The Rebuke (Mark 8:31-38)

I remember “The Jesus Movement” of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. I was a teenager, and hearing that Jesus loved me and had a wonderful plan for my life filled me with excitement. I held tightly to the promise in Proverbs 3:6 that if I acknowledged God in all my ways that He would direct my path. When I put the promise of a wonderful plan that He would direct me in together with the Psalm 37:4 that said if I delighted in the Lord He would give me my heart’s desires, I felt that I’d found the perfect formula for a happy life. I think my assumptions of what it meant to be a follower  of Jesus lined up with Peter’s. I understand why he rebuked Jesus.

It was a climactic moment when at last what everyone had been thinking was out in the open. Jesus had asked, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter had said what all the disciples felt, “You are the Messiah!” What was the unspoken expectation? Their understanding of Messiah was someone who would purge Jerusalem from those who trampled her. He would come in might and destroy the godless nations. But instead Jesus began to talk about suffering. Peter’s response was take Jesus aside to rebuke Him.

In the Greek the word used for rebuke has a fundamental sense of “warning to prevent something from going wrong.”* Peter had to rebuke Jesus, because the suffering, rejection and death that Jesus was describing did not fit into his understanding of the Messiah. He was desperately trying to redirect what Jesus was saying and to keep Jesus on mission.

Peter had tried to rebuke Jesus in private, but when Jesus rebuked Peter He turned around and looked at His disciples and said, “Get behind Me, Satan, because you’re not thinking about God’s concerns but man’s!” (Mark 8:33). They all needed to hear the rebuke and to have their thinking redirected. Jesus then summoned the crowd and explained what it meant to be His follower. “If anyone wants to be My follower, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me” (Mark 8:34).

When I was a teenager I was in some ways like Peter and the disciples. I was looking at Jesus as a way to have a happy life. I was thinking in temporal terms and not in eternal terms. We can hear the results of how Jesus redirected Peter’s understanding in the conclusion to his first epistle. “Now the God of all grace,who called you to His eternal glory in Christ Jesus, will personally restore, establish, strengthen, and support you after you have suffered a little. To Him be the dominion forever” (Mark 8:31-37). By rebuking Peter Jesus redirected his attention from earthly glory to eternal glory. It was such a greater gift than Peter or I could have ever imagined.

*HELPS Word-studies epitimao (“to warn by instructing”) correct (re-direct) “warning to prevent something from going wrong.”