Simon Peter

PRAYER OF CONSECRATION Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.  Abba, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice. Abba, we belong to you.  Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.  Mark 8:27–33 (NIV) Jesus and his disciples went on to the villages around Caesarea Philippi. On the way he asked them, “Who do people say I am?” They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?” Peter answered, “You are the Messiah.” Jesus warned them not to tell anyone about him. He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. “Get behind me, Satan!” he said. “You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.” CONSIDER THIS Caesarea Philippi was outside Galilee, and the villages around it made up the farthest distance that Jesus would be from Jerusalem. This city, which was northeast of the Sea of Galilee, a part of the Golan Heights today, had a pagan heritage in that much earlier, following Alexander the Great’s conquest, the city had been founded and called Paneas after the god Pan.1 Around 3 BC or so, Herod Philip rebuilt the city and named it after Tiberias Caesar and himself. On the way to the villages around this city, away from the noise of Jerusalem, Jesus turned reflective and posed a question to his disciples: “Who do people say I am?” Since Jesus had the disciples consider his own identity through the lens of the people, that is, in terms of common report, the answers could be colored by all sorts of factors. The first reply, that Jesus was John the Baptist who had come to life again, was uttered by Herod Antipas (Mark 6:16) in the wake of having executed the prophet at the request of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, whom he had unlawfully married. Deep personal and psychological factors, perhaps energized by guilt, prevented Herod from seeing who Jesus actually was. If the people had known of the proper relationship between John the Baptist and Jesus, that the one pointed beyond himself to the other (John 3:30), then they would have never imagined that Jesus was Elijah, for this Old Testament prophet as well pointed beyond himself and prepared the way for the one who was yet to come: “‘I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,’ says the LORD Almighty” (Mal. 3:1). In fact, Jesus himself would soon make the connection between John the Baptist and Elijah: “But I tell you, Elijah has come, and they have done to him everything they wished, just as it is written about him” (Mark 9:13). The final response, however, was little better than these first two. Though the claim that Jesus was one of the prophets set him apart in the eyes of the people, even from the religious leaders of the day, such a description, given its general nature, didn’t say very much. Having considered what the people thought of him, Jesus now focused his attention on Peter: “Who do you say I am?” Thinking perhaps what his other fellow disciples had considered as well, Peter was the first one to confess: “You are the Messiah.” Interestingly enough, Mark’s account of Peter’s reply is very brief, given the similar though far more lengthy account found in Matthew: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God” (16:16), a statement after which Jesus had much to say about Peter himself and the significance of his confession. The Greek word in our text that is translated into English as “Messiah” is Χριστός from which we get our English word, Christ. Accordingly, Peter confessed then that Jesus is the Christ, which is actually a title since its Hebrew translation is always rendered as Messiah, the Anointed One. Professing that Jesus is the Christ by Peter is undoubtedly a revelatory moment in Mark’s gospel, marking a genuine before and after, which makes the response of Jesus all the more curious, for he “warned them not to tell anyone about him.” But why did he do that? Shouldn’t such a grand truth be celebrated and spread far and wide? As a good teacher, Jesus was well aware of the context in which he labored and how such a truth would likely be received. During the Intertestamental period, from 430–6 BC, some of the literature of this age gave life to the nationalistic hopes of the Jewish people. To illustrate, the Psalms of Solomon, an apocryphal book (that is, not a part of the Hebrew Bible), which was written during the second or perhaps the first century BC, anticipated a messiah who would establish David’s throne, destroy sinners, and rid Jerusalem of all Gentiles, among other things.2 Given this history, the popular understanding of the Messiah held by many first-century Jews would likely clash with what Jesus had in mind. Recall that Peter in our text had used the word Χριστός, which means Christ or Messiah. Jesus, however, preferred a different expression in verse 31. In the first of his three predictions of his passion and death in this gospel (Mark 9:31 and 10:33–34 being the other two), Jesus used the phrase “the Son of Man,” but he developed it beyond what the book of Daniel had offered in terms of suffering (7:21) or what Peter had in mind. That is, to the pain of what Daniel had envisioned, Jesus added wretched suffering—agonizing and unwanted anguish: “the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again.” Beyond this, regarding the phrase, “the Son of Man,” Jesus not only embraced the principal meaning of Daniel in terms of a magnificent figure who was given “authority, glory and sovereign power” (Dan. 7:14) at the end of days, but he also invested this phrase with suffering, deep and wide, at the same time. This was new, in terms of its extent, disturbingly new. This phrase then was not only informed by the book of Daniel but also by the book of Isaiah: He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. (53:3–6) In light of this teaching, why should suffering be associated with the Messiah, “the Son of Man,” and the things of God at all? It doesn’t seem to make much sense. When we think of God as the greatest of all, a greater than which cannot be conceived, the one who created the starry heavens, we often have in mind the words, glory, honor, power, success, and triumph—not “suffering,” “rejection,” “being despised,” “crushed,” and “failure.” If God is good—the best possible good—how can that goodness, in terms of a messianic figure, be understood by what looks like punishment, pain, and rejection? What’s so good about suffering? What’s so great about rejection? More important, what does Almighty God have to do with any of this? If we think like this, then we can take some comfort in recognizing that Peter—great disciple that he was—thought like this as well, even right after his great confession of Jesus as the Messiah. At least at this point in Peter’s journey, in his estimate of things, Jesus was to have nothing to do with these very negative things for he was, after all, someone special, God’s Anointed One. However, such comfort that we might initially enjoy with Peter quickly fades away once we realize that with these understandings in place, of what the Messiah is and should be, Jesus could only say to us what he did, in fact, say to Peter: “Get behind me, Satan!” It will take the many texts, reflections, and questions in the days ahead to demonstrate just why this is so. This is not a simple matter; it has to do with how God will be revealed in Jesus Christ. Though his words were surprisingly strong, a full-throttle rebuke, Jesus knew exactly what he was doing. Even though Peter had confessed Jesus as the Christ (as great as this testimony was), nevertheless at this point, Jesus yet remained to Peter something of a stranger. THE PRAYER Heavenly Father, align me to your purposes and help me to see through attempts of darkness to employ me against your kingdom agenda. May my every thought, word, and deed be infused with testimony to the lordship of Jesus and his glory in our world.