Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
“Follow Me” — Reflection by Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Romans 12:9-21/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Matthew 16:21-28/NRSVUE)
We’ve shared a home with our dog Olive for a little more than decade now. She’s a complicated blessing (as a lot of blessings tend to be); she brings us not only much joy but also no shortage of challenges, most of which are just variations of the same basic challenge.
By my count, Olive has made her way through at least four different obedience schools of various types over the years, and has shown herself to be an exemplary student — while she’s around a trainer, anyway. At home with us, however, all bets are off.
It’s definitely not a matter of her ability to hear. She starts barking the second a car door closes several driveways down the block, and comes running from three rooms away when she detects the sound of the lid coming off a peanut butter jar in the kitchen. But when you call her over to you, she’s more likely to go to another person in the room, or simply ignore you altogether, than she is to do what’s been asked of her.
Nor is it a question of her intelligence. She knows every one of her toys by name; she recognizes delivery people (all of whom she views with suspicion and contempt) when she sees their vehicles or uniforms; and she jumps up and makes a beeline to the back door anytime the words “walk” or “outside” are uttered (and I’m pretty sure she’s figured them out in Spanish too).
You see, with Olive, it’s not about not hearing it, and it’s not about not getting it, it’s about not wanting it. The word “must” is simply not part of her worldview. She wishes for things to be the way she wishes for them to be, and is not big on imperatives and realities that contradict her wishes. She does only what she wants to do, and hears only what she wants to hear. And while she tests the limits of our patience sometimes, we love her just the same.
As I was out walking Olive one day earlier this week — or, to be more accurate, as I stood the holding her leash while she sat on the sidewalk and sniffed the air for what seemed like an hour despite my repeated entreaties to move it along — I was also contemplating (without much success) the passage from Matthew’s Gospel that you just heard (hey, the world’s a busy place so you’ve gotta multitask whenever you can).
This text is familiar to many folks due to both Jesus’s memorable rebuke of Peter (you know that whole “Get behind me, Satan!” thing) and his description of discipleship (“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me”). But the fact that I spent much of the week tying myself in knots over what to say about this passage testifies to the fact that there’s more to it than a few quotable lines. And then it occurred to me, as I was enduring the latest of Olive’s acts of defiance, that Simon Peter and Olive have at least one thing in common.
Today’s reading picks up right where last week’s left off. There, Peter was the first person to rightly declare that Jesus is the Messiah. Jesus then gave Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven and told him that he’s the rock upon which he will build his church.
All in all, this probably seemed like a good day to this former fisherman from Capernaum named Simon. I mean, he received confirmation (from God, no less) that this Jesus guy he’s been following around for a while now is, in fact, “the Son of the Living God,” and he had good reason to believe that he’d been named as Jesus’s right hand man. Peter must have felt like he was sitting on top of the world.
But from the very first word of today’s reading, it’s clear that things have changed — in the story, as well for Peter and the rest of the disciples. Matthew tells us that, “From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the chief priests and scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised.” And this is what’s changed: for the very first time, Jesus speaks of his own impending death and resurrection. He’ll do this again two more times in Matthew’s Gospel, but this first time is a really big deal.
Up to now, the story’s been all about Jesus’s early life and his ministry amidst the people of Galilee, which has consisted mostly of preaching and teaching and feeding and curing diseases. Sure, he’s run into a few problems along the way — being rejected in his home synagogue, debates with the Pharisees and Sadducees — but nothing too bad.
But now the focus abruptly shifts to the fateful journey that Jesus and his disciples are about to make to Jerusalem and, ultimately, to the cross. At this point, they haven’t even begun their trip, but we know how it’s going to turn out; we know that this is where they’ve been headed from the beginning — Peter, however, doesn’t know any of this. And it’s gonna be a tough pill for him to swallow.
As Matthew explains it, this is where Jesus tells his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem. There’s that word again: “must.” And it quickly becomes apparent that Peter doesn’t want to hear that word any more than Olive does.
