The misunderstanding of Peter (Sunday Gospel’s Commentary)
Last Sunday, we have heard the beautiful confession of Peter at Caesarea of Philippi.
And we have listened ,like an echo of it, to Caiaphas (perhaps another Cephas) who provoked Jesus in the same terms: I put you under oath before the living God tell us if you are the Messiah the Son of God. And Jesus simply replied: You have said so (Mt 26,63-64). In a moment of great vulnerability, just before being condemned to death Jesus affirms that he is the Messiah the Son of the living God. This is his true messianity, this is his true divinity.
But Peter had to grow in order to realize that.
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 scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying: God forbid Lord, it will not happen to you. But he turned and said to Peter: Get behind me Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for your thoughts are not God’ thoughts but human thoughts
Jesus does not identify Peter to Satan, but as the Father had revealed to Peter Jesus’s identity, Satan, the one who scandalizes, who makes stumble, prevents Peter to recognize that the thought of God concerning his Messiah are not his thoughts.
So was it when Jesus was tempted in the wilderness; Satan said to him: if you are the Son of God, show it with miracles and not through a stupid abandon to God.
Peter will still be victim of his weakness when he will deny Jesus. But we know that at the end of his life he was able to be coherent with his profession of faith in dying as a martyr for Christ. As if he was telling us:” It was worthwhile to follow this Messiah”.
Now I we look at the first reading, Jeremiah 20,7-9
O Lord you have seduced me and I was seduced, You have overpowered me and you have prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all day long, every one mocks me ( and in fact how not to laugh of a God who is weak, a messiah who is crucified)….If I said: I will not mention him or speak any more in his name, then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones. I am weary in holding it in, and I cannot.
So let the Word of God seduce us with its demands and even its foolishness, let it burn in us as a fire, without trying too much to hold it .But let it consume us in following the Messiah, the Son of the living God.
See the Video with Sr. Anne Avril’s Commentary (in French).
