Bloomsbury Central Baptist
Church
31st August 2014,
11.00am
You can listen to this sermon here:
Matthew 16.21-28 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. 22 And Peter
took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, "God forbid it, Lord! This
must never happen to you." 23
But he turned and said to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan! You are a
stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but
on human things." 24 Then
Jesus told his disciples, "If any want to become my followers, let them
deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 25 For those who want to save
their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find
it. 26 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? 27
"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. 28 Truly I tell you, there are
some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man
coming in his kingdom."
Romans 12.9-21 Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold
fast to what is good; 10 love
one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. 11 Do not lag in zeal, be ardent
in spirit, serve the Lord. 12
Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. 13 Contribute to the needs of the
saints; extend hospitality to strangers.
14 ¶ Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not
curse them. 15 Rejoice with
those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.
16 Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but
associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. 17 Do not repay anyone evil for
evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. 18 If it is possible, so far as it
depends on you, live peaceably with all.
19 Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the
wrath of God; for it is written, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says
the Lord." 20 No,
"if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them
something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their
heads." 21 Do not be
overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
Have you ever
noticed that good people
can do terrible things with the best
of intentions?
Not everybody
who does an evil deed is an evil person,
and sometimes the worst of deeds
emerge from a heart heavy with good
intentions.
We have a
proverb to this effect, don’t we?
‘The road to hell is paved with good
intentions’, we sometimes say,
unconsciously quoting
the twelfth century Cistercian monk
Bernard of Clairvaux
(1090-1153), who said it first.
I can honestly
say that most of the people I’ve ever met
have seemed to me to be good people.
Sometimes they
might have been very damaged due to past trauma, yes;
and sometimes they might struggle
with mental illnesses
that impair their
judgment;
but on the
whole, I think it is true
that most of the people we encounter
in this world
are normal, everyday
people,
trying to live relatively good and
moral lives,
not seeking to cause harm
or hurt to others.
And yet, there
is so much evil in the world,
as twenty minutes in front of the
evening news will easily demonstrate.
It seems that
the capacity for human beings
to harm and hurt others is almost
without end.
The abuse of
power,
the recourse to violence,
and the dehumanising of
the other,
dominate the
interactions between individuals
in ways that shock and dismay us.
So where does
this evil come from?
There is a
strong tradition within Christianity
to assign the existence of such evil
to an external agency,
to some kind of
supernatural entity that acts upon humans
and causes them to
behave in ways that are contrary to their true nature.
Sometimes this
entity is given a name,
such as the Hebrew word satan which means ‘adversary’,
or the Greek word daibolos which we usually translate as
‘devil’.
Perhaps it is
the case, we tell ourselves,
that the origin of evil lies beyond
the human heart,
coming to us from
somewhere else, from someone or something else.
Maybe this is
why good people can do such terrible things,
even with the best of intentions?
Maybe this is
why some people seem to end up
so consumed by the darkness of dark
deeds
that it can be hard to
discern the flickering embers
of the humanity they
share with the rest of us.
Maybe it’s all
Satan’s fault,
maybe the devil made them do it?
In some ways
this can be a comforting theology,
as it removes the ultimate
responsibility for evil from humanity.
Evil is just
out there, seeking its moment to strike.
All we need to do to avoid it is to
be vigilant, to resist temptation,
to observe whatever practices we
have come to believe will ward off the evil one.
So from prayer
and holiness, to superstition and sorcery,
many people, both within and beyond
the Christian faith,
take such daily actions to keep
Satan at bay from their lives.
But of course
this can also be a terrifying place to live.
Because what if we get it wrong?
What if we let our guard down?
What if Satan gets in? Would we even
know?
I have met
people who have spent many years
petrified that they have let the
Devil into their lives;
whether
through some misguided action,
or simply through a profound lack of
self worth,
there are many whose daily routine
is paralysed by fear of the evil one.
And here, in
today’s reading from Matthew’s gospel,
we meet Jesus using the word Satan
to describe his close friend Peter.
Only a few
moments earlier,
Peter has declared Jesus to be the
Messiah, the Son of the Living God (16.16),
and Jesus has responded
by declaring Peter to be the rock
on which the
church will be built,
which not even the gates
of Hades will overcome.
So it is
something of a shock to find Jesus calling Peter ‘Satan’.
Particularly so
if our understanding of what is meant by ‘Satan’
is determined by the Christian
tradition I’ve just been describing,
in terms of an external,
personified, spiritual being
that seeks to take over the lives of
the unwary
and lead them into deeds
of terrible darkness.
