Blog:"Get behind me, Satan!"

I love this line from Scripture -- and it's rather useful at times, a magnificent rebuke, "Get behind me, Satan!" My wife and I throw that one at each other when we're getting on our nerves, or just for fun.

Here from Matthew:

From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly from the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised.

Then Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, “God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you.”

He turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”

We don't know how Peter reacted to it, as it was in no way said in jest. Think about it: the Lord called him "Satan"!

What's going on here?

God's plan, not Peter's

Nearing the time of the Passover festival, Jesus had prepared the disciples for his coming Passion. My NAB Bible gives this passage the title, "The First Prediction of the Passion." And it wasn't just a hint: Jesus told them flat out, that he will

suffer greatly from the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised.

Who wouldn't react like Peter: No, Lord, no!

We do know that whatever he made of it, Peter didn't understand the purpose.

Later, and with so much happening, it is certain that Peter had long forgotten about this episode, at the arrest of Jesus in the Garden, Peter again tries to protect Jesus' life, this time not with braggadocio but true bravery, wielding a sword. He truly didn’t get it, didn't get the logic of God’s plan. Peter kinda missed that "and... on the third day be raised," business.

Naturally, he was shocked that Jesus said he would be betrayed and killed, the purpose of which the Peter and the disciples failed to understand. The rebuke, then, is plainly that Peter was thinking about this life not the next, thinking, as Jesus told him, like a human and not like God.

We’re worse than Peter, though— God's plan has been fully revealed to us and we are still stuck, “thinking… as human beings do.”

So how does God think?

The passage follows Simon's appointment as head of the Church, the rock, "Peter," to which Jesus appoints him following Peter's declaration that Jesus is "the Messiah, the son of the living God." Peter said it, believed it, but through God's grace, as Jesus told him, and without grasping what that means to be the "son of the living God" -- that Jesus is also God.

The Evangelist John, as usual, gives us some additional passages to clarify that Jesus is God, including the seven "I am" statements, with the most direct one coming in Jesus' challenge to the Pharisees:

So the Jews said to him, “You are not yet fifty years old and you have seen Abraham?” Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I AM.”

His listeners react violently to the claim and try to stone him. But the Messiah will be "lifted up" not knocked down, so Jesus miraculously escapes.

Woe unto You, Scribes and Pharisees by James Tissot (wikipedia)

Even if they understood him to be the Messiah, as did Peter, none of them had any notion of the Messiah's actual mission much less his actual nature as God.

And that's where men don't think like God. Instead they understood that the Son of David was a man who would free Israel from foreign enslavement, as did Moses for them out of Egypt, and then restore the kingdom. Hindsight tells us this is why Jesus (and John the Baptist) says, repeatedly, "The Kingdom of God is at hand" -- to clarify that the "kingdom" is not of a man (a "son of David") and thereby not of this world.

Not only do they all not comprehend the role of the Messiah, their bias is so strong that they completely mistake Jesus' miracles for demonstrations of power, not mercy, and his teachings of repentance for expiation of Israel and not for personal salvation. Exasperated, the Pharisees accuse Jesus of acting through Satan, and when he slaps down that accusation, they still demand "a sign" -- only, the sign they want is Caesar's head, not a healed and repentant former leper. They are simply enraged by it all, and their frustration grows palpable in the constant questioning of Jesus about it: if you're the Messiah, save us already!

Jesus instead confounds them with references to their own Scripture and gives them a mini-lesson in typology,

He said to them in reply, “An evil and unfaithful generation seeks a sign, but no sign will be given it except the sign of Jonah the prophet.

Just as Jonah was in the belly of the whale three days and three nights, so will the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights."

Then he doubles down on they way God thinks, pointing out what Jonah's mission was, a prefigurement of the mission of the Christ, which they entirely misunderstand: salvation for all mankind, not just Israel -- and, by the way, you'd better get on board:

At the judgment, the men of Nineveh will arise with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and there is something greater than Jonah here.

At the judgment the queen of the south will arise with this generation and condemn it, because she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and there is something greater than Solomon here.

Whatever they make of the repentance of Nineveh and the judgement of the pagan queen, they mistake the Scriptural references for glory for Israel and not for God. Thinking like men, they refused to understand.

Similarly in Luke 17, Jesus responds to the pharisetical bullying,

Asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, he said in reply, “The coming of the kingdom of God cannot be observed, and no one will announce, ‘Look, here it is,’ or, ‘There it is.’ For behold, the kingdom of God is among you.”

