A PRAYER TO START
Our faith heritage has a history of confusing right belief with righteous behavior. You and I would be a bit foolish to think we are not just as prone as our forefathers and mothers to the inherited quirk. Good thing for you and I our Father has a history of correcting our miss-assumptions with unrelenting consistency and unfathomable mercy! Pray today…
Father, there is a way that seems right to me but in the end leads not to life but to destruction. Show me the other way! Let not my understanding of who you are and what you promise to do give me such self-confidence that I miss the way you are fulfilling your faithfulness. Keep my mind focused on you so that I might share in what you have for me. Thank you for your often direct and always kind correction to return to the way you are working! Amen.
GETTING THOUGHTFUL
Peter, and the other disciples, have received a revelation from the Father (16:17). Now it is not a vision ascertained in a dream or lost in deep meditation; rather, an opening of the eyes of the mind and soul through a simple conversation; which happens more often than we give credence. Now, discerning Jesus to be the long awaited rescuer of both body and soul, Peter and the disciples are able to hear, perhaps for the first time, just how this plan of God’s, hidden for ages, will now unfold upon history, their history.
Perhaps you can remember your own revelatory moment(s), those soul satisfying instances when Jesus was seen by you for who he really is. Your heart at peace, confident in God’s salvation, ready to encourage, exhort, proclaim and follow wherever Jesus may lead. These moments are precious indeed, and the sense of trust that fills every cell compels us to believe that “neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation” (Romans 8:38-39) can stand against the purposes of the Lord, and our role in those purposes.
Have you had such moments in your own faith story? Think about them for just minute or two. How would you describe the emotions you felt in the moment?
What dreams or expectations of what God had in store for you filled your mind and prayers?
Did you, like most of us, consider such revelatory instances as new chapters in your story, destined never to repeat the chapters that preceded?
Imagine yourself once again upon this spiritual high. What if, in that same interval of spiritual confidence, Jesus began to reveal to you the details of the Father’s plan for him and for you? Details that included persecution, rejection, betrayal, abandonment, torture, death, and new life on the other side of dark days (16:21). How would you respond in your euphoric state?
Perhaps you would respond like Peter, once again acting on behalf of the other disciples. Having been affirmed in the revelatory gift from the Father, and encouraged that his confession would be the rock on which generations of believers would join him, and embolden that even the realm of death could stand no chance against the authority to which he would now share in (16:16-20); Peter, full of confidence in the power of God and assurance that all will work out well, kindly places his hand upon the shoulder of Jesus and whispers with empathetic sureness, “God is merciful to you, Lord, he will not allow such suffering to come upon one whom he loves so dearly and is clearly for.” (16:22)
Have you ever encountered someone walking in courageous, faithful obedience but under a barrage of difficulties, trials, and sufferings? Maybe you thought they were naïve in their endeavors, or simply faint of heart in their realism, or you were simply so convinced of your own ability to discern that you felt compelled to speak. In those encounters, perhaps upon a revelatory high, have you whispered words of intended encouragement like Peter’s to them?
Peter believes he is encouraging Jesus by refuting the suffering that Jesus spoke of as obedience. After all, no one longs to suffer, and Jesus himself just said that not even the most inevitable power known to humankind (death) could stand before those who followed the Messiah (much less the Messiah himself). And yet, Jesus responds,
“Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.”
Peter believes the glorious destiny of Jesus and those that follow him, but like all his sisters and brothers, he desires to advance to the “glory and bypass the elementary [essential] suffering” (Garland, 182). Jesus equates such vision as not from the Father (from which his confession came (16:17)), but from the father of lies. In Peter’s attempted encouragement he is acting like the tempter we met earlier in Matthew’s gospel story (4:3-11), scheming to draw Jesus off the path the Father is having him walk!
What is the significance of Jesus’ rebuke of Peter’s human response to God’s plan and purposes for the way we speak of God's intent to each other?
Jesus’ rebuke is certainly meant to shock his faithful friend. Yet, Jesus no more wants Peter to act unwittingly on behalf of the opposer to Christ, than he desires him to feel ashamed of his naïve over-confidence. So, Jesus gathers all his disciples around and let’s them know that what he assured them in their confession of him as Christ will come as they “deny themselves and take up their crosses and follow him” (16:24). Indeed, there is no glory without suffering. What we perceive the Lord doing in our human mindset is often amiss to what God is actually doing in our Father revealed understanding.
