Near the center of Mark, right between Peter’s affirmation of Jesus as the Christ and the Transfiguration, Jesus calls Peter “Satan.” The disciple goes from being the first proclaimer of the gospel to an ally of the devil in a single conversation. Peter clumsily bumped into a battle in which God's salvation or his shame are at stake. Into the center of things, where redemption is hazarded. Let’s read it.
Mark 8:31-38
And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again. And he said this plainly.
And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.
But turning and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.”
And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? For what can a man give in return for his life? For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”
So here's the question: How did Peter find himself standing on the line between heaven and hell?
In order to answer the question, we need to make our way back through the book to see how Mark set this conflict up. Up to this point in the book, he has been cataloguing the slow progress of Christ's self-revelation. Various answers to the question "who is Jesus?" dominate the main dramatic movements of the first half of the book.
Mark, of course, hasn't held us in suspense. We know who Jesus is from the start. The book's first sentence is, "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God," and Mark follows it quickly with the Father's proclamation of that blessed Sonship at Jesus' baptism: "You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased."
Yet notice that Mark doesn't let anyone else in on the answer. Even when the Father's voice booms down from clouds, Mark doesn't mention that anyone heard it but Christ alone. In this book, by the time Jesus starts his ministry, it's not clear that anyone in Israel has the slightest idea who he is.
And that's where the quirkiness begins. For the next seven chapters, Jesus devotes himself to healing people, to calling people, to teaching people, and also to making sure that no one tells others who he really is. Which is weird. He just doesn't want people to find the answer that way. As he casts them out, demon after demon shouts the news of Jesus' divine Sonship as if that was the worst mischief they could do, and time after time, Jesus tells them to be silent. "He strictly ordered them not to make him known."
At the end of chapter four, his disciples, baffled, are asking, "Who, then, is this?" By the middle of chapter six, we find out that there's a big debate among the political and religious elites: "Is he John the Baptist, raised from the dead? Is he Elijah, come to announce the Messiah? Is he a new prophet, like the prophets of old?"
And in the meantime, while all this wondering and bafflement is going on, Jesus is wandering around silencing the people and the demons who know who he is.
Because of this, I think it's fair to say that the whole book of Mark hinges on the questions, "Who is Jesus?" and "How does he want people to come to know him?"
It turns out that he wanted people to discover who he is by being around him and learning it wordlessly. He didn't want to begin his self-revelation with an interview; he wanted to begin with a relationship. He wanted people who would look to him, remove their expectations and prejudices, and take him as he is. That's why even his closest disciples aren't told who he is until they discover it for themselves.
That moment of discovery also comes in Mark 8, right before the beginning of today's passage. For the first time, Christ has clearly and openly acknowledged his Messianic role to his closest disciples. When Jesus asked him, Peter guessed correctly. He got the right answer. A+. And he's right to be excited.
But Peter made a big mistake. Flushed with the joy of Christ's unique confirmation of his hopes, and living in a new assurance of his knowledge of God, ("He's the Christ! He's the Messiah!") he began jumping to conclusions that surpassed Jesus' revelation.
He thought (as the disciples would continue to think until Jesus' betrayal and death), "1) He is the Christ, so he is the King who will sit on David's throne. 2) He is the King who will sit on David's throne, so he will overthrow the Romans and Herodians and reign in glory (with the twelve of us at his hand). 3) He will overthrow the Romans and Herodians and reign in glory, so he cannot be put to death by them."
And he was wrong.
But having that idea wasn't Peter's big mistake. There’s no harm in making pious guesses like that one. In fact, Jesus seems to expect his followers to be making pious guesses all the time. How could Peter have said "You are the Christ," when Jesus asked him, unless he had been making guesses all along?
No, Peter's mistake wasn't to guess that Jesus couldn't die, it was to insist that Jesus conform to his guess. When Jesus started acting and speaking in a way that seemed to disagree with Peter's theories, he decided to tell Jesus to change instead of revising his ideas.
