Rock to Satan

Calling St Peter names

One minute, Our Lord calls Peter the Rock on whom His Church will be founded (Mt 16:18); five verses later, He calls him Satan (Mt 16:23). Why? Because, says the Lord, the way Peter thinks is not God’s way, but man’s.

People keep getting the wrong idea about Jesus. When John the Baptist tried to refuse to baptise Him, that was human thinking, not God’s. Later, when Peter tries to refuse letting Jesus wash his feet, that will be human thinking, not God’s. And now, when Peter tries to stop Jesus from suffering and dying, that too is human thinking, not God’s. In human thinking, the great and good should be served, not serve others. In human thinking, suffering is something to avoid, not to embrace.

But human wisdom is shamed by the folly of the Cross. For it is in the Cross that we see who Jesus really is, and so who God really is. Peter saw so much, but at this moment, exposed how little he really understood. He saw that Jesus was the Messiah and Son of God, and that profession of faith constitutes the solid Rock on which the Church is founded. Yet he failed to understand what the Messiah’s sonship of God really entailed. He failed to see that the Messiah, according to the Scriptures, notably the famous motif of Isaiah 53, had to serve, to suffer and to die.

The chief of the Apostles knew who Jesus was, but failed to know what He must do. And to err is only human. But what makes Peter’s failure more than merely human is that failure to know Christ is failure to know God; and since the knowledge of God is the highest knowledge to which humans can attain, and indeed prerequisite to union with God, which is the ultimate aim of humanity, extreme though Our Lord’s injunction sounds, any obstacle to that aim can rightly be called “Satanic.”

Satan, according to St John Chrysostom, did not want Our Lord to suffer and die. The old serpent knew that biting the Lord’s heel, for all the satisfaction of spreading his poison throughout humanity, would ultimately result in his own head getting crushed. How much better for the Devil if the Lord had called in hosts of angels to whisk Him away from danger, or simply retired to the countryside to live a peaceful life! For then His work would not have been accomplished, and Satan would still be the undisputed prince of this world.

But that is the human way of thinking, not God’s, and we think that way still. When we think that since Jesus bore the Cross, we do not need to; that since Jesus suffered, we will leave in peace and safety; that since Jesus served, we can be masters – all this is human thinking, not God’s, and leads to precisely the spiritual torpor on which the Enemy thrives.

The sign of the Cross is the sign of our reliance on God, but also of our cooperation with Him. It is the sign of self-renunciation, the ancient Way we have inherited from the Apostles. That is why many of us make the Sign of the Cross so often, on great occasions or small: in worship, when we bless those to be baptised, when we begin and end our prayers, when we invoke the Holy Trinity or bow before the Blessed Sacrament; but also in our homes when we eat or in our cars when we are about to set out on a journey. We make the Sign of the Cross to invoke God’s blessing, but also to conform our behaviour to that sign, again in both great things and small: by giving without counting the cost, or by making ourselves smaller that those around us might grow.

Faith without works is dead. It is not enough merely to believe with Peter that Christ is Son of God and Messiah. We must also walk the Way he and all the Apostles walked. For, as Our Lord concludes, when He comes in the glory of His Father, He will reward each one of us according to our deeds. So, before we receive the Blessed Sacrament this week, let us recall Whom it is that we are receiving, and examine our souls to ensure that we are conformed to God’s way, not man’s, and do not receive so great a Guest unworthily.