So let’s spend
a few moments now unpacking something of the history of satan,
before returning to our passage from
Matthew
and considering why it might be that
Jesus uses this term of Peter.[1]
I’ve already
said that satan is the Hebrew word
for ‘adversary’;
and the Old Testament speaks in
three places of a personified adversary, or satan.
In Job (chs
1-2) and Zechariah (ch. 3)
we find visionary descriptions of
the heavenly throne room,
which is pictured in terms similar
to the throne room
of an ancient near
eastern ruler
– with God sat in the place of the
king, surrounded by his advisors.
One of these
advisors takes the role of ‘the satan’, or ‘the accuser’,
and seem to have a function similar
to a prosecuting counsel
in a contemporary
courtroom
– his job is to put the other side,
to test the integrity
and righteousness of the person on trial.
Here, the satan is not a personal name,
but a role that one of the members
of the divine court fulfils.
The third
reference to satan in the Old
Testament is found in 1 Chronicles (21.1),
and it refers to a human being who
provokes David
to take a census of Israel, against
the will of God.
In the New
Testament, the word ‘satan’ appears
rather more often,
with 36 references in total, all of
them to a character referred to as ‘the
satan’.
And again, as
in the Old Testament,
the job of ‘the satan’ is to test
human piety
– to put the opposing
view.
The word is
still not a proper name
– our pew Bibles get it
wrong when they capitalise it.
It’s a description of a role, rather
than the name of a person.
It is always
‘the satan’
in the same way as one might say
‘the prosecutor’ or ‘the adversary’.
It is never
just ‘Satan’ the personified being.
That comes later in the Christian
tradition,
with the mythology
surrounding Satan developing through the centuries.
In the early
church, authors like
Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Iraenaeus, and Origen,
conflated other biblical characters
with the idea of ‘satan’
to flesh out the idea of
the adversary as a personified divine being.
So, the serpent
of Genesis 3,
the defeated ‘morning star’ of
Isaiah 14,
and the disgraced king
of Tyre from Ezekiel 28,
all ended up being more closely
associated with the construct of Satan,
than the actual satan
passages themselves!
The
identification of Satan with the serpent associated him with original sin;
the Latin for ‘morning star’, ‘Lucifer’, gave Satan one of his
nicknames;
and the idea that Satan
led a revolution in heaven
before the
creation of humanity
came into being when the
story of the fall of the king of Tyre in Ezekiel
combined
with a saying of Jesus in Luke’s gospel
to form yet another
strand to the emerging mythology of Satan
as a divine
character (Ezek. 28.12-19, Lk. 10.18).
Moving well
beyond the New Testament for a moment,
the Faust legend of the middle ages contributed
the idea
that an ambitious person
can make a ‘deal with the devil’ to achieve success,
while Dante’s Divine Comedy from the early fourteenth century (1308-1321)
depicted Satan as large
and frightful, but ultimately impotent.
In contrast,
Milton’s Paradise Lost from the
seventeenth century (1667)
created a new era in the
mythology of Satan,
giving him a heroic and sympathetic
reading,
despite casting him as
the incarnation of evil
whose agenda is to
overthrow God.
While Milton
may have portrayed Satan as a flawed hero
in order to highlight the grandeur
of God’s victory over him,
many other
more recent writers and artists
have been inspired to take further
this idea of a powerful Satan,
to the extent that in
the popular imagination
Satan has become a kind
of evil counterpart to God,
battling for the control of the
cosmos
and for the ownership of
human souls.
All of which
is a very long way from the biblical picture
of an adversary whose role is to
test human piety.
And if we are
to understand what is going on
when Jesus turns to his friend
Peter,
and says to him, ‘Get behind me, Satan!’,
we need to set aside our inherited Satan mythology,
and we need to set aside our inherited idea
that personified evil lurks round the next
corner,
waiting to take control of us if we let our
guard down.
The picture that emerges
from Jesus’ encounter with Peter
is exactly the opposite of this.
What we come to realise
from this story
is that evil is not an embodied being awaiting his
opportunity,
but rather evil is something that can
originate
from within even the most pious of human
hearts.
Evil takes hold in the
world whenever and wherever
people enact a way of being that is contrary to the way
of God
as revealed through Christ.
Even Peter can take on
the role of the satan.
In Jesus, we encounter
the one in whom the way of God is made flesh.
And what we meet in Jesus is one whose life was dedicated
to the
overcoming of evil in all its forms.
