Text: Matthew 16:21-26
Date: September 13, 2020
Event: The Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost, Year A
Matthew 16:21–26 (EHV)
21From that time, Jesus began to show his disciples that he had to go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders, chief priests, and experts in the law, and be killed, and on the third day be raised again.
22Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “May you receive mercy, Lord! This will never happen to you.”
23But Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a snare to me because you are not thinking the things of God, but the things of men.”
24Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If anyone wants to follow me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. 25In fact whoever wants to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. 26After all, what will it benefit a person if he gains the whole world, but forfeits his soul? Or what can a person give in exchange for his soul?”
The Christian Life Is Sacrifice
As 21st Century Americans, we have a real problem processing the idea of “sacrifice.” Attitudes and actions that are truly sacrificial are deeply unpleasant to us. They are an affront to our selfish sinful natures and our national attitude toward individualized freedom. Often, we view “freedom” as a lack of sacrifice. I’m free to do what I want when I want so that I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do. I never have to sacrifice any desire or good thing because I’m free!
The anniversary of the September 11 attacks this past week maybe gave us some reflection on sacrifice in a physical sense: first responders rushing into danger rather than away from it, brave people on airplanes sacrificing their lives to protect others on the ground so that the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania never reached its target. But those are extraordinary, almost mythical situations. Few of us ever face that kind of situation—thanks be to God!
This morning, though, Jesus has words of caution for us not as Americans but as Christians. We have a life in front of us that is going to be mean sacrifice, and that sacrifice is not something we should run away from, but embrace as a gift from God.
Our Gospel picks up shortly after where we left off last week, perhaps even part of the very same conversation. Last week, Jesus had asked his disciples what people were saying about him, and then he asked his disciples what they thought. Peter had the beautiful confession, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus praised that confession and said that he would build his church on that confession to the total destruction of every plan of Satan, death, and hell.
But then Jesus starts to become a little bit more clear and blunt with his disciples—what does it mean that he is the Christ? What had he really come to do? From that time, Jesus began to show his disciples that he had to go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders, chief priests, and experts in the law, and be killed, and on the third day be raised again. Jesus didn’t come to be a popular teacher. He didn’t come to be a crowd-gathering miracle worker. He didn’t come to have a ruling position among the people. Jesus came to suffer and die. That’s what the role of the Christ was. That was what the promised Savior had to do. That was the only way to solve mankind’s problem of sin.
But, understandably, this doesn’t sit well with the disciples, and especially Peter. We’re told that Peter had the audacity to even rebuke his teacher, rebuke the one he had confidently said was the promised Christ! “May you receive mercy, Lord! This will never happen to you.” It’s very possible that Peter had a misguided view of what the Christ’s job actually was. It was a common misconception of that e day that the Christ, the Messiah, would come and be a political Savior. He would be someone who would rescue the nation from the Romans, he would come and restore the glory of Israel as a powerful country, to relive the glory days of King David. You can’t do any of that if you are killed by the current regime in power. So it’s possible that this statement was so incompatible with what Peter knew the Christ would do, he had to correct him.
It’s also possible that Peter saw in Jesus’ words trouble for himself. As goes the teacher, so goes the disciple. If this fate befell Jesus, what would that mean for Peter himself? What would it mean for the rest of the twelve? Peter had to stop this happening for Jesus so that it wouldn’t happen to him!
A third option is simply that Peter loved Jesus and he didn’t want these horrid things to happen to him. So his care and his concern for Jesus (which was at least a factor in all the possible motivations for what he said to Jesus if not necessarily the factor) also is in the picture here.
But really, regardless of what Peter’s motives are, it’s clear how his actions are being used. Jesus is clear that Satan is using Peter’s concern for his friend (and perhaps Peter’s concern for himself) to try to sway Jesus off course. Jesus called Peter a “snare,” literally something that causes someone else to fall or even to sin. Satan is trying to steer Jesus off course here. And you can imagine that even for Jesus the thoughts of not sacrificing yourself, not dying horribly on the cross, would have been appealing. We see that clear as day sometime later when Jesus prays to his Father in the Garden of Gethsemane minutes before his arrest where he prayed that if there was some other way to save mankind, let’d do that.
