There’s a portrait of Jesus you’ve probably seen that a lot of people like. It shows Jesus laughing, and it’s true that over the centuries we have seen so many images of Jesus showing him as some otherworldly being, that it’s good sometimes to picture him as human, someone like us. Because he was. If that is your main picture of Jesus, though, today you have to make a change in the way you picture him. Because today in this gospel we see another side of Jesus, a Jesus we don’t often seek out, the Jesus who turns our lives completely upside down. I don’t know if we can avoid seeing it this way: This is a Jesus who can frighten us.
This very tense gospel reading isn’t something we’re quite ready for at the end of a nice relaxing summer. But this scene between Peter and Jesus is meant to make us uncomfortable. What Peter did on the face of it was something any of us might do — he told Jesus he didn’t want him to die. If you were writing this scene from scratch for an inspiring movie, you know what you’d do after Peter told Jesus that death should never happen to him — Jesus would quietly tell Peter that he understands, and that everything will turn out all right. Maybe they’d even have a meaningful hug. But the gospel isn’t written that way. These are angry words Peter and Jesus are exchanging with one another, there’s nowhere else in the gospel, except perhaps when Jesus is cleaning the money changers out of the temple, where there’s quite this level of anger and sharpness and tension between Jesus and anyone.
What happened here to get Jesus this angry at Peter, why is this such a turning point in the way we understand who Jesus is? It’s this: Peter has done the one thing that contradicts everything about who Jesus is — he wanted to be safe. He made self-preservation and safety his first priority.
Don’t think that Peter is in the gospel as comic relief — poor old Peter, missing the point again. Peter is in there today to show us what our instincts would be in the same situation. Isn’t what we humans mostly want to do is set ourselves up in a way that troubles can’t harm us very badly, where we’re protected from disappointment and poverty and having to deal with people or things that might make us uncomfortable? But there’s more, this very tense argument comes three sentences after Peter has just been told that he’s the rock on which Jesus will build his church, So Peter’s desire for safety shows us what churches often do, too, even our church. Don’t we sometimes think that church means that there are just a few obligations to fulfill and things you have to believe and you’ll be in good shape if you just take care of them? That is the kind of thinking that stems from Peter’s attitude, where he wants faith to be inspiring but not very dangerous. Peter ends up wanting Jesus to avoid the cross, and that’s the one thing Jesus knows no one can do.
This might not be the Jesus that a lot of people think they signed up for. But in a way it is a Jesus that we can love even more deeply that. It isn’t that Jesus wants us to be miserable, but he does want us to live life the way he lived it. The way the old spiritual goes, he wants us to live with our eyes on the prize, and nothing else.
Sometime we feel our religion is a comfort to us. And of course, it is, I don’t need to tell you all the ways that it is. But today’s scriptures tell us that if we are taking our faith seriously we won’t get as much comfort as we might want. Jeremiah, the prophet who also seemed so angry today in that first reading, found out it was a rotten job doing God’s will. He thrashed around and complained that he got fooled into starting something that was a lot harder than he’d been told. But it turned out that he just couldn’t see a way to stop doing it, it was a fire burning in my heart, he says. His heart came alive because he was willing to go where he was sent, not because suffering’s good but because the work had to be done. If you’re a Christian and not feeling like that now and then, intimidated and even scared by how much God is asking of you, then you simply haven’t been paying attention.
Just last week, Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do you say I am?” That’s the question today, too. We don’t have to answer by choosing between a laughing Jesus and an angry Jesus, a Jesus who wants us happy and a Jesus who somehow wants us unhappy. There’s really only one choice, the real Jesus, who loves us, but also wants us to follow him, no matter where we have to go.