If the disciples, and you and I, are to encourage others to follow Jesus in his kingdom (or, as Jesus put it, to steward “the keys of the kingdom of heaven” and “bind” and “loose” on this earth in reflection of what is bound and loosed in heaven) then we must not only recognize Jesus for who he is, but also accept the way he will transform us all: suffering and death first, then life anew. “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” (16:25)
What human-like “things” or ways you’d like God to work, are you focused on against the way Jesus reveals God working?
How does that manifest in your encouragement, rebuke, correction, or even silence among our faith family, your Gospel Community, and other Jesus confessing friends and family?
What suffering is Jesus inviting you to share in so that you might also share in his glory? (Romans 8:17)
REFLECTION
Jesus’ encounter with Peter and those whom Peter represented in Matthew 16:21-28, reveals to us that there can be a gap between wholehearted confession of Jesus’ identity and purposes, and faithfully following Jesus as the way to life. Praise him that he not only reveals the gap but also invites us to see it closed as we get lost in those same purposes and identity!
Use the questions in the section above to help you prayerfully reflect individually and/or discuss as a DNA group.
ECHO
In a poem to his son Den, Wendell Berry captures the collaboration of revelation and discerning participation that Jesus espouses in Matthew 16 and exhorts us to share with one another as Berry does with his son. As we observe the rhythms of salvation and the possibilities of what can come to be as old wrongs are made right, might we properly encourage one another to join in the melody, not tempting one another to follow (even unintentionally) a different beat. May these words echo in your mind, your heart, and your courageous actions this week.
.
We have walked so many times, my boy,
over these old fields given up
to thicket, have thought
and spoken of their possibilities,
theirs and ours, ours and theirs the same,
alone, the thought of you goes with me;
my mind reaches toward yours
across the distance and through time.
No mortal mind’s complete within itself,
but minds must speak and answer,
as ours must, on the subject of this place,
our history here, summoned
as we are to the correction
of old wrongs in this soil, thinned
and broken, and in our minds.
You have seen on these gullied slopes
the piles of stones mossy with age,
dragged out of furrows long ago
by men now names on stones,
who cleared and broke these fields,
saw them go to ruin, learned nothing
from the trees they saw return
to hold the ground again.
But here is a clearing we have made
at no cost to the world
and to our gain—a re-clearing
after forty years: the thicket
cut level with the ground,
grasses and clovers sown
into the last year’s fallen leaves,
new pasture coming to the sun
as the woods plants, lovers of shade,
give way: change made
without violence to the ground.
At evening birdcall
flares at the woods’ edge;
flight arcs into the opening
before nightfall.
Out of disordered history
a little coherence, a pattern
comes, like the steadying
of a rhythm on a drum, melody
coming to it from time
to time, waking over it,
as from a bird at dawn
or nightfall, the long outline
emerging through the momentary,
as the hill’s hard shoulder
shows through trees
when the leaves fall.
The field finds its source
in the old forest, in the thicket
that returned to cover it,
in the dark wilderness of its soil,
in the dispensations of the sky,
in our time, in our minds—
the righting of what was done wrong.
Wrong was easy; gravity helped it.
Right is difficult and long.
In choosing what is difficult
we are free, the mind too
making its little flight
out from the shadow into the clear
in time between work and sleep.
There are two healings: nature’s,
and ours and nature’s. Nature’s
will come in spite of us, after us,
over the graves of its wasters, as it comes
to the forsaken fields. The healing
that is ours and nature’s will come
if we are willing, if we are patient,
if we know the way, if we will do the work.
My father’s father, whose namesake
you are, told my father this, he told me,
and I am telling you: we make
this healing, the land’s and ours:
it is our possibility. We may keep
this place, and be kept by it.
There is a mind of such an artistry
that grass will follow it,
and heal and hold, feed beasts
who will feed us and feed the soil.
Though we invite, this healing comes
in answer to another voice than ours;
a strength not ours returns
out of death beginning in our work.
Though the spring is late and cold,
though uproar of greed
and malice shudders in the sky,
pond, stream, and treetop raise
their ancient songs;
the robin molds her mud nest
with her breast; the air
is bright with breath
of bloom, wise loveliness that asks
nothing of the season but to be.