Preached at St John’s, Devizes
Readings – Romans 12:9-21, Matthew 16:21-28
But he turned and said to Peter, ‘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.’
May I speak in the name of God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Last week I watched two films that depicted how people convinced they are fighting injustice can descend into barbarism precisely because of their moral certainty. Both looked back on events in the late 1960s and 1970s. The first was Sam Green and Bill Siegel’s insightful documentary on The Weather Underground, the second was Bernd Eichlinger’s emotionally overwhelming dramatization of the story of The Baader Meinhof Complex. On both sides of the Atlantic, young people outraged by the nightly television scenes from Vietnam, with America killing civilians in great numbers, themselves resorted to bombing and killing. None of this produced any of the justice and liberation they sought. In the end, both organisations found the world moved on rapidly and left those in them behind: on the run, or marooned on the edge of society, or imprisoned. The illusion that if only we ourselves ran the world, then everything would be wonderful, is a dangerous one.
First century Palestine was a place of political and religious ferment and frequent outbreaks of religiously-inflected political violence. Utopianism was as prevalent there as it was in the Chicago or West Berlin of 1968. To understand how Jesus calling Peter “Satan” fits into that world, we need to go back to the episode in Matthew’s Gospel that immediately precedes Jesus beginning his public ministry. It’s the bit where Jesus is “led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil”. The last of the three temptations Satan puts before Jesus is to offer him all the kingdoms of the world in return for His worship. Jesus refuses and the Devil flees. Jesus’ goal is not power or conquest, nor even to initiate an enlightened political order, but the service of His heavenly Father.
Peter stumbles into being a bit of a devil without realising it, for he places exactly the same temptation before Jesus, to renounce His mission from the Father and seize earthly power. We know that power comes into it for the passage immediately preceding this, the Gospel at last Sunday’s service, is the one where Peter is the first person to correctly identify Jesus as the Messiah. The Messiah was expected to be an extraordinary God-sent leader who would restore The Temple to holiness from the way it had been spiritually despoiled by the Herods, and deliver the Jewish people from Roman Occupation. It was thought the Messiah was going to, if you will, Make Jerusalem Great Again.