I’ve said before that I
think the root cause of all human sin is idolatry,
and what I mean by this is that whenever God is displaced
from the centre of a person’s life,
the path to hell opens before them.
I think that we each have
the capacity to create hell on earth
when we follow any way of being
that is contrary to the way of God.
And we do this whenever
we give allegiance to any power
other than the will of God as revealed in and through
Christ Jesus.
This is what Peter does
in our passage from Matthew’s gospel,
and this is why Jesus calls him the satan.
Jesus has just been telling
Peter and the other disciples
that he must now go to Jerusalem to be killed.
He has been making it
clear to them that his path is the way of the cross,
and that the only way to overcome evil
is to
submit to its power over life
in order to defeat it with resurrection.
The Christ-like route to
true life
runs through the valley of the shadow of death.
And Peter, it seems, is
right on board with the battle to defeat evil,
Peter is totally committed to the path of overthrowing
the powers-that-be
in the name of the coming kingdom of Christ
Jesus.
But for him, this
doesn’t look like the cross,
it looks like armed insurrection.
It looks like throwing
the Romans out of the city
and expelling them from the land.
It looks like Jesus seated
on David’s throne in the holy city of Jerusalem,
with his disciples by his side.
It looks like the
heavenly throne-room made real on the earth,
as through Jesus, the reign of God begins.
And suddenly, without
meaning to,
Peter finds himself in the position of the satan,
the advisor who tests the resolve of the
king,
the one who argues the alternative path
to that which has been chosen.
Jesus is taking the
difficult, costly, painful path to the cross,
and Peter offers him a far more enticing alternative.
Jesus has met this
temptation before, of course,
in his wilderness wanderings,
when his own internal
battle with the satan
held before him the prospect of the kingdom without the
cross.
And Peter offers him
that same temptation,
and so encounters the same title.
And it is such a
tempting temptation, isn’t it?
To do righteous battle
with the forces of evil in the world,
boldly proclaiming the lordship of Christ over the earth,
taking decisive action to make it real in our
midst.
It is the path of godly
glory,
it is the path of those who get things done,
it is the path of the
activist, the campaigner,
the revolutionary, the crusader,
the freedom fighter, the terrorist…
And that is why good
people end up committing acts of great evil
with the very best of intentions.
As Paul puts it in his
letter to the Romans,
‘Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with
good.’ (12.21).
The way of Christ is not
tit for tat, it is the way of the cross.
It is not the law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a
tooth (Mt. 5.38),
it is the way of the cross.
It is not the path of proportionate and considered
tactical strikes,
it is the way of the cross.
It is not military superiority from the air but no boots
on the ground,
it is the way of the cross.
‘Do not be overcome by
evil, but overcome evil with good.’
The horrific truth is
that evil simply compounds evil,
even when it originates from the best of intentions.
The insight that Jesus
grasped,
which Paul so clearly expressed,
and which Peter struggled so hard to
understand,
is that evil can only be defeated by good.
In many ways, this is
the ultimate choice,
it is the definitive temptation.
Which path will we
choose?
Which path will Peter choose?
Do we, like Peter, feel
the compulsion to take the opportunity
to do good things by earthy means
when the opportunity presents itself?
Do we long to use our
power, influence, and money
to transform the world in line with the kingdom of God?
Or can we instead hear
the quiet call to join Jesus
in rejecting all such attempts to make the Kingdom real
in our midst,
taking instead the costly and sacrificial path
of the cross?
The temptation to use
coercive means
to achieve our ‘right’ ends is always before us.
Whether at a personal or
international level,
whether within our families or between nations,
we need to hear the voice of Jesus calling us to account:
‘If any want to become
my followers,
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?’ (16.24-26).
The way of Jesus is the
path of overcoming evil with good.
It is the way of
salvation
from the hellish and satanic outworkings of human
violence.
Jesus did not come to
save people from a violent God
who is looking to cast them to the depths of hell
if they fail to comply with his will.
Neither did Jesus come
to save people
from Satan’s attempts to steal their souls for eternity.
Rather, Jesus came to
save people from something far more real:
he saves us from the violence that lurks within each
human heart.
He comes to deliver us
from evil,
to save us from satan,
and to lead us through
death to life eternal.
[1]
See the article ‘Satan’ in Dictionary of
the Bible and Western Culture, eds M.A. Beavis and M.J. Gilmour, p. 468.
See also Satan, A Biography, by Henry
Ansgar Kelly, 2006.
