by Br Julian McDonald cfc
Along the way, Jesus asked his disciples: ‘Who do you say I am?” Peter said to him in reply: “You are the Christ.” Jesus began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and rise after three days. He spoke this openly. Then, taking him aside, Peter started to remonstrate with him. But turning and seeing his disciples, Jesus rebuked Peter and said to him: “Get behind me, Satan! Because you are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.” Mark 8: 27-35
The fact that Jesus framed a short, sharp and direct question for his disciples meant that he cleverly limited the responses open to them. “Who do you say I am?’ is a question that allows no room for discussion and no space for hypothetical answers. It forced them to give a factual response that effectively stated where they placed their allegiance.
While Peter correctly identified Jesus as the Christ, God’s anointed, the Messiah, he and Jesus had different understandings of what the Messiah was meant to look like. When Jesus started to describe how he was destined to suffer at the hands of the Jewish leaders of his time, Peter took him aside and tried to set him straight. In Peter’s mind a suffering Messiah would not only not cut it with ordinary people but would bring rejection and suffering to anyone who stuck with him. The prospect of suffering at the hands of Jewish officialdom had absolutely no appeal to Peter.
It’s important to get our thinking right here. God neither promotes nor encourages suffering. God does not approve of the suffering human beings inflict on one another. Jesus was totally committed to promoting the kingdom of God, to proclaiming the value of justice for all, of making sure that the poor, widows, orphans and strangers were cared for and not overlooked. He had committed himself to live with integrity. He would be made to suffer for being true to those values. By taking Jesus aside and telling him that he did not want him to suffer for what he had committed his whole being to bring to reality, Peter was effectively presenting himself as a hindrance to the mission Jesus had undertaken.
Mark wrote his Gospel decades after Jesus and his message had been rejected by the Jewish authorities, brutally tortured, crucified and raised from the grave. Mark was writing for an early Christian community, pointing out that anyone, who was committed to following in the footsteps of Jesus, could expect harsh treatment, rejection and persecution from those who persisted in opposing the establishment of the kingdom of God.
Peter’s effort to have Jesus steer clear of physical harm and suffering was entirely understandable. When he took Jesus aside, he had not yet come to understand that suffering would inevitably come to Jesus as it had come to all the prophets before him. Jesus knew the scriptures well and had come to appreciate that his continuing to speak the truth to his world, that his unswerving commitment to his mission and his personal integrity would bring on him the same kind of rejection and suffering that had been meted out to the prophets who had preceded him.
Perhaps what is most surprising about today’s gospel-reading is that Peter, after being soundly rebuked by Jesus and disillusioned about the kind of Messiah he preferred, did not shrink from the commitment he had made on behalf of all twelve of the Apostles. Perhaps he was even hoping that the rejection and suffering that Jesus had forecast for himself might somehow be averted.
History demonstrated that all, except one, of those followers of Jesus on whose behalf Peter had spoken, did not sway from their commitment.
The very same question that Jesus put to those close followers of his is put to each one of us. Our responses will be individually expressed in our own particular way. We know that, because of our human frailty, we have wavered from our commitment to Jesus and his Gospel. The words of commitment we articulate will be confirmed only by our actions. We know that our actions sometimes falter. We also know that we all have a history of picking ourselves up, asking forgiveness and recommitting ourselves to live true to the Jesus who never gives up on us.
We live in a world in which self-interest is rampant. Jesus and his Gospel are increasingly rejected. To give priority to promoting justice for those who are persistently overlooked will bring us criticism, opposition and rejection.
Peter was to experience criticism when, while warming his hands in the forecourt of the Temple, he was identified by a servant-girl as an associate of Jesus who was on trial before the High Priest. His denial eventually caused him great shame. It was not until after Jesus’ resurrection that he fully realised that suffering was inseparable from the life of the Jesus whom he had committed himself to follow.
In last Sunday’s gospel-reading, we heard how Jesus cured the man who was profoundly deaf. Peter was equally deaf to what Jesus had been trying to tell him about how he was a Messiah who would experience sufferingand rejection of unparalleled brutality. If there are two things we can learn from Peter, they are these: He did publicly profess his faith in Jesus and even though that faith wavered, he eventually came good. What’s more, despite being told by Jesus that his faith was lacking something really important, he stayed around, through thick and thin and through the crucible of Jesus’ suffering and his own, until his faith matured. Surely that gives hope to every one of us.
