Sweetly Seductive Satan: Sermon Preached on 3rd September 2023 (13th Sunday after Trinity)

Preached at St John’s, Devizes

Readings – Romans 12.9-21; Matthew 16.21-28

“And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him…”

Conjure the scene in your mind: Peter tapping Jesus on the shoulder in front of James and John and all that lot and saying, “Jesus, can I have a word… in private?”

Sometimes there are revealing little details in the Bible that can pass us by our whole lives, even when the stories are very familiar. As I prepared this morning’s sermon, a phrase that caught in my mind for the first time was that when Peter told Jesus not to risk His life in Jerusalem, Peter “took him aside and began to rebuke him.” One wonders what the other disciples thought.

Now, Jesus doesn’t tell Peter off for embarrassing Him in front of the other disciple, but something more dramatic, famously telling him, “Get behind me, Satan!”

Why did Jesus give Peter such a blunt and probably rather hurtful answer? Well, can you remember what last week’s Gospel was? It was Peter working out the Jesus was indeed the Messiah, and Jesus telling Peter that he would be the rock on which He would build His Church. This morning’s reading follows directly on from that story without a break. In all three synoptic Gospels, once Peter works out that Jesus is the Messiah, Jesus begins to tell the disciples that He must suffer and die in Jerusalem – although Luke doesn’t mention Jesus saying “Get behind me, Satan.”

Poor Peter must have been crushed by this. When Jesus told Peter that that He was indeed the Messiah and, better still, that Peter would be the rock of His community, suffering and death would have been the last thing in Peter’s mind. The Messiah was expected to be a great religious, political, and probably military leader. Peter will naturally have thought that Jesus the Messiah would march into Jerusalem, annihilate the Romans in a huge battle, overthrow Herod, and put the scribes and Pharisees in their place. Jesus would then reign as king, and Peter would be something like His Prime Minister. Peter thinks he’ll be a powerful figure in Jesus’s new Kingdom—and, in fact, he is entirely correct in that, but he completely misunderstands what the new Kingdom is.

That doesn’t mean Peter wanted to be some sort of power-hungry apparatchik. The disciples absolutely believed that the Old Testament prophets outlined the sort of Kingdom this Messiah would build. It would be one of genuine righteousness and honesty, where the poor and weak were looked after. It would set such an impressive standard of government that non-Jewish people would flock from the four corners of the Earth to marvel at it. Some of our most-loved passages of the prophets are those that paint a visionary picture of this restored Kingdom of justice and human flourishing.

So, Peter’s vision is fundamentally a decent one. It’s what most people who have ever sought political authority set out to achieve, at least when they were still idealistic and uncorrupted by the realities of getting and retaining power. Perhaps Jesus sees that potential for corruption in the way Peter has so quickly started leaning on his special status as “the Rock”, calling Jesus aside for private chats away from the other disciples, to try to divert Him away from God’s mission and towards Peter’s.

Remember, Satan’s game in Scripture, from his earliest appearance in the Adam and Eve myth, is to tempt humans away from the paths God has set out for us with the idea that we can do things better on our own. The Snake tempts Eve with the idea that she can exceed the limits that God placed on human behaviour, with her and Adam being better off and no harm being done.

Let’s set aside for a moment the question of whether Satan is an actual being who personifies evil, or a mythical concept that depicts deep truths about the human condition, because either way the Devil is a central concept in the Christian story. Jesus talks about Satan a lot—there’s no escaping from that.

Let me throw in one of my favourite lines from St Paul, sadly not in this morning’s epistle reading, that the Devil comes disguised as an angel of light. Even the heavy metal version of Satan, the one who appears in Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath songs, is a fun-loving rule-breaker who has all the best tunes, unlike God – that boring old fart – who wants us to sit on a cloud all day, playing dreary harp music even your granny wouldn’t listen to. The Devil often tempts us with the idea that if only we can always get our way, then the world would be perfect—he doesn’t usually tempt us with the idea of being cruel or selfish for the sake of it, because we’re nice people who instinctively recoil from cruelty or selfishness. Instead he tempts us with the idea that we are in fact perfectly nice and good people who only want good for others.

That’s what’s wrong with Peter’s thinking. Peter thinks if he can be second-in-command to his hero and best pal Jesus in a wonderful new Kingdom, he will only do good. Yet one wonders what Prime Minister Peter would have done to the many people who rejected Jesus’s message in any new utopia, especially given the appalling record throughout history of both religious and atheistic states that claimed to be building utopia.

But Jesus proclaims a different sort of Kingdom, citizenship of which requires people to deny themselves – how opposed that idea is to the dominant culture of the early 21st Century West. In this Kingdom, we are required to take up our crosses and follow Jesus, presumably to that terrible execution, for we all know that life can be crucifying sometimes.

In our epistle reading, St Paul outlines this new Kingdom; the key to it seems to be to trust God. That is the opposite of how both Peter and Eve behaved when they let themselves be tempted by Satan. The rules of this new Kingdom don’t read like the sort of laws we associate with earthly states. Outdo one another in showing honour; rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep; be patient in hope. We are told overcome evil with good and leave vengeance to God. Could you imagine a political party putting this forward in the manifesto for the next general election?

Trusting God in this Kingdom certainly comes with risks, not least leaving ourselves open to being taken advantage of by those who conduct themselves according to the basest worldly standards. There is no guarantee that in this Kingdom that we will be successful in conventional terms.

Then again, neither is there any guarantee that those who chase fame and fortune, or money, or power, or sensation and pleasure, will find what they seek. Yet if we follow Jesus with our crosses, to the death of ourselves as we had understood ourselves, the sufferings of this world are but a passing phase before we are raised with Him to that new and eternal Kingdom. A Kingdom which cannot be imagined except in visions painted by poetic language, and even then in the broadest of strokes.

This Kingdom awaits us if we follow Christ, trusting that its rewards are already ours not because we are good enough for it, any more than Peter was, but because God is love, and that as God in Christ loved Peter, so He loves us. And now to that God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.