When Glory Fails: Peter, Promise, and the Cost of Discipleship

From that time on, after Peter confessed that

Jesus was the Messiah, 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 elders and the chief priests and the scribes,

and be killed, and on the third day be

raised. And Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him, saying,

God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to

you. But Jesus turned and

he said to Peter, get behind me,

Satan! You are a hindrance to me,

for you are setting your mind not on divine things

but on human things.

Then Jesus told his disciples, if any wish to come after me,

let them deny themselves and take up their cross and

follow me. For those who want to save

their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will

find it. For what will it profit them if they gain

the whole world but forfeit their life?

Or what will they give in return for their life?

For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of

his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done.

Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not

taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in

his kingdom. This is the Gospel

of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let's pray.

Help us, O Lord, to set our mind on divine things.

Help us to lose ourselves in your love. Help us to take up our

cross and follow you. Let the

words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable

to you, O God, our rock and our redeemer.

Amen. An opening question

for us this morning: have you ever wanted something

so bad that once you got it, the reality

just couldn't live up to the expectation.

Or let me put it this way, have you ever thought something was going to

be really, really good, but it turned out to be bad,

less than good, less than ideal? Sometimes things

don't go the way we expect. I don't have a specific story

because this happens to me so often that

I'm afraid to admit it. These type of questions make me

think about the oft-quoted, perhaps mythical

statistic: half of all lottery winners declare

bankruptcy within the first 5 years. The actual

number is more like a third, but it's besides the point. These types of questions

make me think of the fable of King Midas. If you think

back to your elementary school fables, when granted one wish,

He wished that everything he touched could turn to gold.

He got his wish, only to find out that all that gold

was worthless when he couldn't touch his loved ones anymore or eat any

food. He was surrounded by wealth and he

couldn't enjoy it at all.

These types of questions, I think, arise from our Gospel

text this morning. Let me unpack this situation for you in case you

weren't here with us last week. Jesus has been traveling around the region of the

Galilee, teaching and healing and

drawing up a following. Last week, in the passage immediately

before this, he brought his disciples up to a place called Caesarea Philippi, this sort

of out-of-the-way region, it was a trek, and it was known for

having a very famous religion site in the Greco-Roman

religion called Banias Springs.

Again, this site was famous because it was full of shrines and grottos

to all the Greek and Roman gods, And so Jesus gathers his disciples

there amidst these throngs of other worshipers, and he probably looks

around and he asks this question, now, who do you

say that I am?

Now, Peter is the only one who gets the correct answer,

right? You are the Messiah, the Son of God. And his confession draws

a blessing from Christ. He gets a name change, he goes from Simon

to Peter, a word that in Greek means the rock.

And he gets a commission.

Peter is to be the foundation of the church, and he

is given the keys to the kingdom, as our Roman Catholic siblings like

for us to remember. Now, Peter's aha

moment, gosh, that must have felt so good,

right? Especially because his confession that Jesus is the Messiah

was usually interpreted in a very specific way.

The Messiah, God's anointed one, would come and liberate

the people of Israel and Judah from foreign oppression. He would restore

the kingdom of Israel once and for all. This was to be a military conquest,

a recapturing of the land, a kicking out of the

oppressors. So imagine Peter's delight at being the first

one to get it and to have the promise of leadership in

that new kingdom bestowed upon him. It must have been everything

that he ever dreamed of.

And yet, our passage today very quickly goes in a

different direction. The reality quickly doesn't live up to

the expectation. From that time on, that time

being the time of Peter's confession, Jesus began

his first prediction of his suffering and

his death. In his resurrection.

This was not the way that the story was supposed to

go, and so Peter, expert that he was, he had

to let Jesus know about it. God forbid it that this

should ever happen to you, Lord. Turns out that

the Pope, in fact, can be wrong.

Jesus rebukes Peter and curses him.

Get behind me, Satan! You are

a hindrance to me, for you are setting your mind

not on divine things but on human

things. Someone who gets it so right,

almost immediately thereafter getting it so,

so very wrong. And this is one of my favorite verses

simply because it forcibly reminds us that sometimes

the truth hurts and that Jesus was not always

nice. This entire passage shows us really

that true kindness, a word that means of being like, like someone,

of the same kind as them, does involve confrontation

and truth-telling when need be.

Get behind me,

Satan. The word Satan literally

means adversary, accuser.

Peter has done a literal 180. He has gone from being

the rock to the stumbling block.

I say this over and over again in my preaching, it's one of my core

themes. This whole religion thing is not

going to go the way we might think or hope.

Jesus' teaching his life show us that there is

no glory, there is no kingdom, there is no true love

to be had without suffering.

Our religion, after Jesus' own way and pattern,

should be cruciform,

cross-shaped, marked by us taking

up our cross and bearing our cross in love and and in

service to others. This passage

shows us that the things of God, the divine things,

are in fact different than the human things

and the human hopes and the human expectations that we

let consume us.

Sisters and brothers, this passage should cause us to pause and

reflect? Are we wrapped up in those human

things? We shouldn't get it twisted,

most of the notions at work in our culture are of a false peace,

a false harmony, a false good, and it's all

too easy for us to live in that illusion,

in that false reality, thinking that we are our own God,

we are our own Masters.

