Peter’s kind of had a rough go in the gospel readings lately. A few weeks ago there was that whole “walking on water” attempt/debacle where he like almost drown in a storm, and then across history scholars chastised him for having “little faith” and getting out of his boat. And last week he had that whole epiphany moment of identifying Jesus as the Messiah, and getting called the rock of the church, only to this week have Jesus call him a stumbling block, and even Satan. I joked about it last week, calling Peter a “wishy-washy” rock, but the truth is, you can’t fault Peter his response here.
Think about what’s happened here. We’re at chapter 16 of Matthew’s Gospel, so Peter’s been traveling with Jesus for a long time now. He’s seen Jesus teaching, heard him preaching, watched him heal. He’s even seen Christ manifested through Peter’s own life, when Peter himself distributed five loaves of bread and two fish to feed the multitudes. Peter’s experience in the world up until he met Jesus had been pretty tough. He was a subsistence fisherman, a poor freeman in a world of class politics, a Jew under Roman occupation, his opportunity to have any life other than the hard-scrabble one he knew simply didn’t exist. And then Jesus appeared. And sudden Peter knew he could be more than that. Suddenly Peter saw the promise of the reign of God. He saw a world where the blind saw, the lame walked, the sick were healed. He saw a world where there was enough food to go around, where everyone, no matter their background, had value. And last week we heard Peter testify to that realization, that in Jesus the world as Peter knew it would be changed.
But this week, from where Peter is standing, Jesus seems to be pulling the wool out from under him. Peter’s seen, and heard, and learned, and understood all these amazing things that Jesus is about, when suddenly Jesus starts talking about how he’s going to suffer, be sentenced to death, and die. And with those words, Peter just feels his world slam shut. If Jesus is dead, everything Peter’s experienced will stop. If Jesus is dead, the sick will not be healed. If Jesus is dead, the hungry will not be fed. If Jesus is dead, oppression will continue. All these dreams that Peter thought would be happening, the promise of the coming reign of God, with Jesus’ pronouncement about his death, Peter feels all those dreams die in an instant, come crashing down around him along with what remained of the life he once knew.
So Peter lashed out at Jesus. Not because Peter is dumb or a jerk or not faithful, but because that’s what we humans tend to do when we’re hurt or scared or angry. No, Jesus, no, Peter said, and even in the text you can hear the anxiety in his voice, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.”
Jesus rebuked Peter, because Peter has made a crucial error here. What Peter demonstrated in this comment was that even as he recognized Jesus as the Messiah, as the very Son of God, his vision of who Jesus is, is still too small. Peter saw Jesus as coming to save him, his time, his community, his people. But Jesus’ vision was not just for Peter, or for the Jews, or even for the first century. Jesus came to change the very foundations of the world, the very way in which creation itself relates to God its creator. Peter missed the forest for the trees, if I can simplify it down that much. Peter had experienced so much good, so much salvation, in his travels with Jesus, that he was terrified to let it go. But what Peter missed is that what Jesus was about was even bigger, even greater, than the things that Peter had already experienced. And only by letting Jesus go, only through Jesus death, could Peter, could the world, experience the fullness of God’s promise in Jesus, a death that defeats death, and a resurrection that leads to life eternal. Not just for Peter, but for the world, across time and space, forever.
That’s the thing about Jesus, he’s always bigger than we can imagine. He’s always more than we hoped for, greater than our expectations, deeper than our understandings. So much so that it’s scary sometimes, even terrifying, to understand the depth and the breadth of this kind of love. It’s more than we can fathom. So sometimes, like Peter, we try to put limits around this love, try to determine who is in or who is out, and what we have to do to make sure we’re in on this action of salvation. Because it feels like there must only be a finite amount of Jesus to go around. Peter tried to make Jesus about the people who knew Christ in the flesh. We try to make it about people who think like us, or act like us, or fit whatever definition of being right that we understand. It’s well-intentioned sin, but it’s sin nonetheless. Jesus love is bigger than the boundaries we try to draw around it, his salvation is more expansive than the requirements we try to place on it. This scripture invites Peter and us to hold lightly onto Jesus, or better stated, onto our expectations of who Jesus is and how Jesus will work. When we try to pin Jesus down, we are libel to miss him entirely. But if we open our hands wide and let Jesus roam where he may, we find ourselves drawn deeper and closer into the love that he is.
And then we get to the bit about picking up the cross and following. And I find myself cringing inside, because it feels like all these promises I have about how Jesus works in the world come crashing down here in the same way that it must have felt for Peter when Jesus told Peter that he was going to die. If Jesus died to set me free, why then to follow Jesus do I have to pick up a cross?
And part of my struggles with this section is I think that we as a church, and I’m talking about the church here, like the church across history, have done a horrible job with this passage, and with this idea in general. There’s two main branches of Christian thought, and without going into any sort of detail, there’s the moralistic Christianity I touched on last week, that idea that if we do good things than God will do good things for us, that God is about making us feel good. And that’s of course a problem because sometimes you can do everything right, and things can still go wrong, and that doesn’t mean that God is not still with you. But the line of thinking that’s come out of this section I think is even more dangerous than the sort of “feel good” Christianity we talked about last week, this idea that the Christian life is all about suffering. And that anything bad that happens to you or to the world, you just have to sit with it, because it’s your cross to bear. But see, I don’t think that’s a cross, I think that’s a burden. And burdens, brothers and sisters, we are meant to bear together, burdens Christ bears with us. Jesus says later in Matthew’s Gospel, my yoke is easy and my burden is light. If something is hurting you, holding you down, calling you less than you are, making you feel like you do not have value in the kingdom of God, that is not your cross, that is your burden, and I promise you however you may feel, you do not bear that burden alone, but Jesus Christ bears it with you.
But a cross is different. A cross is something you pick up. No one can tell you what your cross is but God, and because of free will, God lets you make that decision on your own. Because here’s the thing about the cross. Jesus chose his. He chose to suffer, he chose to die, because the benefits for humanity outweighed for him the cost. Jesus didn’t pick up his cross because he needed saving, he picked up his cross because we needed saving. That is the truth about crosses. The crosses we pick up are for the sake of the world, for the sake of each other. We pick up crosses because caring for each other is the kind of life Christ calls us to; it’s the kind of life Christ modeled for us. And here’s the other difference about crosses, picking up our cross gives us power. When Jesus took up his cross, the very foundations of the earth shook. And when we pick up our crosses, like Jesus said to Peter last week, the very gates of hell themselves will shake. Amen.
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