Why Does Jesus Rebuke Peter After Giving Him The Keys?

In last week’s text, we had Jesus asking who do you say I am, then Peter stepping forward and said, “You are the Christ. You are the Son of the Living God.” Then Jesus said it wasn’t flesh and blood that revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. You are Peter, and on this rock, I will be in my church. And so Jesus renames Peter from Simon to Peter, and he forms this Peter – this rock, petros, and builds his church on it.

Right after that, Jesus is taking them aside and saying to them that the Son of Man is destined to suffer grievously at the hands of the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and will be put to death, but will be raised on the third day. So Jesus is starting now to look at his passion. He’s in the furthest place away from Jerusalem. He is at the outpost of the empire and there’s only one place to go now, and that’s to turn around and head right back to Jerusalem, and he’s setting his sight towards Jerusalem, and saying to them, this is what’s going to happen. We’re heading to suffering, we’re heading to death, we’re heading to my destruction, and that’s where we’re going.

Peter was recently named the man in charge; the Overlord of the house; second in command only to Jesus himself. He just got a new name and a new position, and he is now exercising his position and he’s calling Jesus aside and saying, “No no no! This is not how we’re going down. We’re not going down into Jerusalem for you to suffer and all this kind of foolishness. Heaven preserve you Lord! This is not going to go down that way!” So Peter now gets another name. Jesus says to him, “Get behind me Satan because the way you think is not God’s way but man’s way. You are an obstacle in my path.”

Now, how do you move from getting the keys to becoming the satan in two easy steps? Only Peter could do that, but this is an instructive text because in it, Jesus is teaching us about the nature of his church, and about the nature of leadership in the church and the nature of discipleship in this church. What is interesting is that he opens the text from the 12 to all disciples down to the middle of the text, and that shift we also have to see because it is instructed for every single one of us.

What we have in this text is really a revelation not just about where Jesus is heading, but a revelation about the true nature of discipleship itself, and what we need if we are going to be disciples of Jesus Christ.