We waste our life on these human things:

status, wealth, prestige, education,

enjoyment, and pleasure for their own sake.

We can invest so heavily in all those things only

to find at the end of the day that we are

bankrupt within. We seek

after things that seem alluring and they wear us down, they make us less,

they rob us of our purpose and our true joy

in relationship for which we were designed.

And so, I think we need to ask ourselves every so often this

somber question: Who are we letting

define our values?

Who are we letting define our values? And you might

be able to find the answer if you pause and reflect on where

you are ascribing your own value,

the things that you invest in. It is probably a hint of

who you have let into your heart.

Peter here gets caught up in a category confusion. He thinks that

he has hit the jackpot But his definition of what

the Messiah is supposed to be and do, those values, right,

are bankrupt. He has become literally

God's adversary.

And we do too when we make that

same mistake, when we get wrapped up in that same confusion, when we expect

the kingdom and the power and the glory But

we, when we are not willing to embrace that

cross. And so, thanks be to God

that Jesus stops Peter in his tracks,

that he rebukes him right then and there, that he challenges him

with his own burden. If any wish to

come after me, let them deny themselves

and take up their cross and follow me, for those who want to save their

life will lose it, And those who lose their life

for my sake will find it.

For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world

but lose their soul?

As it turns out, to the question that Jesus poses, who do you say that

I am? There are some answers that are incorrect.

That oppose God's way, that misidentify who

he is and what his mission among us is to be.

Thanks be to God that Jesus in his wisdom and grace and mercy

helps Peter and his disciples and us by extension

to course correct when we err and wander.

Because the good news of the gospel that Jesus does have

for his disciples and for us is that God's love

will always look like a cross,

that Jesus' identity is that of the suffering servant, and that the challenge

of the gospel for us is that our love too must

look like a cross,

that we too must serve, must sometimes

suffer for the sake of the gospel.

I've often read this passage and wondered how Jesus' disciples understood

the phrase, take up the cross and follow me, how they understood

that before on that side of

the crucifixion. What did that mean for them? What did it look like?

In many ways, I think that the earliest disciples who composed the

writings of the New Testament, the Gospels and the letters, I think that was their

answer. They were reflecting back on Jesus' life, trying to make sense

of what this was. It was their

attempt to lose themselves in the teachings of Jesus and

in the way of Jesus. It was their attempt to make sense

of and take up their own cross.

And we are called to do the same as

we continue that story of the gospel with our own lives,

right? As we answer that question, Who do you say that

I am? With our words and our actions and,

yes, even with our time and our money.

The good news of the gospel, again, is that God, in great love for

us, gave all of those things up to win

us back, to show us the way, to bring us

back to life. His death secures our forgiveness. His death loves

us back to the way when we err and wander. His cross

His death, those things resurrect us.

And so, to be a disciple, to be a student of

Christ, is to study the way of

Jesus. It is to study the way of the

cross. It is to embody the kind of love that Jesus had for

His disciples on that hill.

This is both for ourselves and for one another and for this world that

we are called to safeguard and shepherd.

The more and more we lose ourselves, we give up our own lives, we lose

ourselves in it, the more and more we might find

a new and abundant life,

a rich and full life, a life together, the kind of life that God wanted

for us from the beginning.

It's not that suffering or pain or loss,

it's not that those things in and of themselves are redemptive. It's all

too easy to turn suffering and service into a twisted

kind of self-glorification. Just check Facebook.

It's that there is no true love really without

suffering, without working to redeem and to

restore the other in our midst.

This is what compassion, a word that means suffering with, this is what it

looks like. It looks like a cross. It is what God has designed

us for. It is what Jesus sets us free to do. It is who

the Holy Spirit empowers us to

be. People the cross.

I'd like to close today with a quote from Dietrich

Bonhoeffer, who was a Lutheran pastor and theologian and martyr.

This quote comes from his book, The Cost of Discipleship, a book that's definitely worth

your time. In that book, he says this,

the cross is laid on every Christian.

Thus, it begins. The cross is not the terrible end to a

God-fearing and happy life, but instead

it meets us at the beginning, the beginning of our communion,

of our relationship with Christ. When Christ calls

a man, He bids him come and

die. But we do not want to die.

And therefore, Jesus Christ and his call are necessarily our death

as well as our life. As Christ

bears our burdens, so ought we to bear the burdens of our fellow

man. The law of Christ, the law of Christ,

which it is our duty to fulfill, is the

bearing of the cross.

The cross is our end and

it is our beginning. It is our death to self, it is our death to

those human things, and it is our

resurrection. It is our birth, a resurrection

to life together, a resurrection to those divine things that God wants

for us. And so anything encouraging you, siblings in Christ,

to do less, those things

are not of God. Anything encouraging

you to other definitions of life, of happiness, of security,

of peace, those things

are of the adversary.

Anything less, make no mistake, anything less will

make you less,

and God has so much more

that he wants to give you.

Dear siblings in Christ, let the words of

this gospel rest on you this week. Take up

your cross for one another,

for this world, Lose your

life, and let's find it again together

and resurrected.