Gospel of Matthew — Get behind me Satan!

Matthew 16:20-23

This is the passage in which Jesus begins to tell the disciples that he must go to Jerusalem, suffer, and be killed. Peter rebukes him — shocking in itself for a disciple to rebuke his master — and Jesus says to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan."

This has always seemed fairly straight forward to me — a real "stop tempting me" moment. I liked what William Barclay says, in this speculative lectio divina thinking about what may have come to Jesus' mind, connecting it to when he was tempted by Satan himself.

Source

We must try to catch the tone of voice in which Jesus speaks. He certainly did not say it with a snarl of anger in his voice and a blaze of indignant passion in his eyes. He said it like a man wounded to the heart, with poignant grief and a kind of shuddering horror. Why should he react like that?

He did so because in that moment there came back to him with cruel force the temptations which he had faced in the wilderness at the beginning of his ministry. There he had been tempted to take the way of power. ... It was precisely these same temptations with which Peter was confronting Jesus all over again.

Nor were these temptations ever wholly absent from the mind of Jesus. Luke sees far into the heart of the Master. At the end of the temptation story, Luke writes: "And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time" (Luke 4:13). Again and again the tempter launched this attack. No one wants a cross; no one wants to die in agony; even in the Garden that same temptation came to Jesus, the temptation to take another way.

And here Peter is offering it to him now. ... Peter was confronting Jesus with that way of escape from the Cross which to the end beckoned to him.

That is why Peter was Satan. Satan literally, means the Adversary. That is why Peter's ideas were not God's but men's. ...

What made the temptation more acute was the fact that it came from one who loved him. Peter spoke as he did only because he loved Jesus so much that he could not bear to think of him treading that dreadful path and dying that awful death. The hardest temptation of all is the one which comes from protecting love. there are times when fond love seeks to deflect us from the perils of the path of God; but the real love is not the love which holds the knight at home, but the love which sends him out to obey the commandments of the chivalry which is given, not to make life easy but to make life great. ... What really wounded Jesus' heart and what really made him speak as he did, was that the tempter spoke to him that day through the fond but mistaken love of Peter's hot heart.

I have often recalled that bit of Luke's gospel which Barclay mentions — "he departed from him until an opportune time" — and wondered when Jesus felt the sting of temptation at times when it wasn't mentioned in the gospels. For that reason, perhaps, Barclay's thoughts here resonate with me.

Quote is from Daily Study Bible Series: Gospel of Matthew, vol. 2 by William Barclay. This series first ran in 2008. I'm refreshing it as I go.