Matthew 16:21-28 Commentary

How quickly being a “rock” can make you a stumbling block. Peter learns the very hard lesson that some of us also need to hear: just because someone tells you that you’re their rock doesn’t mean you get to tell them what to do with their life.

Granted, last week Jesus didn’t mean that Peter was “his rock” the way we mean it when we’re thanking someone for being strong and steadfast for us. Yes, Peter could have been a great comfort and a worthy companion for Jesus on his journey of suffering, but Jesus merely meant that he would use Peter to build Jesus’s church.

It is quite possible, though, that Peter heard Jesus’s blessing and wanted to rise to the calling. As he hears Jesus carefully and purposefully tell him and the other disciples about the suffering that’s coming, Peter’s idea of helping is to tell Jesus to knock off the melancholy—God has blessed him and won’t let such an awful fate befall him! In his head, Peter’s thinking, “You’re the Messiah, for crying out loud! You’re not going to lose. What you’re saying is the opposite of what we all know to be true!”

It’s quite possible that the English translations you’re reading have both Jesus and Peter talking about what “must” happen/not happen. In the Greek, it’s different, though. Peter uses a double negative (ou mē) whereas Jesus uses the word dei, which actually means “to be under necessity of happening” (BDAG) Theologically, dei signals that the will of God is making something happen. Jesus is talking about what God has willed to happen, and Peter is talking about what he emphatically feels shouldn’t happen.

In one sense, we really can’t blame or look down upon Peter for caring enough to not want Jesus to go through all of the awfulness Jesus is explaining to them. Jesus is honest about going to Jerusalem to suffer and be killed. And yes, Jesus says that he will also “be raised” but how thorough is Jesus in explaining what that means? Even when the moment actually did come, the disciples hadn’t put two-and-two together… But Peter’s desire to not see Jesus suffer has another motive: victory that would be easily recognized. Peter wants Jesus to win as the Messiah and he wants no one to doubt it.

It is for this false image of victory that Jesus rebukes Peter. Peter wants victory in the way that people, culture, and even the evil one has shaped its meaning: vanquishing and crushing one’s enemy so that there is no doubt of who is on top. For Jesus, Peter’s words ring back to the devil’s temptation (Matt 4.10), when the devil offered Jesus power over all the world if he but worshipped Satan. If Jesus listens to Peter now and goes against the will of God in order to annihilate the threat of his own suffering and take the easy way out, he would succumb to the tempter’s wager. No, Jesus must keep his own mind on the things of God and lead his disciples in doing the same.

Peter can stop being a stumbling block if he returns to his rightful place as a follower of Jesus Christ. This is what Jesus explains in the second half of our pericope. To be rocks of faith rather than stumbling blocks to the gospel, we must learn to live our lives for and like Jesus Christ. After all, the Great Commission tells us clearly that Jesus builds his church through discipleship (“Teaching them everything I have commanded you…”). And discipleship is most characterized by following, with the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ to the glory of God the Father (aka according to God’s will).

When Jesus describes those who choose to take up this task, he uses the present tense of “follow.” He is inviting Peter, and anyone else who wants to discover the true meaning of life, to continuously follow him. It is in the pattern of Jesus that we discover that path to true life. This will mean sacrifice and learning new models for what really matters; it will mean changing our views, lifestyles, and interactions so that we don’t run away from what is hard or uncomfortable or challenging, or provokes our fears. It will mean being honest about our experiences so that we can discern whether what we are enduring is the will of God or something else—whether we are losing something for the sake of Christ or acting selfishly for ourselves in some way.

The promise that Jesus gives us as his disciples is that what we do with these choices matter because he is returning. In a sort of slant version of what Peter was originally envisioning, Jesus will have world domination at the Second Coming, and our discipleship will be fulfilled in blessing and honour and glory. Or, we will learn on God’s judgement day that we pushed and pushed for the kind of life we thought we wanted, but that we never really had anything at all.

Textual Point

Verse 28 is a difficult one to understand. Scholars have named a number of different ways that Jesus may have meant that people alive then would see “the Son of coming in his kingdom.” Given the fact that no one has had a miraculous 2000-year (and counting) lifespan, what did Jesus mean? Four of the most common understandings is that Jesus meant some kingdom expressions that happened within the disciples’ lifetimes, such as (1) the Transfiguration; (2) Jesus’s resurrection, ascension, and Pentecost; (3) the subsequent expansion of the mission to the Gentiles; or (4) the destruction of Jerusalem, which was interpreted as a foreshadowing of future judgement.

Illustration Idea

The hit HBO show Succession ended with its fourth season in the spring of 2023. It chronicles the media and entertainment mogul Logan Roy and his adult children, sons Kendall and Roman and daughter Shiv (and to a lesser degree, son Connor). As the name of the show suggests, the show is about who will succeed Logan and run the family business. It’s a painful spectacle of excess (wealth, power, vindictiveness, childhood wounds, meanness, poor behaviour, the list goes on). Each character accepts such patterns as the way it must be “to gain the world.” Though there are some moments of hesitation, none of them are able to break the cycle. The show does not shy away from showing the (mostly) private moments of misery each of the siblings endures before they decide on their next backstabbing, swindling or duplicitous move, but they aren’t ever really able to forge a new path. Even the final scenes of the series, as the board meets to decide who will take over the company—and which feels a bit like a judgement scene as each board members casts a vote for or against Kendall Roy—leaves doubt in the viewer’s mind about Shiv Roy’s vote against him. Does she do it because she knows it will destroy him like it destroyed their dad and their family, or does she do it because her estranged husband will become the CEO and that’s the closest she can get to having power herself? Either way, every member of the Roy family is one who has gained the whole world but lost their life in the process. If they had not been disciples to the family patterns and family way of doing business, what kind of life might they have found?