I was invited to speak at Forest Hill Community Church today, on an episode of my choice from the life of Peter. I chose Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Messiah in Matthew 16, looking at how come Peter got one thing so right and something else so wrong.
I used this to ask whether we are really open to changing our minds and admitting that we are wrong.
We started with a song from the 1980s by the bank Fat & Frantic:
The chorus goes like this:
It’s hard being right, it’s a burden on my heart
It’s hard being right, but I’ve been right from the start
It’s hard being right, but you simply must accept
That my point of view is unfailingly correct…
Of course this is a satirical song which plays on the idea that we think we’re reasonable people, and admitting when we’re mistaken and changing our mind is the right thing to do – we shouldn’t just go through life believing that “I’m right, and you’re wrong!”
But I think it’s a challenging question: When were you last wrong? When was I last wrong?
I don’t just mean, when did I last make a mistake, but when did I last become really convinced that I’d got something wrong, and that I had to change my mind and live with the consequences?
Maybe we’ll come back to that question, but have a think about it.
I love that you’re looking at the person of Peter in the New Testament. And I love this passage today – a very well known incident that can be seen as the turning point of Jesus’ ministry – a moment of revelation of who Jesus was and is.
I remember Nigel Wright speaking at Here for Good about the different interpretations of ‘on this rock I will build my church’ which are behind Catholic, Protestant, and Radical understandings of church. (I can lend you a book if you want to revise those.)
But as we’re focussed on Peter, how does this play out from his point of view?
In chapter 16 of Matthew, Jesus and his disciples come to Caesarea Philippi, which was away from Galilee, which has been the setting for Jesus’ ministry up to this point. Matthew doesn’t tell us why there were there, but maybe one advantage, for what was to follow, was that it was away from the crowds that followed Jesus wherever he went in Galilee.
Maybe this was important because it gave Jesus the opportunity to address their misunderstandings described in the preceding verses. In any event, it gave Jesus and the disciples a chance to breathe, to think, and to have a conversation.
And there is a big question that Jesus has for the disciples. Maybe he’s been mulling it over for a little while, looking for the right moment to ask it. I was walking with a friend a few weeks ago and had some particular news I wanted to share with him – as we walked across the Pennines I was looking for the right moment, which eventually came over dinner in the evening.
Maybe Jesus has been looking for the right moment too, and in the end he doesn’t go straight to it, but opens with a starter for 10: “Who do [other] people say the son of Man is?” There’s another whole question of what Jesus meant by using the phrase ‘son of Man’, but for now we can just note that this is a slightly roundabout Jesus uses to refer to himself – this is clear from the way the question is phrased in the other gospels, and from the follow up question which we’ll get to.
Quite possibly Jesus knew the answer to this question. People in the crowds that followed him must have been speculating all along about who this man might be, but it opens up the conversation. And the disciples come up with some ideas from Israel’s distant and no so distant past – John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, another prophet… You can feel the conversation heading off into the safe waters of a discussion about the relative merits of other people’s ideas.
But then comes Jesus’ Big Question: “But who do you say that I am?”
Now that’s much more difficult, much more personal. What are the disciples going to say? What is Peter going to say? How are they going to put into words the ideas and questions that must have been in their minds too? Jesus’ follow-up question suggests that none of the ideas they’ve come up with so far is correct, so what do they think?
Peter, the Galilean Jew, has been following this man Jesus since Jesus started his ministry. According to all four gospels Peter was one of the first disciples called, along with his brother Andrew – isn’t it interesting how little more we hear of Andrew? I wonder how Andrew felt about Peter’s prominence in Jesus’ ministry, and in the early church. Which of them was the older brother? I don’t think we know. But all that’s another subject for another time…
Since his call by Jesus, Peter has seen Jesus do some remarkable things (flick back through the earlier chapter of Matthew to see)…
- He’d been right there for the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus picked up the Old Testament law, gave it a good shake, and expressed it in new terms for a new kingdom (there’s more to the Sermon on the Mount than that, but that’s my summary for this morning)
- Peter had Jesus come into his own house, and maybe that was where Jesus lived some of the time. On one occasion, Peter’s mother-in-law had been ill with a fever and Jesus had healed her.
- Not only had Jesus shown authority over sickness, he’d also taken authority over creation and stilled the storm, and over demons and evil spirits by casting ‘Legion’ into a herd of pigs.
- Jesus had even shown authority over death itself by raising the synagogue’s leader back to life.
- Jesus had not only had the disciples follow him and see what he was doing, but he’d sent them out to share the kingdom project that he was about.
- Peter and the others had seen Jesus challenge the religious leaders and their assumptions and practices in pretty radical, revolutionary ways – Jesus had even claimed the right and authority to forgive sins!
- And Jesus had also challenged the Roman rule over the land of Israel and its people.
On the basis of all of this, and his understanding of the Jewish scriptures, Peter formulates an answer. Could it be that everything that Jesus has been doing and saying, and the way he has interacted with people, points to him being a figure long promised in the Jewish scriptures and hoped for by the people?
