José Ricardo Bezerra and Felipe Bezerra
On this 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, the Gospel is the exact continuation of what we meditated on last Sunday. Right after Peter’s profession of faith, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Mt 16:16), Jesus begins to announce that he must go to Jerusalem, suffer greatly, be put to death and rise on the third day (cf. Mt 16:21). The same Peter who had just received a revelation from the Father takes the Lord aside and rebukes him. And he hears from Jesus one of the harshest words in the Gospels: “Get away from me, Satan!” (Mt 16:23).
This Sunday’s Gospel runs to verse 27 and includes the conditions of discipleship: to deny oneself, take up the cross and follow the Lord. We chose to stay with the first three verses, which already give us a great deal to pray with. We will take up the rest three years from now, when Year A comes round again. Feel free to pray with the whole Gospel. As always, we have chosen five points for your meditation and prayer, which we share in the podcast: https://youtu.be/5EnCcBePE0A (with subtitles in your language).
Gospel: Mt 16:21-27
“At that time, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly from the elders, the chief priests and the scribes, and that he must be put to death and rise on the third day. Then Peter took Jesus aside and began to rebuke him, saying: ‘God forbid such a thing, Lord! May this never happen to you!’ But Jesus turned to Peter and said: ‘Get away from me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me, for you are not thinking the things of God, but the things of men!’ Then Jesus said to his disciples: ‘Whoever wishes to follow me must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, but to lose his life? What can anyone give in exchange for his life? For the Son of Man will come in the glory of his Father, with his angels, and then he will repay each one according to his conduct’.”
1. “He must go to Jerusalem”: the duty of one who is entirely free
The first word that leaps out of the text is “must”. Who was forcing Jesus? No one! There was no power over him that could compel him to go up to Jerusalem to die. He himself says it clearly: “No one takes my life from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down and power to take it up again” (Jn 10:18). Jesus’ “must” is not submission to a blind fate nor an imposition from outside: it is the filial awareness of one who knows the Father’s will and embraces it freely. That is why, a few verses later, he rebukes Peter precisely for not thinking the things of God (cf. Mt 16:23).
There was also, on the human level, the duty of a good Jew. Jesus went up to Jerusalem for the Passover, as he had done since childhood (cf. Lk 2:41-42). Israel’s tradition had three pilgrimage feasts, and Passover was the greatest of them (cf. Ex 23:14-17; Dt 16:16). But the evangelist is saying something more: this time, the duty to go was not only to celebrate the Passover; it was to suffer, to be put to death and to rise. The Passover he was going to celebrate was his own.
And here our prayer begins. The inconsistencies of our life almost always arise from the distance between three verbs: to want, to ought, and to do. On the simplest level this is almost comic: I want the whole cake, I know I ought not to, and I end up eating a slice. On the moral level, however, it hurts. It is the experience Saint Paul describes without disguise: “I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want”, and at the end, the cry: “Wretched man that I am! Who will free me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Rom 7:19.24-25). To the young man who asks him what he must do to gain eternal life, Jesus answers with the essential: keep the commandments (cf. Mt 19:16-19). That is our duty: to love God above all things and our neighbour as ourselves (cf. Mt 22:37-39). But between knowing and doing there is a road, and it passes through wanting.
It is worth praying with that distance. Jesus went freely to Jerusalem. He could have not gone. He knew he must, he wanted to go, and he went.
2. “Suffer greatly”: the mystery that cannot be explained
Jesus does not merely announce that he is going to die. He announces that he is going to suffer greatly, and at the hands of those from whom it would be least expected, the religious authorities of his own people. He knew what awaited him.
The suffering he took on was not only physical, although that was real and brutal, and had already been described centuries earlier in the Fourth Song of the Servant: his back given to those who struck him, his face to blows and spitting (cf. Is 50:6; 52:13-53:12). There was moral and affective suffering: to be abandoned by his own, denied by Peter, handed over by one of the Twelve (cf. Mt 26:56.69-75). And there was an immeasurable moral and spiritual suffering: being innocent, he willingly bore the consequences of our sins and offered himself for us. He remained absolutely without sin; he was made “sin” for us in the sense of becoming the victim offered on our behalf, taking our sorrows upon himself (cf. Is 53:4; 2Cor 5:21). In Gethsemane the anguish reaches his body, and his sweat becomes like drops of blood (cf. Lk 22:44). On the cross, the summit: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46; Ps 22:2), the prayer of a Psalm that begins in lament and ends in hope. All this the Son of God lived in the humanity he assumed for us, and this self-giving already begins in his self-emptying, when, being in the form of God, he took the form of a servant (cf. Phil 2:6-8).
Why did he have to suffer? Not out of an absolute necessity, as though God could not have saved us in another way. Saint Thomas Aquinas draws the distinction well: there was no absolute necessity, there was fittingness. But once God willed to accomplish our redemption through the cross, the Passion became necessary within that plan, as the path freely embraced by the Son and the most fitting way of manifesting his love and of conquering sin in our own flesh. He willed it. And in willing it, he stripped sin of the power it had over us. We still sin, it is true, and we must fight against it; but sin no longer has the last word, because the Lord suffered, died and rose again.