He made the mistake of the foolish college student who thinks that learning one aspect of their major well entitles him to claim mastery of the whole field. Or the student who imagines she's an accomplished biblical scholar after one good paper on the gospel of John. Peter used the fact that he had been right once to assume that he would be right again.
And that is a really big mistake, especially when it's about a person. It's the sort of mistake that ruins friendships and marriages all the time. When you tell a friend or spouse through your words or your actions, "I don't want you, I want my explanation of you," or "I want my idealized image of you (which you, by the way, don't quite live up to)," or "I want my assumptions about your motivations, not your real soul," you're on a path to massive misunderstandings and to quiet, persistent emotional abuse.
We all know what this is like: as soon as someone decides they "completely get" us and stops trying to understand us better, you can be pretty sure they'll begin making mistakes that hurt.
And if this kind of mistake is disastrous when it's applied to our friends, how much more disastrous when we apply it to the Son of God. This is the big mistake that Jesus corrects when he turns to rebuke Peter.
But, let's be frank: Jesus' rebuke remains startling, unprecedented, curt, and strong.
"Get behind me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man."
Why is he so abrasive? Why would he call Peter "Satan?"
Jesus isn't just having a crazy freak-out moment. Starting with this startling rebuke, and continuing through the end of the passage, He's taking pains to say that "this right here, this simple little thing that everyone does, this marks the boundary between heaven and hell." Everything comes down to whether we will try to learn who Christ is from him (:31), or try to teach him who we think he ought to be (:32); to whether we will accept his shame (:34), or be ashamed of him (:38); to whether we will follow him (:34), or rebuke him (:32).
It is Satan who tries to teach God who He ought to be. It's Satan who is ashamed of Christ. It's Satan who rebukes Him. And that is what Peter, unwittingly but willfully, did too.
Christ says, "Get behind me." (:33) "Come after me." (:34) "Follow me." (1:17, 2:14)
In the end, this will be everyone's choice: whether they will accept God as He is, often despite their plans and expectations, or try to invent the god whom they want. Those who choose the former will save their lives. Those who choose the latter will be self-subjected to the standards they tried to impress on Christ: because they are under God, they will find themselves under the shame that they held higher than God. (:38)
This, friends, is what it means to believe in Christ. This is what it means to have faith in him. This total subjection to our good God that Christ made possible is the only key to everlasting peace. (Rom 4: 13-25)
Like Abram, we must fall on our faces and be taught everything (Gen 17:3), even what our own name is. "No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham." (Gen 17:5)
We must listen to the Psalmist. "Stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel!" (Ps 22:23)
Like Abraham, we must become people of whom it could be said, "No unbelief made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised." (Rom 4:20-21)
Unless, in the end, you are willing to follow Christ as he is, not as you want him to be, into any privation or suffering, abandoning any closely-held concepts of yourself, the world, and your God for the sake of His truth, unless you are willing to patiently, trustingly wait for however long the good, good God sees fit to bring his salvation, unless you are willing to let him teach you who he is, you will not be with him. That's what a personal relationship with Jesus or with anybody means: it means committing yourself to loving them as they are. You are saved by having a personal relationship with Jesus, with the Jesus who leads you through the necessary sufferings of the cross. Be behind Jesus. Imitate Him, and learn from Him.
This is something everyone must choose ultimately, and it is also something we must choose daily. Like Peter, we could at any time stumble into a place where we might pick our desires or ideas of who God should be instead of loving God himself. Friends, keep your eyes fixed on the things of God, not on the things of man.
We must always be seeking, seeking, seeking God's will and God's revelation, never content with our own desires or our own intellectual systems, never content with our idea of ourselves, or our idea of God, until He Himself reveals His truth to us.
And, friends, he will reveal it, if you will seek. "Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you." The very next passage in the gospel of Mark, and the center point of the whole book, is Jesus' transfiguration, when Moses and Elijah, the Law and the Prophets, attend him, and God the Father declares again in glory, "This is my beloved Son."
Then he turns to us, and God, our Father, says, "Listen to him."