Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 30, 2020 – Jeremiah 20:7-9; Romans 12:1-2; Matthew 16:21-27

“Don’t you love farce? My fault, I fear. I thought that you’d want what I want. Sorry, my dear!” Those words are from A Little Night Music, a play by Stephen Sondheim, and the song is Send in the Clowns. Judy Collins had a fair sized hit with it, and Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand also have had successful recordings of it. 

I tell you that because it will help us to understand today’s reading. I asked two questions before the Gospel began. The first was, was St. Peter’s comment to Jesus - “God forbid anything should ever happen to you” – was that altruistic? We have to understand what was in Peter’s mind. Unfortunately, when we read this gospel, the translators have chosen to say in the line just before it, “You are the Christ, the son of the living God,” as we heard last week. And using the word “Christ” now makes us think it’s part of Jesus’ proper name. The correct translation should have been, “You are the anointed one, the son of the living God,” because that’s who Jesus was to many people, the promised savior who would throw off the yoke of Rome, and rescue the people from their military might. In last week’s gospel, that’s what Peter had told Jesus He was, and Jesus called him a rock.

Jesus’ answer to him today has another kind of rock in it. There’s a stumbling block, but it’s not really a stumbling block. In Greek there are two words for stones. Last week Jesus used the word for a great big block, a petron. Today He uses the word skandalon, from which we get the English word, scandal. A skandalon was a stone in the road, bigger than a pebble, something maybe hidden in the grass of your own lawn, that you trip over when you’re walking across the lawn because you don’t see it, but it’s big enough to catch you and make you fall. And so there’s a deliberate bi-play of words there in the story that we don’t get when we separate the story into two parts.

So, was Jesus’ response to Peter – “You’re not thinking as God does, but as human beings do” – was that a fair response? In the circumstance, yes, it was, because Jesus expected that Peter would be tuned into the long standing tradition of his people about the way the Messiah was supposed to be. There are so many quotations in the Old Testament that talk about a different kind of Messiah than the one Peter had hoped for.

What we have to understand is why this story is here. If you look at the other gospels, you will find “You are the Christ,” and then you will find Jesus predicting His Passion, and then you will find the last part of today’s gospel, “Whoever would try to save his life will lose it.” But you do not find the conversation between Peter and Jesus in any of the other gospels except this one. However, that doesn’t mean the conversation is not true. There are other conversations like it in the other gospels, but they don’t appear here, they don’t appear this way. St. Matthew puts this conversation here the way he does, because of the people of his own time, for whom he’s writing the gospel. 

In the year 70 A.D., the Roman army set siege to Jerusalem. Eventually the city fell. It was destroyed. And Jews ran for their lives, for other places where they thought they’d be safe. Not only Jews themselves, but Christian Jews as well. All of them still honored the temple, Jew and Christian alike. When it was destroyed, they were destroyed. So now Matthew is dealing with a Jewish Christian congregation that is still devastated by the loss of their national identity. And their also fearful for their own lives, because friends and neighbors have been hauled out of their houses by Roman soldiers, brought to prison, then to execution. Because of that fear, and because of that nostalgia, they’re unable and unwilling to do the hard work of preaching the gospel. And so, Matthew tells the story this way, in order for us to see the big picture.

How does this come down to us? Well, I asked if Peter’s comment - “God forbid anything bad should happen to you” – was altruistic. We have to realize that nobody does or says anything completely out of altruistic motives. It is impossible for human beings to do that. There’s always some part of the self found someplace in every kind action, every good deed, and every gentle thing that we say. And so, it’s unfair to expect that anybody’s, or our own, behavior should ever be completely altruistic. That’s the way we were made. But we have to make allowance in our lives for the fact that others are going to speak to us with not entirely altruistic motives; that we will act toward others in the same way. Make allowance for it, and forgive it. On the other hand, what Jesus said to Peter, He says to us as well, “You are not thinking as God does, but as human beings do.”

That seems like a harsh criticism. How can human beings think like God does? I mean, isn’t that the difference between ourselves and God? That God is God, and we’re us. But, if it was true in St. Peter’s day, that Peter had enough information, enough inspiration, from his own Jewish scriptures to be able to understand Jesus on another level, now we have the entire bible, Old Testament and New Testament, twenty centuries of church teaching and church division, the culture in which we’ve grown up was still, in our own childhood, a largely Jewish Christian culture, then we should be able to sometimes think less selfishly, and more like we think God would want us to think. And if we look at life that way, then even when we make mistakes, even when we are not altruistic in our behavior, and even when we are not quite thinking the way God thinks, we still want what God wants.