It's a sublime response that, thinking like humans and not God, they cannot accept, and in not accepting it their contempt grows, even to mock him as he is dying on the Cross:

Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross that we may see and believe.” Those who were crucified with him also kept abusing him.

Transfer of authority

It's not in any sense ironic that forty years later the Romans ended up destroying Jerusalem, killing hundreds of thousands of people through starvation, warfare, and, again, no irony, crucifixion of thousands. It's not ironic because it's not related to Jesus and the unbelieving Pharisees.

The Roman destruction was preceded by Roman imperial provocation which was intended to punish continued Jewish resistance to the occupation but that instead provoked outright rebellion. And it's not ironic because the Jews expected that God would once again save his chosen people: he brought them from Egypt; he saved them from the Babylonians and Assyrians; and he gave them victory over the Seleucids (Greeks) who, as the Romans were now doing, had profaned the Temple.

Christ and the Good Thief by Titian (Wikicommons)

Along with the element of thanksgiving, the Jewish system of sacrifice was for expiation of the sins of Israel and the ongoing restoration of its kingdom, so for the Jews, the lesson was always that God punishes infidelity and rewards faith, lessons that backfired horrifically when God wasn't there for them in 70 AD. It's a failure of what's called "normalcy bias" -- expecting things to be the same, just because it's always been that way. Instead, reason failed them when, for example, seeing plain miracles of Christ they saw misdemeanor Sabbath violations instead.

By refusing to listen to God's son, they missed the entire point. The only person in the Gospel not guided by the Holy Spirit and who realizes before Jesus' death what was actually going on was the "good thief," who after mocking Jesus for not saving himself, repents, just before dying himself, telling Jesus,

“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” (

The Taking of Christ (unidentified, Flemish, 17th century; wiki commons). Peter slashing the guard's ear is depicted to the lower right.

There you go: had Jesus not died, which Peter tried to stop, there would be no divine coronation. It was at his own death and upon watching Jesus die that the good thief was able to see what the rest of his countrymen could not, and that Jesus had been saying so plainly all along: the Messiah will restore not the temporal throne of Israel, but lead her people -- and the rest of the nations, as God had promised Abraham -- to the Kingdom of God. Indeed, one of my favorite lines from Jesus comes after Peter slashes at the soldiers who came to arrest Jesus. After the famous "live by the sword, die by the sword" comment, Jesus tells Peter,

“Do you think that I cannot call upon my Father and he will not provide me at this moment with more than twelve legions of angels?

Similarly, Jesus also tells Pilate,

“My kingdom does not belong to this world. If my kingdom did belong to this world, my attendants [would] be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not here.”

That's precisely what the pharisees and the disciples and all the Jews wanted from their Messiah: that Jesus order his "attendants" or call down "twelve legions of angels" and throw the Romans out of Palestine. They wanted him to climb down from the Cross, crack open a bottle of champaign, and say, "Just kidding! Let's kick some Roman butt now!"

But that's how men think, not God.

Learning to think like God

Jesus rebuked Peter for being an obstacle to the Cross. Jesus knew he had to die, that were he not to die Satan would prevail. But Jesus would not allow, it, thus he commands that Satan stand aside, get out of the way.

It was a bit of a learning curve, but Peter eventually got it and could thereby preach the Good News that the Messiah had not only arrived but arose to his fullest glory. From 1 Peter,

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the chosen sojourners of the dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, in the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification by the Spirit, for obedience and sprinkling with the blood of Jesus Christ: may grace and peace be yours in abundance.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who in his great mercy gave us a new birth to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,

to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you who by the power of God are safeguarded through faith, to a salvation that is ready to be revealed in the final time.

Go Peter, but he spoke there from hindsight and the Holy Spirit. So, before we scoff at the Apostles and disbelieving Jews, we might consider that it'd be rather remarkable if people in our own day were not so plainly blind to simple truths that don't conform to their world view, their temporal satisfactions, and, most importantly, to their pride.

We humans think temporally. God thinks eternally.

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There's one more aspect of Jesus' warning to Peter that we must consider. Jesus told Peter that he, Jesus, must die, and to deny that death would be Satan's work. Death was introduced to man through Satan, and only the Christ can defeat it and restore eternal life -- by dying. It's unclear, though, if Jesus was speaking to Satan as well as to Peter. Jesus knew that Satan would instill hatred in Judas and betray him, so why give Satan this warning? Either way, what matters here is that Jesus was preparing his followers for his death. As Jesus told the two disciples on the Road to Emmaus the day of his Resurrection,

Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and enter into his glory?”

November 15, 2024 by Michael

St. Joseph, pray for us!

Here to go back to Blog roll

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