Get Behind Me, Satan!

Mark 8:31-38

During our Sunday evening worship service, we often ask “I wonder” questions after we have read and reflected on the Scripture lesson and story that we are talking about that evening. After reading this passage, I have an “I wonder” question: I wonder what Peter’s face looked like after Jesus said to him, “Get behind me, Satan!”

Peter had just been given the best compliment that a follower of Jesus could receive. When Jesus asked, “Who do you say I am?” Peter answered, “You are the Messiah.” In Matthew’s sharing of this story (Matthew 16: 13-20), Jesus tells Peter that he is blessed—“he didn’t get that answer from books or teachers, but only from my Father in heaven.” Then Jesus tells Peter that he is a “rock” and it is “on this rock that I will build my church.”

Wow! What a compliment! First, to be told that you have listened well and that God has shared a life-changing insight with you. Then, to be told that you are the foundation on which the church will be built. Could it get any better for Peter? Yet, just one conversation later: “Get behind me, Satan!”

Peter’s head must have been spinning. I close my eyes and see his jaw hanging half way to the ground. If he (Peter) was totally tuned in to God with his first answer, Jesus tells him he had changed channels and was totally tuned in to the world with his second. In the wink of an eye Peter had gone from being a “rock” to a “stumbling block,” and from tuned in to God to having his mind set on “human things” and not on God.

Michael Slaughter, writer and pastor at Ginghamsburg UMC, has a new book out, Renegade Gospel-The Rebel Jesus. Here is a quote from his book that I think really speaks to Peter’s dilemma in this story and as a reminder to us of how easy it is to lose our way as we work to follow Jesus:

“The disciplines of Lent remind me how easily as Christians we succumb to the secular worldview of the contemporary culture, trying to bring the rebel Jesus into our own worldview instead of being transformed into his. Soon we operate as if God were not a factor. Jesus becomes a Sunday morning habit, and the rest of the week we seem to get along just fine without him. A secular worldview is also a materialistic worldview. We draw our security from our money and material possessions rather than from the promises of God.”

How could Peter have such a divine understanding of Jesus as Messiah and yet such a secular worldview of how that same Jesus as Messiah would need to engage and offer God’s love to our world? Well, I want to give thanks that Peter got the first part so right and that his example of getting the second part so wrong serves well as a reminder to us of just how easy it is to take our eyes off the Messiah and let them be compromised by the world. 

~ Rich Greenway