Last week, we got to hear about the Confession of Peter that Jesus is the Messiah and Jesus’ statement that Peter was the rock upon which he would build the church. Today, we continue the story and Jesus tells the disciples just what being the Messiah and following the Messiah would cost.
And Peter, in his usual way, follows up his great revelation with a tremendous clanger: “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you!”
There are several problems with Peter’s exclamation. First, it is based upon a serious misunderstanding of what Jesus being the Messiah really meant. To Jews of that time, the Messiah was to be a warrior king who would free the people of Israel from foreign domination. For the Messiah instead to suffer and be killed was unthinkable. Impossible! God simply would not allow that to happen!
Also, Peter’s objection overlooks the sacrifice that Jesus would have to make and the sacrifices that we ourselves are called to make. If Jesus’ sacrifices—suffering and death on the cross—are not made, there would be no resurrection!
Peter, like us, wants to avoid the cost—the pain, the unpleasantness, the rejection, the suffering, and ultimately, the death he himself would suffer in Rome. We ourselves want to remember Christmas and Easter and not think of Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. We are sort of like the story of the young man, eager to make it to the top, who went to a well-known millionaire businessman and asked him the first reason for his success. The businessman answered without hesitation, “Hard work.” After a lengthy pause the young man asked, “What is the SECOND reason?”
When Jesus delivers his crushing rebuke to Peter, “You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things,” he is saying that is putting human ways of thinking—about the role of the Messiah, not wanting to pay the cost of discipleship—in the way of what God wanted.
We cannot do what Peter wanted, which was to take the cross out of Jesus’ life and death, because the cross is where God endured the greatest pain and suffering a human can endure. And because He did, he understands and shares in the pain of our mortal lives.
In his book, The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonheoffer asserted that there is a cost to following Jesus. We hope that we will not be called upon to pay the same cost that Bonheoffer did—a slow, gruesome hanging by the Nazis. There can be other kinds of costs, some petty, some large. We take up our crosses and we must be ready to endure what we must so that God’s work can be done. But we know that with God’s help, the cost will not be unendurable. [Note: in Westminster Abbey's Gallery of 20th Century Martyrs, Bonheoffer is on the right.]
But what we gain for that cost is beyond belief! If we are willing to give up our lives to save them, if we are willing to not hoard ourselves, we can have everything that truly matters. But, if on the other hand, we give up our eternal lives to gain worldly things, we will gain nothing of value.
In one of my favorite plays, A Man for All Seasons, the title character, Sir Thomas More has just heard Richard Rich give obviously false testimony which will condemn More to the block. When he is told that Rich has been appointed Attorney-General for Wales, he says, sadly, “For Wales? Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world . . . But for Wales!”
While Sir Thomas was executed by Henry VIII’s government, he has been honored for his integrity and courage and has been canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. On the other hand, Richard Rich, who eventually became Lord Chancellor as Lord Rich and was a Protestant under the Protestant King Edward VI and a Catholic under the Catholic Queen Mary, may have died in his bed, but he became infamous.
Like Richard Rich, we can sacrifice honor and integrity for personal gain. But, Jesus makes it clear that the little we gain will be dwarfed by what we will lose—our opportunity to be with God in his Kingdom.
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