30 August 2026 14th Sunday after Pentecost
Exodus 3.1-15 Psalm 105.1-6; 105.23-26 Romans 12.9-21 Matthew 16.21-28
One minute Peter is making that profound statement of faith – ‘you are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God’, and the next he is denying what it means for Jesus to be that ‘Messiah’. Jesus has just predicted his own death and resurrection, and Peter tells him ‘nah, not on my watch, you can’t possibly go through with all of that’. Peter, and probably all the disciples, knew the prophecy, the Messiah would come and rescue them from oppression. They have learned all there was to know about former messiah-like figures, they knew the story of the Maccabean Resistance, they were looking for someone to lead them in the fight, they were not looking for someone who was willingly walking toward their death.
I wonder, have you ever been in that sort of situation? You are expecting something dramatic or important to occur and suddenly, it all turns around and you are left deflated and confused. What do you do? Do you look for some other way of achieving what it is you were expecting; do you try to re-engineer the situation so it all turns out the way you were expecting.
When Peter expresses his feelings about what Jesus has just told them he is about to do, Jesus strongly rebukes Peter as an ‘obstacle’ in God’s path, as an adversary of Jesus. Peter has just been given the ‘keys to the kingdom’, but he is now told to ‘get out of my way’, you do not understand what has to happen. We see in this, Jesus’ commitment to the path he knows he has to take, as well as learning what is the cost of being Christ’s disciple. It has sometimes been said that ‘salvation is free, but it will cost you everything’. And that is what Jesus is telling us that when he says that ‘those who want to become my followers’ must ‘deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me’. That those who save their lives will lose them and those who lose their lives for Jesus and the Good News will save them. Not an easy path to follow, yet it is the only one with a future.
Peter is looking at things from a ‘here and now’, ‘earthly’ perspective, but Jesus has a different perspective. He is outlining a different logic to how life should run. Rather than retribution, violence, and hate, this logic runs along the lines of forgiveness, mercy and love. And Jesus knows that the powers in society will not tolerate this new logic and that they are ‘gunning for him’, and this is what Peter is finding so hard to understand. And when we stop to think about it, it is not surprising that Jesus was killed. From the moment of Jesus’ birth, he was such a threat to the rule of force and violence, that Herod was willing to slaughter all children under the age of 2 in the hope of destroying him. But what is surprising is that God raised Jesus from the dead. Resurrection reinforces that Jesus’ life, love, and sacrifice are ultimately what will prevail. It may be hard for us to see in our current world environment of ‘tit-for-tat violence’, but Jesus invites us to live lives shaped by love, and forgiveness, lives shaped by compassion and hope.
The problem is, like Peter, we want more of what the world already gives us – wealth, security, popularity, status…. But Jesus didn’t come to comfort us, he came to free us. And freedom means recognising that what we are settling for is not life-giving, and when we can hear God’s promise we will see there is something different on offer. God’s promise of life is a promise that means something only after what we have previously accepted as life, dies.
So the question before us today is, are we ready to hear something different. Are we ready for something more. And this will not be an easy step. It is not easy to offer forgiveness rather than retribution; to be generous with what we have rather than keeping it all for ourselves; to offer someone a second chance rather than just writing them off as a lost cause; to offer our future to God rather than planning all our next steps. And the thing is, when we accept that what the world is offering us is all there is, this ‘different’ thing feels like death, even like dying on the cross, but God uses these things to raise us to new life. God is at work giving us a taste of life that we never thought possible and increasing the impact of our actions beyond our wildest dreams. Until suddenly, just as it feels like we have lost our lives, we find them. The Messiah came, not to give us what we want, but to give us what we need. Life in all its abundance.