Peter’s Test

The time and culture of the Bible is the time and culture which God chose

“Get thee behind me, Satan: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men.” (Mk 8:33)

St Peter, the Rock and chief of the Apostles – and Our Lord calls him “Satan.”

St Peter, who represents all the Apostles and their successors, every bishop of the Church from his time to our own – reprimanded for putting human concerns above divine ones, for thinking his plan is better than God’s.

St Peter, who has just heard the prophecies of Scripture, the words given to the prophets, expounded by the Incarnate Word Himself – “that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again” (Mark 8:31) – and yet fails the test of trust in God.

Peter’s excuse is love: love for the Lord he does not want to see die. But Jesus’ idea of love, that is, God’s idea of love, is different from Peter’s merely human idea of love: as Our Lord said to His disciples, “he that hath My commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth Me” (John 14:21). Trustful obedience, a willingness to sacrifice what is most dear to you, is the love the Word of God demands.

But this is not the first time the Word of God had tested a leader of his people so severely. We must always remember that the Word of God Incarnate in Christ is none other than the Word who appeared and spoke to the prophets and patriarchs. There is no division between the God of the Old Testament and the New. And so the Word who spoke to St Peter is the same Word who spoke, as the Angel of the Lord, to Abraham, and put him to the most extreme test:

“Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.” (Gen 22:2)

To be clear, God asked this of Abraham already knowing the result, and knowing that Abraham would obey. But it is a strange test, apparently contradicting what God had promised: seed as great in number and glory as the stars of the sky (Gen 15:5). But instead of trusting in God’s promise, Abraham conspired with his wife Sarah to expedite God’s plan by mating with her handmaid, Hagar. Sarah herself laughed at God’s promise, but that laugher soon gave name to the fulfilment of that promise in her own first-born son, Isaac. This Isaac was to father the many nations God had ordained of Abraham’s line: and now, God calls for his sacrifice.

On the third day – note the significance of that timescale – Abraham obeys. Yet it is the child Isaac’s faith which proves the stronger. When they reach the hilltop, at first he questions: “Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” (Gen 22:7). But when he is bound hand and foot, he says nothing. As Isaiah would later prophesy, “He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth” (Isa 53:7). So the son of Abraham proves a type of the Son of God, who calls his followers to trust like children and to take up our cross.

The Angel of God calls out and stops Abraham’s hand. We know that this Angel was the Lord Himself, the Word of God, because after the event, Abraham names the place of the sacrifice Jehovah-jireh, “God has appeared.” So, Isaac’s life is saved by the very same Word of God who will one day give his life on the Cross for the salvation of all who trust in Him. For through that Word, born a man of the seed of Abraham, people of “many nations” are grafted into Abraham’s line, God’s chosen people. Though not their kin by blood, we are adopted as heirs of God’s promise by faith.

Both Abraham’s and Peter’s tests are tests of faith, teaching them to put their trust in the promises of God’s Word rather than their own human calculations. This is why the Lord’s rebuke to St Peter is so strongly worded – “Get thee behind me, Satan” – because undoing humans’ trust in God has been Satan’s work since Eden.

Where do we, God’s church, put our trust today? Do we trust in the Word of God, Incarnate and revealed in Scripture, or in the words of men?

Some will object that the Bible is a product of its time and culture. Really, what God should have chosen was to be Incarnate in our time, as a twenty-first century American or Briton or Japanese, sharing our enlightened values. Perhaps we think God’s Word is relativised by the context of the age and the people, his chosen people, the Jews whom He chose to bear that Word and to proclaim it. Perhaps we try to distance ourselves from God’s decision to be born a Jew. If so, we might reflect on some of the historical ramifications of that distancing, and tremble. The time and culture of the Bible is the time and culture which God chose.

Or do we think that Jesus, God Incarnate, was a slave to convention, unable to shake off the chains of ancient patriarchy, so that we can disregard his less comfortable teachings? That would be both a theological and historical error: theological, because He is God, and his humanity does not compromise his divinity; historical, because the records we have of Him suggest no such moral cowardice. A friend to Samaritans, defender of an adulteress from stoning, healer of lepers, Jesus was hardly afraid to confront the prejudices of his day.

Perhaps we think that we know more about love than God does, and that our modern human understanding can justify disobedience and distrust in his promises. St Peter thought so, too. He learned a better way. But to learn, he had first to err. And if the chief of the Apostles can err, we should not be surprised when the church and her leaders, even the highest of the bishops who succeed him, should also err, savouring “not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men.”

At such times, there are two things to remember.

First, the church is not a democracy. We live in communion with the patriarchs, prophets, apostles and saints in heaven, a cloud of witnesses who far outnumber the church on earth, and who far outweigh us in glory. No local church has the authority to outvote the witness of the saints to the promises of God which has been preserved ubique, semper et ab omnibus. The test of trust in any teaching is whether it conforms to the faith Our Lord bequeathed to the Apostles, recorded in Scripture and passed on by the saints throughout the history of the Church. This, not a majority vote in any synod, is what constitutes the sensus fidelium. If we fail this test, we divide the Church; and the work of division is not the work of God, but of the Divider, the Diabolos, who wants to rupture God’s house with the same divisions his own house endures.

And second, God does not change. God is eternally at unity in His three-personed self. The Spirit moves where it wills, but never wills to contradict the Word. The spirit of division is not the Spirit of God, but the spirit of this world. The Church should therefore be instinctively suspicious of innovations, even (perhaps especially) if the messenger who suggests them looks like an angel of light. If we cannot repose in God’s changelessness, we have no repose at all. We offer the world no peace, but just more of the same destabilising chaos.

Anglicans may be heartened by the sixth of the 39 Articles, which makes it clear that the church has no authority to demand assent to anything which cannot be proven by Scripture: “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith.” Indeed, according to Article 20, “it is not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary to God's Word written, neither may it so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another.” Should we find the leaders of our churches so doing, the greatest act of loyalty we can pay them, as successors of the apostles, is to challenge them. After all, even St Peter was tested by the Word of God. Ultimately, he repented and proved true.

But it’s not just bishops who need testing by God’s Word. We all do. So, as we approach the Sacrament of Unity in our fractured church, we would do well to mark Our Lord’s words before we receive Communion, and be sure that we do not eat and drink to our condemnation:

“Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation; of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” (Mk 8:38)