“Having No Idea How God Works”

Matthew 16:21-28

Poor Peter: one minute he’s walking on water, the next he finds himself sinking and his faith being called into question. One minute his faith is being praised and his testimony as to the true identity of Jesus as the Messiah is being called the rock upon which Christ would build his church, the next Jesus is calling him Satan. Poor Peter: doing or saying the right thing only to turn right around and do or say the wrong thing.

But what about Jesus? Sometimes Peter and the others get what his ultimate mission is only to turn right around and prove that they haven’t got a clue. Over and over again they buy into their culture’s expectations of the coming Messiah. And they’re not the only ones. John 6:15 reads, “When Jesus realized that they [the crowd he has just miraculously fed] were about to come and take him by force and make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.” People kept trying to force him into a role he was not called to play.

Even the Devil tried to do it. In the wilderness just prior to the beginning of his ministry the Devil – Satan – tempted him with earthly power. Turn stones to bread and feed the masses. Jump off the pinnacle of the Temple in order to impress them with his superhuman powers. Give them bread and circuses. Buy their loyalty with handouts and cheap tricks. The Devil’s trump card was offering to Jesus lordship over all the earth if he would only bow down and worship the Prince of Darkness. Jesus’ response was no, no, and no.

In the verse prior to today’s text, after Peter had correctly identified Jesus as the Messiah, Jesus sternly ordered his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah. Why? See John 6. People would want to crown him the wrong kind of king, a king whose view of himself would match their populist assumptions.

All that is why Jesus called Peter Satan after Peter strongly objected to the notion of a crucified Christ. Peter, more than likely out of his love and loyalty for his Master, was playing the role of Satan as he offered Jesus an easy way out. That’s why Jesus essentially told Peter that he didn’t have a clue as to how God was working his purposes out.

God had sent his Son to be the Suffering Servant Messiah and Passover Lamb, the One whose sacrifice would atone for the sins of the world. He was not to be a warrior king. His power was to be exercised through humility and servanthood. His mission involved dying on a cross. There would be resurrection and redemption, but first he had to go to Jerusalem and die.

And that’s the reality that became a stumbling block to Peter’s faith. A crucified Christ? A murdered Messiah? Peter couldn’t begin to understand that this was the will of God, that this was how God was going to redeem the world. It didn’t make sense.

And it still doesn’t. Those thoroughly immersed in the cultural assumptions of the kingdoms of this world cannot grasp the idea that God’s Kingdom turns all earthly assumptions upside down and inside out. The Sermon on the Mount comes across as nonsense when heard through the ears of someone held captive to worldly assumptions. That’s why Paul wrote in First Corinthians 1:22-25:

“For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews [like Peter in today’s text] and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”

I’ll never forget a wonderful lady who belonged to a church I once served. She would not say the words “He descended into hell” when she said the Apostles Creed. She could not comprehend someone as good and perfect as Jesus being condemned to hell. In her own way she was stumbling over the reality of the cross. Jesus didn’t just die for us on a cross; he also suffered hell itself as he experienced being utterly forsaken by God. She could not see how our Lord’s descent into hell was part and parcel of his atoning sacrifice.

She didn’t want her Savior to be contaminated by contact with hell. Like many of us, probably most of us, she wanted her Jesus to be neat and clean and pretty. But that’s not how God chose to do it. Once the Word became flesh all that neat, clean, pretty stuff went right out the window. Wrote Jin S. Kim, “The amazing thing about the gospel is precisely that God chooses to become not so immaculately conceived by coming as a despised Jew in the Roman Empire, a lowly Galilean among the Jerusalem establishment, living in the mess of humanity and ultimately becoming a victim of our collective dysfunction.”

The Word who became flesh, the God made incarnate in a human being, was not some neat, clean, and pretty Savior. His birth was messy. His death was messier. He spent his life surrounded by and ministering to messy people in the midst of messy situations: like lepers, unclean women, people afflicted by demons. He ate and drank with sinners and lowlifes. His Messiahship didn’t place him above the confusing mess that is human life; it took him into the very middle of it.

We don’t follow a pretty Savior, and sometimes following him isn’t a very pretty experience. And he was upfront about that: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” That definitely puts a different spin on that old hymn that says “I walked today where Jesus walked.” Walking with Jesus isn’t always a tiptoe through the tulips, and while using worn out clichés, neither is it always a bed of roses.

We follow a Savior who, in the words of Philippians 2, “though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.”

Just so we don’t forget, those words followed Paul’s directive to the Philippians that they have in themselves the same mind that was in Christ Jesus. If we’re going to faithfully follow him we must adjust our attitudes in the direction of Christ-likeness, exercising as he did humility, servanthood, and sacrifice. You know - that whole business of dying to ourselves in order to be more like Jesus. Or as Mitchell G. Reddish so well states it, “The disciple who ‘takes up the cross’ is one who is willing to surrender pride, ego, status, comfort, and even life itself for the sake of the kingdom of God.”

With that in mind, allow to share the rest of Jin S. Kim’s earlier quote, “If we are going to become followers of Jesus, we cannot become any less vulnerable with, toward, and for others.” In other words our willingness to be vulnerable must imitate that of Jesus. Dr. Kim then goes on to write some lines that may step on the toes of some of us, maybe all of us. “Our concern is not first and foremost the purity of the church or the rightness of our doctrine, but our willingness to follow Jesus into the world and onto the cross. We do not control God or give Jesus the conditions to our discipleship; instead, we risk contamination and insecurity by releasing the need to protect our own lives and institutions.”

There is on earth no perfect and pure church, neither congregation nor denomination. This side of heaven the body of Christ, all those folks just like us, is never going to be all neat and clean and pretty. It’s going to be messy and dysfunctional. We’re going to disagree about stuff, including theology and biblical interpretation. Be that as it may, in the midst of our debates and discussions we need to remember what our mission is: following Jesus out into the world, proclaiming and demonstrating the Good News that is the Gospel, practicing humility and servanthood, and day by day dying a little more to self; going forth, in the words of Paul, to preach Christ, and him crucified. And being ready, willing, and able to suffer for doing so.

If anyone tries to tell us that’s wrong, we need to be ready, as Jesus was with Peter, to say, “Get thee behind me Satan.” To tell them, “You have no idea how God really works.” Amen.