or Jesus’s cross, but ours. What can this possibly mean for us, especially now, two millennia later?
Even in these terror-ridden times, there are, thankfully, no crosses, no crucifixions. But even so, there are many crosses to bear in these times. Racism and lynching, sexism and glass-ceilings are only some of the many shapes of our contemporary crosses. In Choosing Life, Dorothee Soelle, a German theologian of the late twentieth century, put the matter of “taking up the cross” this way: “Take up your cross and follow me means: join the battle. Give up neutrality.”
Jesus is telling us to have the courage of our faith. Even as he lets the disciples in on the pain and suffering that is to come for him, he’s daring them, and us, to come out of our zones of safety and security and rise to the challenge of his teachings and his life. He’s calling us to faith, a faith that is not easy, a faith that is demanding, that requires bravery, persistence, and insight. He’s calling us to action.
We join the battle – we take up the cross – in big ways and small, and all have value. We take up the cross when we feed the hungry by working at the food pantry or donating to the foodbank; when we not only welcome the stranger, but find ways to invite the stranger into our lives, our church, and our homes; when we reach out to the boys of The Discovery School; when we put aside, even for only a few hours every week, our pursuit of accomplishment and worldly success to study the words of Jesus and try to understand his message for us; when we seek to face up to our failings, our triumphalism, and our conscious and unconscious contributions to injustice; when we reach out to children through the Boys and Girls Club, to the homebound through Meals on Wheels, to hospice, and to other such programs; when we march or advocate for gun safety and for voter accessibility; when we work to conquer the scourges of poverty and illiteracy; when we care for one another with visits and calls, and by trying to walk a mile in each other’s shoes.
All these are easy words to write and read, but behind them is arduous work and careful self-examination, always grounded in the teachings of Jesus. I know this is hard, but I also know that we’re up to it. I’ve seen that here in Scottsville and beyond, in all the ways we walk in the footsteps of Jesus. With God’s help, may we be empowered to see and fully comprehend the crosses that are ours, and may we have the courage to take them up as we follow Jesus.
Joys and Concerns
Unending prayers for us all as the weight of loneliness and depression, anxiety and impatience, anger and frustration at our current situation seems to grow heavier. May we find ways to see beyond the fear engendered by the pandemic, and beyond the growing economic, social, and political fragility of our nation and the world.
Let us pray together:
Abba God, your Son rebuked the disciple who tried to turn him from the path of the cross to the path of self-protection. In our humanity and in our fear, we, like Peter, plead for safety rather than the courage and confidence to face our path. O God of the cross, teach us that stronger than the pain of any cross is the power of your arms opened wide to receive us and your love reaching out to welcome us.
Teach us to put behind us the temptation to cling to the small things and finite hours of our lives.
Teach us to trust that, even as we struggle with disappointment and dashed expectations, your plan for our lives will energize us to action and bring us peace and comfort.
Teach us to move surely and eagerly into the infinite eternity of your plan for creation.
Teach us that whenever we choose to carry the cross, we carry with us as well the breadth and height and depth of your love into this broken, hurting world. Amen.