Back

Trinity 14

Reading: Matthew 16: 21-28

28/08/05

God has a plan. It may not make sense to me at times, but I still believe it’s there and he
is seeing it through. Unlike Jesus, I don’t know the details of how I fit into God’s plan,
but I think perhaps that’s a good thing.

In today’s gospel reading Jesus was teaching his disciples about God’s plan for him. He had
to go to Jerusalem, suffer at the hands of the authorities, and be killed. That sounds like
a pretty rotten plan to me, and evidently Simon Peter agreed because he took him on one side
and gave him a good telling off. Good old Peter, the rock on which the church of God would
be built, wanted Jesus to back off from the very action that would bring God’s kingdom into
being. And so, the rock became a stumbling block, and Jesus told him so.

“Get behind me, Satan!” Harsh words, and they must have been hurtful to Simon who had only
just received his new name of Peter the rock for his recognition that Jesus was the Messiah.
But he had so quickly lost his focus on the things of God and had to be brought back. Just
as we can swing between moments of great insight and times of no understanding or
misunderstanding. And just as it was part of God’s plan for Peter, it’s part of his plan for
us.

Jesus didn’t dwell on the negative. As we should come to expect, he used it as a teaching
opportunity. He gathers the disciples around him and tells them, in the words of the Message
translation: “Anyone who intends to come with me has to let me lead. You’re not in the
driver’s seat; I am. Don’t run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I’ll show you how.
Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to finding yourself, your
true self. What kind of deal is it to get everything you want but lose yourself? What could
you ever trade your soul for?”

God knows us so well. He knows how much time and effort we put into getting the things we
want in life. The creature comforts. The job security. The high salary. Our culture tells us
that these are Good Things and we should strive for them. And there is nothing wrong with
wanting or achieving those things, as long as we remember that they are not going to get us
into God’s kingdom. And that is what we really should be striving for.

God does not promise Christians an easy life; far from it. We have to follow where Jesus
leads, and so we can expect to experience suffering as he experienced suffering. Hopefully
none of us will be required to make the ultimate sacrifice as he did, and not everyone here
will have what most people would see as a difficult life, but many of us will experience
some sort of pain or sorrow or denial during our lives. What God does assure us is that
through Jesus, he has been ahead of us on that road of suffering, and he came back to walk
it with us and help us bear our pain.

That is the part of Jesus’s initial teaching that the disciples seem not to have latched
onto in today’s gospel. They got caught up in all the pain and horror of Jesus’s suffering,
but completely failed to notice that while Jesus must go through this, it was because he
also must be raised on the third day. It was all part of the plan. If Jesus had avoided the
pain, he would also have been avoiding the joy – of his own reunion with his Father, and of
all the subsequent reunions as prodigal sons and daughters were reunited with their Father
in heaven.

So Jesus teaches his disciples that self-sacrifice is the way to true life. He’s talking
again about the eternal life we have in him, which is not something we look forward to in
heaven, but something we can claim and experience right now. When we become God’s hands and
heart in our community, when we become the team of builders creating his kingdom here in
North Greenford, when we become the building blocks that make up God’s church, then we find
our true purpose and our true self.

But why did Jesus give his life to God’s plan? And why should we? Why should we bless those
who persecute us? Why should we feed our hungry enemies? Why should we love our neighbour at
all? These are all the self-sacrificing attitudes expected of us as Christians, but why
should we?

Jesus tells his disciples why. “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.” When he comes those
who relieve suffering will be relieved, those who suffer will be avenged and those who cause
suffering will feel the wrath of God. This is judgement, and is also part of God’s plan for
the world.

And finally, he says, “there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see
the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.” And he has come; his kingdom is already here. We are
part of that kingdom, both as builders and as building materials.

You wouldn't necessarily want to know in advance all the pleasure and pain you'd have in
life, but whatever happens, we can take comfort in knowing that God has gone ahead of us and
is with us, through Jesus, and will continue to be with us through the Holy Spirit. We can
know that our joys and pains make us the person we are, whom God loves and wants in his
kingdom. And we can know that we are part of his plan.

Back