Morning Devotion for the Season after Pentecost
June 10, 2022
Invitatory
Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in you sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son: and to the Holy Ghost;
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen.
Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness: Come let us adore him.
Reading: Matthew 16:21-27
From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me, for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life? “For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done.
Meditation – Peter Vanderveen
Under what conditions is it justifiable to declare that someone is evil – evil in an outright and undiminished sense, and not as an exaggerated term by which to imply that someone is unusually or even irreparably bad?
Strong statements demand serious examination. And in the drama of Jesus’ life, which the Gospels ostensibly narrate, there are few episodes that can match the explosive nature of this exchange between Jesus and his disciples. Jesus invokes Satan, and he does so in direct reference to Peter. Admittedly, by our sensibilities, this doesn’t amount to much. Satan is no longer a visceral or feared embodiment of evil. We might be more startled if Jesus had said that Peter was hopelessly imbecilic or stupid beyond measure. This kind of humiliation would rankle. But Jesus’ rebuke was intended to be even more severe than this. Peter’s remark was well-meaning, but in that moment Jesus understood it to be Peter’s complete misapprehension of who he was. Peter didn’t want Jesus to become a political martyr, which would have been a tragedy. But what he was totally blind to was that Jesus’ fate would be the singular way by which God, through Jesus, would show himself to be God. And not to see this was to deny God the divine power to restore and redeem anything and everything that had been brought to nothing. And this denial was outright evil.
But this was not the only confrontational statement that Jesus made. For he continued with these words: “if any wish to come after me.” What did he mean by this?
What does it mean to “come after” someone? Hank Aaaron came after Babe Ruth. Brahms came after Beethoven. Elizabeth came after Victoria. In our common parlance “to come after” means roughly to fill a similar role or take the place of someone or to succeed them. And in this light, Jesus rather caustically asked his disciples whether any of them had what it takes to succeed him. Or outdo him. He was asking them whether they too had power enough – of divine scope – to defeat death and, thus, to be gods along with him. If so, he said, they should take up their crosses too.
These verses are often put to use, wrongly, to instill in the faithful a need to follow Jesus even if it ultimately leads to self-sacrifice. “Take up your cross,” we are instructed. But this is usually meant merely as a way to compel people to do things they might not ordinarily do. Small things. Gestures. A real cross? Hardly. Actual death? Is this what we truly think God requires of us? Not rhetorically, but seriously. Literally. It’s hard to imagine that this would be good news.
Jesus was, rather, pointing out, stridently, that none of us can “come after” him. None of us can take up our own cross. This isn’t our role, and to carry on as if it were makes less of God and less of evil and less of Jesus – and falsely inflates our own importance, and our own burden in life. The real task is to see how Jesus is the event of God’s triumph over evil in an outright and undiminished sense. For in this acknowledgement, everything is changed for us.
The Lord's Prayer
Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy Name,
thy kingdom come,
thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those
who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
and the power, and the glory,
for ever and ever. Amen.
