Only six verses earlier this same man received the highest commendation anyone gets in the whole Gospel. Jesus called Peter blessed and promised to build his church on the confession he had just made. Now Jesus says to him, 23"Get behind me, Satan!" When Peter confessed Jesus as the Christ, he was speaking words the Father had given him. When Peter rebukes Jesus for predicting the cross, he is speaking for himself, and Jesus names whose agenda that serves.
Look at what triggers it. Jesus finally tells the disciples plainly what is coming, suffering, rejection, death, and resurrection on the third day. Peter hears the first three and apparently stops listening. Nothing in his reply suggests that he registered the resurrection at all. 22"Far be it from you, Lord! This shall never happen to you." He means it kindly. He loves Jesus and cannot bear the thought of losing him, and that is exactly what makes it dangerous. Jesus faced this same temptation in the wilderness, a kingdom without a cross, offered by the devil himself. Now it comes wrapped in a friend's concern.
23"You are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man." Peter is thinking as any of us naturally think, comfort over cost and safety over suffering. This is ordinary human instinct, and Jesus names it for what it is here, 23"a hindrance to me," a stumbling block set squarely in front of the mission he came to accomplish. Whether Peter is a rock or a stumbling block at any given moment depends on whether his mind is set on what God has revealed or on what feels reasonable to a frightened man who loves his teacher.
Then Jesus turns the private rebuke into a public call. 24"If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me." No one hearing that could take "cross" as a figure for minor inconvenience. It meant the walk toward execution, carried out in public and reserved for the worst criminals the empire could find. Jesus is asking his followers to treat their claim on their own lives as already surrendered, the same surrender he is walking toward himself.
That is why Jesus' next saying is hard. Every ordinary instinct runs the other way, protect yourself, hold on, keep what is yours. Jesus says that instinct, followed to its natural end, is how a life gets lost for good. The only way to keep what matters most is to hand it over first.
Peter will learn this the hard way, more than once. He will insist he would never fall away and then deny Jesus three times before the rooster finishes crowing (Matthew 26:69-75). The man who could not accept a suffering Messiah here will later write to suffering Christians that they should rejoice as they share Christ's sufferings (1 Peter 4:13). What moved him from one to the other was failing badly enough to stop trusting himself.
Ask where your own mind is set this week, on comfort or on the cross. Then find the thing you are clutching most tightly and ask what it would mean to give it to Christ first.
Prayer
Father, we have been Peter more often than we would like to admit, loving you sincerely while trying to talk you out of the cost of following you. Show us the moments when our comfort has started speaking for the enemy while sounding like common sense. Give us grace to lose what we clutch too tightly, trusting that losing it for your sake is how we keep it. In Jesus' name, amen.