If it was a scene written today, it might go something like this:
Josh: “When I go to Jerusalem, I’ll be handed over to the authorities and executed.”
Pete: “Yeah, just quietly, don’t say things like that.”
Josh: “You are actual Satan. Get out. You don’t get it at all. Your brain is stuck on minutiae and you’re problematic to me. Just get away from me.”
Pete: “Woah, where did that come from??”
Okay, its a cheesy paraphrase but it is the scene in Matthew 16:21-23 where Jesus starts to explain to his disciples more clearly what will happen to him. Peter, who along with the disciples, still don’t understand the enormity of what will play out, pulls Jesus to one side and denies emphatically that it could happen the way Jesus describes. Jesus in response famously says “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me because you are not setting your mind on the things of God but on human things.” (16:23).
Ouch. Disproportionate much?
Peter doesn’t realise it but what he has said is a very big deal. Firstly, Peter’s mind is limited and he is speaking to, and trying to advise, Jesus from that perspective. He is still thinking that Jesus will be the kind of king that the Jews have been hoping for, the kind of king who will take power and make everything right. Quite apart from being wrong, Jesus can’t have that kind of attitude influencing the disciples and anyone else. Remember, Jesus has had to carefully manage the message and its timing so it didn’t get out of control. He’s had to tell people repeatedly not to tell anyone what he has done or who he is (cf. Matt. 8:4, Mark Mark 5:43 and 8:29-30 etc). Why? Because the Jewish mob was so desperate for the Messiah to come and deliver them from Roman rule, that they would have hijacked the whole thing. In John 6:15 we see Jesus withdrawing from the people because he knew that they intended to come and make him king by force. The context was volatile. The timing was critical. It had to play out the way that God had willed it.
So Jesus’ response to Peter was harsh because it carried the weight of timing his mission to perfection.
Also, as Jesus’ key disciples – his rock in fact – Peter needed to understand. And sometimes it takes a harsh critique to get people to accept the truth. Peter, Jesus’ rock, had become the rock in Jesus’ path that he could stumble on.Peter had to understand the seriousness of what he had rebuked Jesus with.
There is an additional layer to this though. What Jesus says to Peter here is very similar to what Jesus said to actual Satan in Matt. 4:10. Jesus had told Satan “Go (upage), Satan!” When Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness. Jesus, without food or water for 40 days, in the desert, is offered the whole world by Satan. Jesus responds with this command. It is short and authoritative, with all the imperative that he uses elsewhere to drive out demons (cf. 8:32). With Peter, Jesus says “Get (upage) behind me, Satan!” How come the similarity?
Peter’s words are a temptation to Jesus. We see the effect of temptation in the garden of Gethsemane when Jesus asks God to take this cup from him (Matt. 26:39). Jesus is fully human and as such, feels the full range of human emotions, including fear, sadness, despair and an earnest wish to be freed from what is about to happen.
Jesus’ humanity is possibly on view here also in Matthew 16 with his vehement denial of the temptation. He must deny the temptation and it takes force of will to do so. This might give his response more force than might be expected.
If Jesus as the tempt-ee is on show here, so is the tempt-er. There is a spiritual warfare in evidence with Peter’s lack of understanding providing an opening for Satan to tempt Jesus. So the vehement response is not just to Peter and calling him a name, it is literally to Satan who is acting through Peter’s weakness.
So when you understand Jesus’ side of it, his response to Peter is not disproportionate. This is a critical juncture in the gospel. Jesus is about to begin his final journey. He needs everyone to understand. He needs the good deposit to be guarded. He needs to personally be strong in the face of the temptation to not go down the path he knows he must go.
It is no accident that after this moment of conflict, Jesus tells the rest of the disciples that anyone who wants to go after him must deny themselves, take up their cross and follow. “For whoever wants to save their life will forfeit it, and whoever forfeits their life for my sake will find it. For what good will be it be for a person to gain the whole world and lose their soul in the process?” (16:24-26)
Peter, from his worldly thinking, was forfeiting his soul for the sake of the world. Jesus needed them to flip the script, for his disciples as well as those who came after – including us.
We must be passionate in our following, to the point where we are vehement in our denial of sin. We are not perfect, but the stronger and quicker we get at responding that way to sin, the closer to Christlikeness we will get. Jesus was fully human and so knows what it is like to be tempted, even when in a state of abject hunger, thirst or in the face of saving his own skin and avoiding the death ahead of him. He knows what we face when we are tempted. We need to develop the discipline of shouting “Get behind me, Satan!”