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I grew up going to Advent Episcopal School which also happened to be connected to the church my family attended. At church, I sang in the choir, and I loved it.
Advent School also had a choir, a really good one. You had to try out for it and everything. But I wasn’t interested in trying out.
One day, my mom asked me point blank what was going on. I told her that I was worried that if I joined the school choir, I wouldn’t be able to sing in the church choir. She immediately pointed out to me why and how that was not the case in a way which I could hear and listen to her. As a result, more musical world was able to expand as I began to sing in both choirs.
It’s funny how children are, so convinced about how the world works only to find out how wrong that is. But adults are often not much better. Peter certainly wasn’t.
Our Gospel lesson today is actually a direct continuation of last week’s Gospel. There, Peter had the great accomplishment of telling Jesus exactly who He is: “the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Jesus praises Peter for realizing this.
Today, Jesus tells the Disciples what that means. It doesn’t mean riding into power and taking Jerusalem back from the Romans. It means suffering and dying at the hands of them in fact.
This goes against everything in Peter’s little worldview. This isn’t who the Messiah is. This isn’t what He’s supposed to do. That is what Peter tells Him that all that Jesus has said should never happen.
This is when Jesus gives the famous “Get behind me, Satan!” line. What Peter has said might fit in with Peter’s understanding of the world, but it doesn’t fit in with God’s ultimate plan.
Like Peter, and like my 9-year-old self, we all have ways we see the world. We all have understandings about the way things are, or at least how they should be. Sometimes these ideas fall in the face of reality. Sometimes they even go against what it is that God would have us do.
Unlike Peter, unlike our baser natures, we need to take the time to really listen to what it is that God is telling us. We have to be willing to accept that we are wrong from time to time, if not more often. We have to be willing to accept that what God wants and what God has in store for us may be different than what we thought or imagined.
We break this cycle when we start listening to what God has to say. It may go beyond our expectations, but when we do listen to God, we find the world is opened up and something that might seem bad, like Jesus dying, might actually lead to something incredible, such as the Resurrection of all of us in new life with Jesus. Don’t get stuck in your own world. Listen to what it is that God has to say.