But this is Jesus’ role and mission; this is what the Christ had come to do. All of mankind was lost in sin. Peter, you, and me are all alike. We have been selfish and arrogant, we have looked out for our own good not the good of others, we have not done what God has told us to do and done what he told us not to do. For our rebellion and sin we deserve death—eternal death in hell. Jesus came to change that. He came to live a perfect life for us and to endure hell in our place. It wouldn’t simply be an abuse of power on the part of the Jewish leaders or the Roman government—it would be you and me, our sins, that nailed him to the cross. He sacrificed himself to save us.
Because Jesus sacrificed himself, we are free from sin. We have no concerns that it wasn’t done correctly, there’s no leftover work to be finished up. Jesus did it all, and he did it all for us. Jesus’ sacrifice saved us. He has made peace between us and God.
Earlier we noted that part of Peter’s concern over Jesus’ well-being was that he might potentially have to follow down the same path. And Jesus seems to lend some creditability to that concern. He says, “If anyone wants to follow me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. 25In fact whoever wants to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. 26After all, what will it benefit a person if he gains the whole world, but forfeits his soul? Or what can a person give in exchange for his soul?” That doesn’t sound like a happy-go-lucky, carefree life, does it? It sounds like a life of sacrifice that we naturally try to avoid.
So what is Jesus saying here? What should we expect as Christians in this life? As goes the teacher, so goes the disciple. We will not sacrifice our lives for the sins of the world—that work has been done—but we will face similar backlash to what Jesus faced. The world is no more receptive to Jesus’ message of sin and forgiveness today than it was 2,000 years ago. So as we share that message, we should expect to be rejected, mocked, and run into failure after failure.
And it may not be just embarrassment or frustration. We may find our livelihood and relationships threatened. In particularly dire circumstances, Christians even have their life on the line for their faith. So what is our reaction to those moment? To turn tail and run away from the sacrifice as quickly as we possibly can? What benefit will that be to us? If we give up Jesus, if we give up our faith, just to live more comfortably in this life, what have we done? We’ve exchanged the infinite for the finite; we’ve exchanged the eternal for the temporal; we’ve exchanged the perfect for the corrupted.
No amount of peace and security in this life is worth giving up on our Savior. No struggle we face here, no cross that we have to bear, is worse than taking the punishment of our sins back onto ourselves. It is a bad trade to give up heaven to find peace here. It would be eternally regretful to have to suffer hell forever just to avoid something temporarily unpleasant here.
The Christian life is sacrifice. We sacrifice to be Christians, to share Christ. We sacrifice as we live in this sinful world, while knowing that an eternity of perfection is around the corner. But let’s not run from the sacrifice, let’s embrace it. Let’s not just take the sacrifices imposed on us—let’s sacrifice for each other. What can you sacrifice to help your brother or sister in Christ? What can you sacrifice to serve the person you don’t even know? What pain can you endure that other might benefit? What beneficial thing might you give up that others may be comforted?
Maybe we think of being generous with our time or money. Maybe we think of the simple act of wearing a mask in these pandemic-laden days—a very minor sacrifice that could save someone’s life. Maybe we think of potentially sacrificing our pride or our standing with people to invite someone to join us for worship or to share our faith or to confess that we believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God which means that by him we have forgiveness and eternal life.
Anyone who would say that God wants us to live a life without sacrifice is misguided. Anyone who says that God wants the Christian’s life her eon earth to be full of health and wealth, earthly comfort, is lying. Jesus is clear to you and me, “Take up [your] cross, and follow me.”
As you sacrifice in this life, you give thanks to God for his forgiveness. God bless your Christian life of sacrifice to the glory and praise of our Savior! Amen.
