Get behind me, Satan

22^nd Sun in Ord Time   SJU Aug 30

Who is this Jeremiah, this Old Testament prophet who complains telling God how ruthlessly God is treating him? “You duped me, overwhelmed me.  And because you force me to speak the truth about your people’s corruption, I am mocked and scorned in the public square.   And it is your fault.   But it exhausts me to keep silent.”

Lots of complaints to God but he continues to answer his call.   He engages in condemning the Jewish leadership for forty years or so until they are hauled off to Babylonia.   He himself accompanies a group of Jews who flee to Egypt and there is a widespread belief that he dies at their hands some years later.

Yes, a classic complainer.  Most of us complain to God about something or other.  I am happy, for example, to know that the Son of God came in Jesus Christ to experience our human life.    But then I complain that Jesus died young and really doesn’t know about the experience of a full human life into the mature years.   And I get the answer from Jesus that fits many of us here.   “You are among those called to live a long life.  You have been chosen to fulfill what I was unable to experience.”   Yes, I hear that encouragement. But, then, I do think of one of the Jesuits ordained with me on the same day years ago.   He died suddenly just two years after our ordination, a terrible loss.   Now that blessed guy, however, has 50 years of heaven under his belt, 50 more years than I will ever have.   But I shouldn’t complain. Indeed some of us ask him for graces from time to time and I believe he helps us.

Now there are, of course, in the public media many Catholic voices these days who earn the right to really complain just like Jeremiah.    They encounter ugliness and hate speech on the social networks, even sometimes threats to their lives.   Bishop Robert Barron believes that there are people who actually work hard to discredit him by using AI to create a huge community of detractors.   Pope Francis and Jesuit Jim Martin encounter similar reactions.  As these men deliver the Word of the Lord, they can easily complain like Jeremiah that it “brings them derision and reproach all the day.”

But let’s turn now to our third reading, the gospel reading today.   I want to look at it because it features Jesus with a personal complaint directed to one of his disciples.  Jesus is so upset that he curses his follower, the disciple Peter who later becomes the one we recognize as the first Pope.   We remind ourselves about the context of this surprising curse: that is, for already a year or two Jesus has been leading the disciples as they join in preaching about the coming kingdom of God.   Apparently, like many others in the day, Peter expected this kingdom of God to be led by a triumphant Messiah whose reign would bring unparalleled strength and integrity to Israel.   Finally, however, Jesus decides to mince no words and he tells his disciples about the suffering and death that he will endure under the Temple leadership.

Peter is absolutely incredulous and, though still fresh from calling Jesus the Messiah, boldly contradicts Jesus:   “Suffering and death!  No such thing will ever happen to you.”  But Jesus turns his back to Peter and rebukes him naming Peter with the name of his own deadly enemy:  “Get behind me, Satan.  You don’t know anything about how God thinks.”   These words of Jesus, “Get behind me, Satan”, remind us of similar words he used when, much earlier before he begins his mission, he himself is in the wilderness and tempted by the devil.   There he dismisses the devil with these words: “Begone, Satan.”   His use of a strikingly similar phrase with Peter indicates that Peter’s remark is a troubling reminder to Jesus of the temptations in the wilderness.   Peter must be defiantly dismissed.

This flash of temper from Jesus seems to me to be a sign of how troublesome the future appears even to him.   Indeed, later right before the arrest of Jesus, Matthew writes about him in the Garden of Gethsemane with these words: “Anguish and distress came over him.”  Here, however, after dismissing Peter, Jesus collects himself and immediately finds the voice with which his Father blesses him.   He realizes here and now that he has not instructed the disciples very well about how the Father has planned the life of his Son and how they, too, hearing about this plan, are to act.   Yes, the two great commandments are love of God and love of neighbor.  But their practice will demand from those who follow Jesus a radical kind of love.   So immediately Jesus uses this occasion after his striking rebuke of Peter to tell his followers the whole truth, a part of which we just read.           "Those who wish to come after me must deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me.  For those who  wish to save their lives will lose them, but those who lose their lives for my sake will find them.” 

Matthew records here no questions or comments from the disciples even though they have just been directed to die to themselves. Really!  Surely some of them must have wondered what this meant?  Were they going to face crucifixion, too?     Some one of them must have thought about Jesus's first instruction to them, “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand”.    Is this death to self the essence of repenting and accepting the Kingdom of God?

Yes, I would love to hear how the disciples talked among themselves or with Jesus. What did they think about finding life through death to self for his sake.   But absent their comments, let us all think of our own approaches:

There are, of course, quite graphic examples of people who died to themselves just as Jesus did: Jean Donovan, Maryknoll lay missionary: though easily destined for a very comfortable life, instead was brutally murdered in El Salvador in 1980, because she loved and served the poor.  

But death to self happens in a great variety of ways:  I think of a very successful and gifted older man whose days off were usually spent on the golf course.    But after his retirement his wife was severely struck by Alzheimer’s disease.   For a year or two He spent the major part of each day at her nursing home bedside, she never once able to acknowledge him as someone she knew. 

 I pray for the help of Jean Donovan and my friend, the golfer.  We are called to join them and die to ourselves every day.   Dying to our laziness, dying to our doubt and cynicism, dying to our pride, dying to our self-pity, and, along those lines of self-pity, of course, dying to public complaints about personal things big and small.   If we lose our lives for the sake of Christ, we will surely find them.