Matthew 16:21-26
21 From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.
22 Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. “Never, Lord!” he said. “This shall never happen to you!”
23 Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”
24 Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 25 For whoever wants to save their life[a] will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. 26 What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? 27 For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what they have done.
28 “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”
“Life Without Limits?”
The challenge for all of us is not only to try figure out what God’s will really is;
it is also to be willing to suffer rather then lose our integrity. The secret of life is that it has to be lost to be found; it has to dare suffer to be real and have integrity.
As a poet once said, “Life is a sum of habits disturbed by a few thoughts.”
When we try make it be easy we lose what it really is - as Henry James has said -
“Life is effort, unremittingly repeated.” It is not without limits.
Life without limits, without a purpose beyond having it bigger and better; without struggle, commitment to something beyond my own happiness and economic security; without denial, without the struggle which comes in loosing oneself in being an instrument of love in a world of hate; life without integrity and responsibility, servant hood and compassion is no life at all! It is indeed very thin!
“Get Behind Me Satan”
Peter had the best of intentions at heart when he tried to talk Jesus out of the way of suffering. He had no intention of being an evil temptation.
Peter wanted suffering eliminated from Jesus life. We all would like to see the same.
Suffering is so costly; it hurts so much, demands so much, takes so much.
Helmut Thielicke has said the problem for Americans is that we don’t know how to deal with suffering. We regard it as something “which is fundamental inadmissible, distressing, embarrassing, and not to be endured.”
What Peter and we do not understand is that suffering belongs to the very nature of this world and to the very nature of Jesus - the suffering servant who emptied himself.
To be caught up with the will of God is to take on suffering as a part of loving. The only way to eliminate suffering is to eliminate love. Love makes sense out of and gives meaning to life, even suffering.
“...life without any kind of suffering would be no life at all; it would be a form of death. Life - the life of the spirit like the life of the body- depends in some mysterious way upon the struggle to be...suffering-as-struggle belongs...to life’s foundational basis and goodness...A pain free life would be a life-less life.
We suffer because we are human and out of our suffering comes our capacity for compassion. For ‘suffering integrates us into life and makes us more fully and truly ‘alive’.”
Douglas John Hall, “God And Human Suffering”, pp. 57-66
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