“Who do people say that I am?”
They said in reply,
“John the Baptist, others Elijah,
still others one of the prophets.”
We have already seen that the crowds could be a physical obstacle to an encounter with Jesus. But it seems that even their opinions could be misleading. These were not the outright rejections of Jesus as a charlatan or a fraud that would have characterized groups like the Pharisees. They were just close enough to the truth to confuse the issue. No wonder that Jesus did not rush to convey his identity in easy to misunderstand soundbytes. He didn't want people whom he healed to proclaim him as a healer lest he be considered only a healer. And he didn't want his own disciples to publically proclaim him as messiah since no one had yet to terms with what that would truly mean.
And he asked them,
“But who do you say that I am?”
Peter said to him in reply,
“You are the Christ.”
His own disciples were, after all, in a better position than the crowds to understand him. They didn't just come out to see the show, perhaps experience a miracle, and then head home. They were committed to Jesus. They were present day in and day out, when times were good and when times were bad. In particular, their spirituality had been formed by Jesus witnessing Jesus' own dynamic and living relationship with his Father in heaven. All of this was enough to prepare Peter to receive the revelation that correctly answered the question of Jesus which the crowds could not answer.
Peter said to him in reply,
“You are the Christ.”
This fact may not have been obvious. Jesus' life didn't seem to match what many were expecting of the messiah. Military liberation of Israel from Rome didn't seem to be in his plans. There were also other competing ideas about what the messiah would be. But it is safe to assume that Jesus was not a perfect match for any of these, defying expectations at every turn. Peter's response was as if to say that even in spite of this it was Jesus who would truly fulfill the role of God's anointed one. He was implicitly saying that all of the competing conceptions of messiah were at least partially incorrect. It was Jesus who definitively showed what it meant to be messiah, rather than messiah being some ideal category into which a candidate would need to perfectly fit.
He began to teach them
that the Son of Man must suffer greatly
and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes,
and be killed, and rise after three days.
Although Peter was willing to go a long way in letting Jesus define himself, there were limits. Jesus had already been rejected and opposed by some. But Peter wanted to believe that these were occasional exceptions that would eventually give way to victory in some form or another. He couldn't even imagine a messiah who would be killed. That seemed to imply a greater and more irreversible failure, not something that seemed accidental or merely happened along the way. It is unclear whether he heard that Jesus also predicted his resurrection, and if he heard, whether or not he understood. Even if he had it death must have seemed to him an unnecessary setback that a messiah should not need to undergo. But Jesus had said "must" and by it he meant that this was plan God had always intended. He was, therefore, "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world" (see Revelation 13:8). Yet this "must" was not an imposition by hostile forces beyond his control. By his very prophecy of it he demonstrated that it was a part of his plan. And by his rebuke of Peter he demonstrated, contrary to expectations, that it was not the plan of the enemy.
Then Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.
At this he turned around and, looking at his disciples,
rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan.
You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”
Satan's way was that which seemed easy at first but led ultimately to compromise and disaster. But it didn't require demonic assistance to come into agreement with the devil. Rather it only required thinking in a merely human way rather than considering things from the perspective of God. Trying to create a purely secular, human destiny one could only lead to despair.
I will establish my covenant with you,
that never again shall all bodily creatures be destroyed
by the waters of a flood;
there shall not be another flood to devastate the earth.
God would never again attempt to destroy all creatures so as to start over fresh. But in Jesus he would do what the flood could never have done. He would drown sinfulness and destroy death. The cross was a new sort of flood and it was for this reason that Paul said, "We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life" (see Romans 6:4). Even more truly than after the flood, those who were in Christ were a new creation (see Second Corinthians 5:17). Jesus was truly the messiah, the fulfillment of all of the Scriptures, whether or not the explicitly referred to a messiah. God's plan seemed difficult, but was in fact far better than anything that merely human thinking could concoct.
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