Who do you say that Jesus is?

(Mark 8:29)

Yes, the people needed a new hero. Some decades back, Herod the Great had failed to keep the Roman legions at bay. Israel was once more a vassal state, militarily occupied and economically controlled by gentiles. The Sinai covenant shattered. A once proud and faithful nation was hungry for a new liberator from the house of King David (2 Samuel 7:4-8), a triumphant Messiah, a true savior.

Perhaps that was the Messiah that Peter craved. So much so that he can’t take Jesus teaching. Suffering, rejected, killed, then risen, no, this is not how it supposed to be! I want something different, I want the glory of my people restored, Peter may have thought.  He saw Jesus do many things, he was convinced that Jesus was the anointed one. So Peter rebukes God! He momentarily becomes an adversary – that is, a satan – to Jesus’s mission into the world.

I love Peter. I love how he mirrors our reactions to God’s new and radical reversal to the order of things through the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ. Peter expectations were well founded according to the traditions of his ancestors, but God long ago had decided to do a new thing (Jeremiah 31:31-34).

We human beings don’t seem to be able to let go of our need to operate by the standards of kill or be killed. We want to climb. We want to be better than our neighbor and negate what the faith in the resurrection does to all who believe. According to the author of James, we turn the words of the new covenant of salvation into curses and accusations when it is not to be so (3:10) and forget that “all of us make many mistakes” (3:2).

Isaiah 50:4-9a; Psalm 116:1-9; James 3:1-12; Mark 8:27-38

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Image: Andrea Camagna – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67310177