Peter voices to his displeasure by responding to Jesus with an ultimatum of his own: “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you,” is what he says.
And so we end up in the middle of a standoff between competing musts — Jesus explaining that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering and be killed, and on the third day be raised; and Peter declaring that this must never happen. Of course, it’s not really much of a standoff; we all know how this one is going to work out; we know that Jesus is right, but poor Peter doesn’t have any idea – yet.
Then Jesus really lets Peter have it — he doesn’t seem to want to hear the word “must” any more than Peter did. As soon as Peter finishes telling Jesus what must never happen to him, Jesus, moved by what seems to be a mixture of anger and frustration, responds to him by saying, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
Divine things versus human things; it really all comes down to that, doesn’t it? The divine “must” versus the human “must.” And I’ll let you guess which one wins out in the end.
The human must, voiced here by Peter, is relatively easy for us to understand because we live and breathe it every single day. Come on, be honest: we generally want what we want when we want it, and have a hard time understanding when we don’t get it. So when Peter cries out, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you,” he’s obviously concerned about Jesus, but it’s kind of hard not to think that he might be motivated, to a large degree, by his own self-interest.
It’s pretty obvious that Peter wants to see his Messiah riding into town triumphantly, breathing fire and vanquishing the people’s enemies, not suffering and dying; it’s pretty clear that Peter wants Jesus to remain by his side so that he can continue to bask in the glory of his presence; it’s pretty clear that Peter wants Jesus to protect him and his from them and theirs. And so, for Peter, this is what must happen.
But God wants something else — from Jesus and from us.
And if there was any doubt about this, then listen to what Jesus tells the disciples right after he lets loose on Peter: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”
Said differently, discipleship isn’t first and foremost about you, it’s mostly about everyone else; indeed, following Jesus is often about anything but you. And it’s a completely different orientation towards life than Peter is used to — than we’re used to.
When Jesus explains that he must go to Jerusalem to endure suffering and death, it’s easy to understand it as being an order from God that Jesus must obey, to think that Jesus doesn’t actually have a choice here, to believe that this is and has always been part of God’s plan. I mean why would Jesus actually choose to do any of this if he didn’t absolutely have to?
The truth is, Jesus does have to — but not for the reason we might think.
In a worldview that has self-interest as its guiding principle — that is based, above all else, upon what we want — Jesus’s willingness to give of himself for others doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. In such a worldview, Jesus would only do so if some external force — in this case, God — compelled him to do so.
But God doesn’t see things that way — and neither does Jesus. The divine worldview’s guiding principle is not self-interest, it’s love. What does this mean for us? It’s not about what we want, it’s about what the world needs. Jesus ends up doing what he does because he must, but not because he’s following orders. Jesus ends up doing what he does because his love for us simply won’t allow him to do anything else.
How far would Jesus go for us out of love for God and for us? The answer, as we all know, is pretty darned far. The more important question, though, is this: How far would we actually go out of love for God and for each other? The answer, I think we all know, is decidedly less far. And that makes sense, because Jesus is Jesus, and we’re not.
So when he tells the disciples to deny themselves and take up their cross and follow him, it’s tough to say what his expectations of them really are. Is he speaking metaphorically or literally about that cross? Does he really intend for them to meet the same fate that awaits him? I kind of hope not, but, truth is, some of them actually do.
But when it comes to the whole self-denial thing thing, I don’t think there’s any ambiguity here at all — either for the disciples or for us — because loving your neighbor as yourself, by definition, means putting the needs of your neighbor on a par with or ahead of your own. And it means doing so whether you happen to “like” that neighbor or not.
As Paul says to the Romans, it’s a whole lot easier for us to contribute to the needs of the saints than it is for us to extend hospitality to strangers, or to bless those who persecute us, or to feed our hungry enemies, or to live peaceably with all.
But, make no mistake about it, this is what we, as followers of Christ, must do — not because it’s in our best interest to do so, not because God has ordered us to do so, but because this is what love of God and one another compels us to do. The question for us is whether we’re going to do it.
And there’s really only one right answer to that question.