There is an immense consolation here. When I suffer, I can tell Jesus that I am suffering, knowing that he knows this from within. And there is more: suffering united to his is not wasted. This is what Paul says to the Colossians: “in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his Body, which is the Church” (Col 1:24). Nothing is lacking in the sacrifice of the cross, which is perfect and sufficient; what God willed was to associate us with it, so that our pain might enter into the mystery of redemption instead of remaining barren (cf. CCC 618).
A reading that helps a great deal is the Apostolic Letter Salvifici Doloris of Saint John Paul II, on the Christian meaning of human suffering. Its conclusion is disconcerting and liberating: Christ does not give us an abstract explanation that solves the problem of suffering from outside; he answers from the cross and calls us to share in his sufferings. The pain that saves is pain united to the Lord’s. A traditional formula, associated with Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, says that what was not assumed was not redeemed; and Christ truly assumed our whole human nature, body and soul, without sin, in order to redeem it entirely.
At this point, the grace to ask for is concrete: to learn to suffer with him, without grumbling and without complaining about everything.
3. “Rise on the third day”: two sides of the same coin
Notice that the announcement of death never comes alone. From the very first time, Jesus says that he will be put to death and that he will rise on the third day. They are two sides of the same coin, and whoever separates them understands neither.
“Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (Jn 12:24). This is the law of the Kingdom, and it is not a consoling metaphor: it is the real path. That is why Paul can defy death with holy irony: “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” (1Cor 15:55). Death does not have the last word, because Christ descended to the realm of the dead and rose again, and his victory reaches also those who died before him (cf. CCC 632-635).
This changes the way we look at our pains, and above all at the greatest of them, the fear of dying. The saints lived this perspective with a naturalness that astonishes us. Paul goes so far as to say that his desire is to depart and be with Christ, which would be far better, but that to remain is more necessary for the sake of his brothers and sisters (cf. Phil 1:23-24). It is not contempt for life; it is knowing where life is going.
And there is an everyday dimension to this. The spiritual life is made of continual death and resurrection: dying to sin and rising with Christ to a new life. This is what happens in Baptism, in which we were buried with him so that we might walk in newness of life (cf. Rom 6:3-6). It is what the Church proposes to us in the penitential practice of every Friday, through prayer, voluntary renunciation, fasting, almsgiving and works of charity (cf. CCC 1438), works that we unite to the cross of the Lord. It is what Paul asks when he writes, without mincing words: “Put to death what belongs to the earth in you” (Col 3:5), stripping off the old self (cf. Eph 4:22). In our own Writings, Moysés insists on exactly this expression, “to put to death”, and it should not be softened: it is not a matter of letting what is old in us die on its own, but of acting against it with the grace of God.
4. “God forbid such a thing”: Peter’s selective hearing
The Gospel says that Peter rejected the announcement of the Passion. We can read in that gesture what so often happens to us: he seems to have stopped at the words “be put to death” and not to have received the promise that came immediately afterwards, “rise on the third day”. Out of the love he had for the Master came a rebuke: “God forbid such a thing, Lord!” (Mt 16:22).
This is selective hearing, and it is not an ancient defect. We hear from the Word, and from people, only what confirms what we already want. Peter was not being wicked; he was being human. Humanly speaking, we understand him: he did not want to lose Jesus, he wanted more time with him. The problem is that, by refusing one part, he refused the whole, including the promise. It happened to Peter and it happens in our most ordinary conversations, when we listen in order to answer and not in order to understand. We could use a course in listening, not only in public speaking. And we need it in prayer: to listen to everything God says, not only to the part that pleases us.
Behind this lies our permanent difficulty with the will of God. “My thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not my ways, says the Lord. As the heavens are above the earth, so are my ways above yours” (Is 55:8-9).
A beautiful example of this is Saint Monica, whose memorial the Church celebrated this week, together with that of Saint Augustine. According to Augustine himself in the Confessions, Monica did not want him to leave Carthage for Italy and wept much over it; he left anyway, deceiving her (cf. Confessions V,8). God seemed not to have heard that prayer of that night. But it was precisely on that journey that Augustine met Saint Ambrose in Milan and the path of his conversion was opened. God answered the greater prayer, the one she had been making for years. And, again according to the Confessions, it was a bishop, sought out by Monica long before that, who said to her the sentence that has remained: it is impossible that the son of so many tears should perish (cf. Confessions III,12).
How often our prayer is a “Lord, do not let this happen”, said with an anguished heart and with little view of the whole. There is nothing wrong with asking; Jesus himself asked that the cup might pass, and added: “not as I will, but as you will” (Mt 26:39). What we learn from Peter is not to interrupt God in the middle of his sentence.
