TWENTY-SECOND SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME A

[cappie]

Peter says it can’t happen: Jesus can’t be allowed to die. This challenge to Jesus follows right after the passage we heard last week, in which Peter gets the question right when Jesus asks him, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter proclaims that Jesus is “the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

Jesus says, that’s right. That’s who I am. I am the Son of God—and I will die. And Peter says it can’t happen.

We don’t like to think about Death. We push it away. Which why some part of us can understand exactly why Peter says what he says in this Gospel. His beloved friend and teacher, Jesus—the one he left everything to follow—tells them that he will suffer and die.

As St Matthew tells it, Peter took Jesus aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.”

We may find ourselves thinking, and rightly so: “Who would dare to rebuke the Son of God? ”

But it turns out that the more you live, and the more death you see, the more you get exactly why Peter says what he says here. I think most of us, maybe all of us, if we were in Peter’s shoes, would’ve said the same thing.

“I left everything for you! You’ve brought meaning to my life that I never knew before. What on God’s earth would I DO if you died?”

It’s easy to forget, when we read these stories, that Peter didn’t know the ending. All he knew was what he knew. And he knew that death was—is—a permanent condition. If Jesus died, as Peter saw it, then that was it. Sure, Jesus talked about resurrection, but hearing about something miraculous is very different than seeing it for yourself.

So Peter takes him aside and says this just can’t happen.

Jesus answers with his famous call for the disciples to take up their cross and follow him. Again, we risk missing the meaning here. The cross has come to have a special meaning in our lives, in Christian culture, and in the culture at large. The cross doesn’t mean to us now what it did then, before Jesus ever hung on one.

Back then, the cross was an instrument of torture, fear, and death. To take up a cross was to meet Death, face to face.

But we do know the end of this story. We know what Peter doesn’t know: That death will come for Jesus, that that won’t be the end.

Death doesn’t get the final word.

The worst thing that can happen is never the last thing. Faith may die on Friday, but it rises again every Sunday—and that is why we are here in church.

Peter says it can’t happen. Jesus says, Get Behind Me, Satan, because Jesus knows what comes after death comes. “I am here,” Jesus says, “and Death no longer has the final word.”

None of us can say “No” to death. Jesus reminds us that though we cannot say “No” to Death, we can say “Yes” to resurrection, “Yes” to Life—because with all of the world’s horror comes all its beauty, too.

Death will come.

But so will sunshine, love, salvation.        

And Jesus will come here with us—in bread and wine and water and words and us.

Jesus, over whom Death did not win, here with us forever: in morning, in right now, in noon, in evening. And in the darkest night of your life.

Jesus reminds us that it will happen. But Death does not have the last word.

You can say yes, unafraid.