Matthew 16:21-28
September 3, 2023
It is late in the second half of the
musical, Hamilton, and the tension on the stage and in those of us
watching is sky high. A song begins. What has happened before this moment has
broken the hearts of Alexander and Eliza Hamilton. It has broken the hearts of
those of us watching.
The song is It’s Quiet Uptown.
The Hamilton’s have moved uptown where it is, according to the song, quieter,
maybe a little more peaceful. They have relocated because Alexander Hamilton
has revealed publicly that he has been unfaithful to his wife, Eliza. That was
heartbreaking enough, but their oldest son, Philip, has just been killed in a
duel defending his father’s honor. And it is in this song that we feel the
fullness of this grief.
“There are moments that the words don’t reach. There is
suffering too terrible to name.
You hold your child as tight as you can and push away the
unimaginable.
The moments when you’re in so deep It feels easier to just
swim down. The Hamiltons move uptown and learn to live with the unimaginable.”
It is a beautiful and heartbreaking
song. I suspect all of us could name some loss that seems unimaginable, even a
fear of loss that we think we cannot wrap our imaginations around. We claim our
feared loss is unimaginable, not because we can’t actually imagine it, but
because we don’t want to. It is unimaginable because imagining it is too much
to bear.
I wonder if this is how Peter felt
when he heard Jesus speak of what it meant to be Messiah. I wonder if Peter
could imagine Jesus’ words being true. Maybe he could imagine them too well,
too vividly. And that’s the reason he began rebuke Jesus for what Jesus was
saying. He could imagine the Messiah going through what Jesus was telling them
the Messiah must go through. But Peter didn’t want to imagine it. He couldn’t
bear to imagine it. To imagine what Jesus was telling them was true was to
overturn his every belief in what the Messiah should be and do. Maybe Peter
could imagine it, but he didn’t want to, he couldn’t bear to, he refused to
imagine. He refused to hear Jesus, believe Jesus.
From building rock to stumbling
block, Peter traverses at lightning speed the distance between being praised
for his confession of Jesus’ true identity as Messiah to being rebuked by Jesus
as the embodiment of Satan when he failed or refused to grasp what Jesus was
telling him about the true meaning of Messiah.
Surely, it wouldn’t take much
imagination to understand what Jesus is saying. Jesus is not just hinting at
what may happen, possibly, if he continues his current trajectory. Jesus is not
speaking in riddles. Jesus is not giving the disciples clues to a word puzzle
they must decipher. No, Jesus tells them plainly, from that time on that he
must go to Jerusalem. Once in Jerusalem, he must undergo great suffering at the
hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and that suffering will lead
to him being killed, and on the third day after he is killed, he will be
raised.
Say what?!
Peter cannot believe what he is
hearing! He has just told Jesus that he is the Messiah, the Son of the Living
God, and Jesus told him that he was correct. Jesus told him that God worked
through Peter to reveal that truth. Jesus told him that he will be the rock on
which his church will be built. But now Jesus is saying terrible things about
going to Jerusalem and suffering and dying and something about rising again,
which makes no sense, because dead is dead.
I can imagine how Peter must have
looked at hearing these words. He must have become agitated, shaking his head,
clenching his fists. Maybe he squeezed his eyes tightly shut, as though he
could force the words Jesus spoke not to take shape in his mind if he
didn’t see Jesus with his eyes. I imagine there was something like a roaring
sound in Peter’s ears; wave after wave of denial. It’s not true,
nottruenottruenottruenottrue. Then an even greater wave of anger and fury
rushes over him. What Jesus is telling us cannot be true. What Jesus is telling
us will not be true!
No! No, Jesus! No, no, no, no, no!
Stop saying these things. Stop
saying these words. You are the Messiah. I just said it. I just confessed it.
You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. I said living God? Living not
dying, not dead. The Messiah is not supposed to suffer. The Messiah is supposed
to make our enemies suffer. The Messiah is not supposed to die. The Messiah is
supposed to put our enemies, the ones who have oppressed us for so long, to the
sword. No, Jesus, no!
“God forbid it, Lord! This must
never happen to you.”
But Jesus is not messing around, He
is not playing games. He is not trying to make them guess what will happen
next. He is trying to make them understand, to see, to imagine the full truth
of what it means to really be the Messiah.
“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.”
From building rock to stumbling
block. The Greek word for stumbling block is skandalon. It is a deadly
snare, a moral trap. Can you hear the word in English that we get from this?
