Matthew 16:21-28 Commentary

From the highest of highs in their relationship with one another to a new low point, Peter goes from identifying and worshipping Jesus as the true Messiah to Jesus calling out Peter’s collusion with the devil. Jesus looks right at Peter as he tells to the evil one to shove off and quit trying to make Jesus back off his plan. To be sure, Jesus senses that the devil is using Peter’s heartfelt emotions and mindset to do his own dirty work.

It’s easy to understand that part of what Peter is upset about is the implications for himself and his fellow Jewish people if what Jesus is saying is true. The Messiah, whom Peter believes Jesus to be, is the one who was going to free them from their Roman captivity and re-establish them as a nation-state. The Messiah was a political saviour that needed to live and rule, not suffer and die! What king dies and is still able to protect his kingdom from its enemies?

It’s easy for us to see how Peter is getting it so wrong, but can we see where we too might be getting our image of Jesus and the kind of God he is dangerously wrong? The devil couldn’t trick Jesus into giving up, but we aren’t God and it’s a lot easier for us to fall for an image of the Saviour that our stumbles us away from the Jesus way.

This is why Jesus so quickly moves into teaching mode from rebuking mode. The disciples, especially Peter, are likely shocked by what they’ve just watched happen: their rabbi spoke in a way they have never heard him speak before. Jesus has not been hiding anything from them about what’s to come and now he’s made it very clear that they need to let go of any of the whispers and wonderings they’ve been keeping to themselves and accept what he’s showing them. Not only that, they need to embrace it for themselves. Contrary to what they might feel in this moment, Jesus didn’t just tell them the worst news they could have possibly heard, he’s told them the best. He’s told them what it takes to seize hold of eternity.

With God, in the Jesus Kingdom, eternity is found in the contradictions: a God who comes down and is with his people, a King who shows his power not with brute force but with sacrifice, the God-King willing to prove that death has lost its grip on reality.

To serve this God is to live in the contradictions ourselves: to lose our life in Jesus’s way so that we can save it, to lose our life so that we will actually find our meaning and purpose, to understand that all that the devil might whisper in our ear about how good it could (or should) be here on earth is a hollow promise that leaves us on an unending, torturous hamster wheel without any deeper meaning.

The thing that’s needed, no matter the case, is the larger vision that Jesus is constantly trying to give his disciples. Peter and his comrades had been living and breathing one narrow scope of redemption based on perhaps their most pressing need or collective pain point. It’s the sort of attitude that looks for the lynchpin—the pivot point—with the hope that if that one thing changed then a cascade of good things would follow. Of course, that’s not usually how it works—it’s a coping mechanism that, over time, becomes its own hamster wheel that keeps us stuck and unable to see the true opportunity for change that is right in front of us.

Jesus is a liberator, but he liberates much more than a political reality for one people in one area of the world in one point in history. Jesus liberates us from everything—the evil one included—that keeps us on hamster wheels of false thinking, theological ideas that are too small, and from gods made in our own minds or in our own images that lead to harmful and wasteful lives.

When he heard it, Peter said, “God forbid it!” But in Jesus’s suffering, death and resurrection, God forbids anything from stopping him. Amen.

Textual Point

Jesus uses the same word in verse 23 as he does in chapter 4 verse 10 to tell Satan to quit his game. So yes, the words are spoken to Peter and he needs to hear something important in them, but they are also spoken to the evil spirit trying to manipulate and wage his own war on the Messiah. This is more than Peter putting his foot in his mouth: this is the force of darkness trying to stop the power of love.

Illustration Idea

There’s a whole genre of communication devoted to exploring what you might say to the younger version of yourself. It predates Instagram and TikTok, but there’s no shortage of such videos online, hoping to help others on similar journeys know that they aren’t alone. Sometimes, the messages are sad and about unrealized dreams, other times they’re hopeful—about the end of a particularly hard season or a meaningful awakening or sense of freedom. Do you ever wonder what the Apostle Peter might have said to his ‘younger self’? For all the moments of folly or missteps, Peter becomes a powerful messenger of God’s story. How might Peter have looked back on this particular incident with Jesus? A good part of me thinks that he’d reflect on how he took it so personally in the moment but has come to realize that there were much bigger forces at work and how grateful he was that Jesus kept turning to him and pulling him along. I think he’d tell his younger self how important it is to really listen to what Jesus is saying here about being willing to lose life in order to gain it and how that means being open to changing your mind. And I think he’d talk about how, even if you do it imperfectly, the joy of doing it becomes the most awesome thing you could ever do with your life.