5. “Get away from me, Satan”: the things of God and the things of men
Jesus’ answer is harsh, and it must be understood well. He addresses Peter with the severe vocative “Satan”, without thereby saying that Peter is, by nature, the devil. A few verses earlier he had called him blessed, the rock on which he would build his Church (cf. Mt 16:17-18). Now he says that Peter has become a stumbling block, because he is thinking the things of men and not those of God. It is the same man, on the same day. At that moment, without knowing it, Peter was playing the tempter’s part, repeating on Jesus’ road the proposal of a messianism without a cross that had already appeared in the desert (cf. Mt 4:8-10).
The expression Jesus uses here adds something that does not appear in the temptation in the desert: it can be translated as “get away from me” or, literally, “behind me” (Mt 16:23). Some interpreters also see in it a warning that Peter should return to the disciple’s proper place: the one who walks ahead is the Lord, and a disciple is one who follows, not one who points out the way to the Master.
About the name, it is worth knowing: “satan” comes from the Hebrew satan and means adversary, accuser. In the Old Testament the figure appears only a few times in that role, as in the book of Job (cf. Job 1:6-12), in Zechariah (cf. Zech 3:1-2) and in 1 Chronicles (cf. 1Chr 21:1), and its meaning develops progressively until, in the light of the New Testament, he is recognised as the tempter and enemy of God’s designs. And if Jesus sends him away, that does not mean he ceases to act. He goes on tempting, often through mediations: people, environments, our own fragility. Judas will be called the son of perdition (cf. Jn 17:12). What matters is what faith assures us: he does not have the last word, and Christ has already conquered (cf. Jn 16:33; 1Jn 3:8). We should not be afraid of him, and we should ask for the gift of discernment to recognise which thoughts are “the things of men” when they present themselves with the face of common sense and even of zeal.
The most consoling part comes afterwards. Jesus does not take the keys from Peter, does not send him away, does not replace him. Peter goes on following, and he will still deny him (cf. Mt 26:69-75). The Gospel hides none of this, and that is a sign of its honesty: if the story had been invented to promote the leader, Peter would have come out spotless. In fact, it is John who tells us that it was Peter who drew the sword and cut off Malchus’ ear (cf. Jn 18:10), a detail the other evangelists narrate without giving the name.
Years later, already in Rome and already an old man, the same Peter would write: “Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time” (1Pet 5:6). He knew what he was talking about. To be humbled by the hand of God is not to be crushed, it is to be prepared. As Sirach says: “My son, if you come forward to serve the Lord, prepare your soul for trial… for gold is tested in the fire, and men acceptable to God in the furnace of humiliation” (Sir 2:1.5).
And, at bottom, this is what Peter teaches us: the Lord did not choose us in spite of what we are, nor in order to leave us as we are. He chose our weaknesses along with us, knowing beforehand that we would sin, and he calls us to holiness even so. If you have a vocation, whatever it may be, do not lose heart because of your sins: do not accept them, but do not give up because of them. A night-time prayer is traditionally attributed to Saint John XXIII which sums up that trusting abandonment well: “Lord, your Church is yours; I am going to sleep”. It is a devotional attribution, whose historical authenticity is not certain, but it says very well what we need to learn.
Steps of Lectio Divina
Lectio Divina is the prayerful reading of the Word of God. Set aside a time of silence, invoke the Holy Spirit and go calmly through these steps, praying yourself with this Gospel.
1. Reading (Lectio). What does the text say? Read Mt 16:21-27 slowly. Notice the verbs of verse 21: to go, to suffer, to be put to death, to rise. Observe that the announcement of death never comes without the announcement of the resurrection, and that Jesus turns to Peter right after having called him the rock.
2. Meditation (Meditatio). What does the text say to me? Where, in your life, is the distance between what you want, what you ought to do and what you actually do? Which part of God’s Word have you been hearing only halfway, keeping only what pleases you or only what weighs on you?
3. Prayer (Oratio). What do I say to God from the text? “Lord, first of all we want to thank you, because you chose us weak, tired and often confused, and even so you chose us. You know that we are sinners, that we get confused and that we often want the things of men, the things of flesh and blood, and forget the things of your Father. Open our eyes to recognise what is yours, and reveal to us also what is ours, so that we may put it to death. Give us the grace to welcome humiliations with joy, knowing that they are part of the death that prepares the resurrection. O Mary, hold our hand and help us on this path.” Continue your prayer as the Holy Spirit inspires you.
4. Contemplation (Contemplatio). What new way of seeing does God give me? Remain in silence before the Crucified, asking for nothing. Look at the cross and let him show you that that place was yours, and that he took it out of love.
5. Action (Actio). What is the Lord calling me to today? Choose one concrete pain from this week, however small, and offer it united to the Lord’s suffering, without grumbling. And in one conversation this week, listen to the person to the end before answering.
Until next week!
Shalom!
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Podcast video: https://youtu.be/5EnCcBePE0A with subtitles you can select in your language.