Scandal. What Peter said was scandalous. Jesus rebukes Peter just as Peter
rebuked him, and he calls him a skandalon. By refusing to imagine, by
seeing what the Messiah must be as unimaginable, Peter is not only something
that will trip up others, but he will also serve as a deadly snare that will
misdirect others to his wrong way of thinking. Peter can only see human things.
He cannot see divine things. And in this instance, the divine things are what
we as humans most dread: suffering and death.
But this was not the end of Jesus’
rebuke. Listen, he told the disciples,
“If any want to become my followers,
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?”
This is finally where the rubber
hits the road. This is finally where the disciples must come to grips with the
fact that if they truly want to follow Jesus, if they truly want to learn from
him and walk in his steps and witness to his message of the kingdom of God,
then their fates are inextricably bound with his own. He will go to the cross
and sacrifice his life for the children of God, and they are going to have to
deny themselves and pick up their own crosses and do the same. You want to save
your life, Jesus tells them, then you’ll end up losing it. But if you are willing
to lose your life, you will end up having more life than you could have ever
dreamed of. You could turn away from me now and gain the whole world, but in
the end, you will forfeit your everything. Can you imagine it?
Can you imagine that these are the divine things I am speaking of?
Peter,
the building rock, was focusing only on human things. He could not grasp that
the Messiah had finally come, only to be told that the Messiah would ultimately
die. He could not, would not imagine that life would come from death, that
resurrection would come from a cross. He could not, would not imagine that in
denying himself and picking up his cross, he would gain everything. Jesus may
have predicted that Peter would be a stumbling block, a skandalon, to
others, but in this moment, he was equally a stumbling block to himself. My
question is, are we our own worst stumbling blocks as well?
Like
Peter, I don’t want to hear words about death or denial or suffering. I don’t
want to be reminded that to truly follow Jesus, I have to pick up my own cross
and bear its weight. I just don’t. I want to hear about happy things and words
that are filled with sweetness and light. I can imagine the other, I just don’t
want to. That is a skandalon. That is a stumbling block.
This
dramatic scene between Jesus and Peter and the other disciples is not the first
time that Jesus has shown his true self. Jesus has been showing them his true
nature all along. They have seen it in his healing of so many people, in his
teaching and preaching, in his willingness to sit at table with people no
respectable rabbi would ever dine with. They have seen it in his willingness to
speak truth to power, and to buck the letter of the Law so that the spirit of
the Law can be fulfilled. They have seen Jesus walk on water and still storms.
These were not parlor tricks. These were not done just to get their attention.
Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. And because Jesus is the
Messiah, that means that everything he has said and everything he has done, and
everything he will say and do, is about revealing what the divine things truly
are. He has been stretching the disciples’ imagination all along. The kingdom
is already here, in your midst, he’s told them. Can you imagine it?
The
kingdom of God is not based on human values of success, it is based on love,
God’s love. Love that is a verb not a noun. Love that does the hard work of
truly loving others, even the ones who are the most other of all others
possible. God’s kingdom is based on compassion and mindfulness and making sure
that everyone is fed, and everyone has enough. God’s kingdom is where the meek
and the poor and the mourning are blessed and loved and comforted.
Can
you imagine it?
The
kingdom of God is where both justice and mercy reign. It is where
righteousness, not self-righteousness, abides. The kingdom of God is not where
the oppressors finally make room at the table for the oppressed, but where a
whole new table is created for everyone. The kingdom of God is where the
abundance of God and God’s love and grace and mercy is finally understood and
realized. Can you imagine it? Can we imagine it?
Jesus’
words are good news. Because they call us to imagine what the world might look
like if we did what he said we must do: deny ourselves and pick up our crosses.
Jesus calls us to imagine beyond the suffering and death, beyond our belief
that the kingdom is only found on another plane of existence, and to see it
right here and right now. Can we finally imagine these divine things? Can we
imagine?
There
is a final verse to the song, Its Quiet Uptown, that does not erase the
heartbreak of the unimaginable, but that offers hope in the midst of it.
“There are moments that the words don’t reach, there’s a
grace too powerful to name. We push away what we can never understand. We push
away the unimaginable. They are standing in the garden, Alexander by Eliza’s
side. She takes his hand. It’s quiet uptown.
Forgiveness. Can you imagine? Forgiveness. Can you imagine?”
Can we imagine?
Let all of God’s children say,
“Alleluia.”
Amen.
