22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A. Jeremiah 20:7-9 · Psalm 63 · Romans 12:1-2 · Matthew 16:21-27
For the first time, Jesus tells his disciples that he will go to Jerusalem, suffer there and be killed.
Last Sunday's reading ended a few verses earlier. There Jesus asks the disciples who people say he is, and they report what is going around. Peter is the only one who answers with a sentence of his own, and for that he is called the rock that will be built on. He is also given the keys, which is to say the authority to decide what holds.
A reader wrote to me afterwards that the entry said Peter commits himself, but not what for. Whether a man answers like that out of conviction or because it secures his place is not something you can see from outside. And whether someone who has committed himself that far can still contradict later was the question that stayed open. This Sunday Peter is again at the centre.
He takes Jesus aside, and instead of asking whether he has understood him rightly, he corrects him. God forbid, Lord. This must not happen to you. Jesus turns and says to him: Get behind me, Satan. You are an obstacle to me, for you are not thinking as God thinks but as people do.
That lands. The answer does not go to the matter. Nowhere does it say that Peter is wrong. That suffering and dying are bad is not disputed. What is disputed is the measure he has been reckoning with: he wants the other man to stay alive. For me the harshness of the passage lies not in the word Satan but in the clause that follows. There is nothing left to say to that. Whoever answers only confirms that he thinks in the way he has just been accused of thinking. What remains is to keep quiet, to comply, or to go.
And then there is where the measure comes from that he is using here. He was given it last Sunday, together with the keys. Now he invokes it for the first time, God forbid, and in doing so he learns that he does not have in mind what God wants.
This happens in organisations too. A division head, six weeks in office, brought in precisely because she knows the place from below. In her first large meeting she says that the schedule for the changeover will not hold, and she says how she knows. The answer is that she is still thinking like a department manager. The schedule is not discussed again that day. She keeps her office and she keeps her seat in the room. The next time, she does not raise it.
This Sunday's first reading comes from someone who did not stop. Whenever I speak, Jeremiah says, I have to cry out, I have to shout violence and oppression, and the word of the Lord brings me nothing but derision all day long. What he says sounds absurd to the others. He has nothing to show but what he sees, and no one answers that. They laugh at him. It is the cheapest way to be rid of an objection, because it needs no reasons.
For the others the laughter has its use. As long as one man is the one who always starts with it, nobody has to check whether it is true. It costs them nothing, it works reliably, and he is the one who pays.
Jeremiah wants to stop. But when he says he will not speak in that name again, a fire burns in him, shut up in his bones, and he cannot hold it in. He tried and could not. That is where the reading ends, before any answer.
That is the vice that people are caught in who see something early. Stopping does not work, because what has been seen does not go away when it is no longer said. Going on does not work either, because every further time confirms who you are in that room. Whoever is stuck in it for long does not grow tired from the work, but from running against it.
For me Jeremiah and Peter stand very close to each other this Sunday. Neither of them gets an answer to what he says. They get one about themselves, the one laughter, the other a sentence about his thinking.
With Peter, though, there is something else as well. Get behind me, he has heard. A verse later Jesus says to them all: whoever wants to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross and follow. Behind him, both times, is the same place: the one Peter is sent back to, and the one everyone is invited to. What sounds consoling in that is only half consoling, because a person can belong and still have fallen silent. The division head knows this.
What actually becomes of Peter? The reading does not say. He dies years later in Rome, executed, at the very end he wanted to talk the other man out of.
This is a reading aid, not a second full version. Zugemutet reads the four texts of the Catholic lectionary each Sunday for what they say about living together. The texts are given; I listen for what comes across.