The scriptures promised a Messiah – one anointed by God to bring freedom to God’s people. There were quite a lot of different ideas around about what the Messiah would actually be, but there was a widespread expectation and hope that he was coming.
So Peter, known for speaking out when others wouldn’t (and perhaps sometimes he shouldn’t) formulates an answer to Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am?”
It’s easy to see this as Peter’s well-worked declaration of his conviction about Jesus (and that’s often how it’s put in the headings added to our translations), but I wonder if that’s how it played out. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I feel like I don’t know what I think about something until I talk about it with someone else – that process of conversation and having to put thoughts into words crystallises those thoughts and ideas. So maybe Peter’s response was a much more timid, “You are the Christ, the son of the living God?”
However he expresses it, he’s right! At least on this occasion Peter is correct! On other occasions that perhaps we know about, Peter opens his mouth and puts his foot in it, but this time his foot stays where it should be.
“Yes!” says Jesus, “you’re right!” And then I wonder what Peter made of what Jesus said about him. First, he calls him Simon, and says he’s blessed, he’s in the right place with God.
And then he says, “You are Peter” – the only time in Matthew’s gospel that Jesus addresses him as Peter – and this kind of reflects what Peter said about Jesus. “You are the Messiah” – “You are Peter”, and both are significant.
“You are Rocky (Petros), and on this rock (Petra) I will build my church!” Whatever we make of Jesus’ play on words, it must have been clear to Peter that Jesus thought he had some significant role to play in the future of the kingdom that Jesus was bringing in. He’d got something right about who Jesus was, and Jesus needed that sort of person.
And then, famously, it all goes a bit wrong again for Peter. “From that time on…” Matthew tells us, “Jesus began to show his disciples that he must … undergo great suffering … and be killed … and on the third day be raised.” They all know now that Jesus is the Messiah, and here Jesus is explaining how that is going to work out. The challenge he has been making to the various authorities, and the anger this has provoked, will come to fruition in Jesus’ suffering and death.
But that’s not what Peter meant! That’s not the sort of Messiah that Peter had in mind – all those miracles and teaching that revealed things from God surely meant that Jesus was going to bring down the ungodly authorities and set up the kingdom of God in their place. Not that they would triumph over him!
And so Peter, perhaps made bolder by the affirmation he’s just had from Jesus, takes Jesus aside and rebukes him – “This must never happen to you!”
“Get behind me Satan!” Wow, strong words from Jesus which must have taken Peter aback. What’s going on?
Do you remember that Jesus has already been tempted or tested by Satan in the desert at the start of his ministry? (ch.4). That included a temptation to avoid the path of suffering and to become Lord of the world by another, ‘easier’ route. We know that a big part of Jesus would have loved there to be another way than to suffer and die – that’s what he was praying for in the Garden of Gethsemane just before he was arrested (ch.26). But he knew he had to resist that temptation at the start of his ministry, and in the Garden he concluded by praying, “Not my will, but yours”.
Here, Peter is offering the same temptation – there must be a way to avoid all that suffering. And Jesus knows that he must resist it strongly, and that ultimately that temptation comes from Satan.
So there is Peter – so right, and yet so wrong! How can this be?
Maybe you’ve already noticed in the text – when Peter declares that Jesus is the Messiah, Jesus says, “flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.” And when Jesus rebukes Peter, he says, “you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
When Peter is hearing God’s revelation he is right. But when he works simply on a human basis, he gets it wrong.
All of which brings us back to our opening question – when was the last time you were wrong? When was the last time I was wrong? And why?
As, I think, Oliver Cromwell may have said, “Is it possible that you are mistaken?” – that’s a useful question to keep in mind.
Peter had got some revelation from God, but his ideas went off beam when he started to think things through from a purely human point of view. This is not to say that we shouldn’t use our God-given minds to think, but that we need to check our conclusions against the revelation of God that we see in Jesus.
The continuing story of Peter shows that he continued to receive God’s revelation and he continued to have to change his mind – maybe Peter was more willing than we are sometimes to change his mind.
In the next chapter of Matthew we read about the Transfiguration of Jesus, where Peter receives another revelation from God: “This is my Son, the Beloved, with him I am well pleased; listen to him!”
At the Last Supper, Peter does not want Jesus to wash his feet, but then changes his mind to want his whole body washed, and then (with further explanation) understands why only his feet are necessary.
In the early days of the church it’s Peter we see responding to the revelation of the Spirit’s power at Pentecost to interpret it for the crowd. Later, he sees a vision of unclean animals in a sheet, and he responds to the vision by changing his understanding of who the gospel is for – its’ for Gentiles as well as Jews.
Peter has learnt, by his experience with Jesus, to be open to the revelation of God, and to the correction that that can bring. How open are we to realising that we might not have got everything quite right?!
My prayer is that we will all be open to the revelation of God, even if that challenges our own ideas, that we will see potentially surprising ways that Jesus wants to be Messiah and Lord of our lives, and the king of the kingdom of God. Surprising to us, if not to him!
And that, with Peter, we are able to declare that Jesus is the Anointed Son of God, and be a person that Jesus can still use to build his church.
Amen.