What makes for Peter’s fall from grace? And there will be more occasions for him to stumble after this.
The notion of a Messiah is loaded with revolutionary ideals. Israel was an oppressed nation and as a people under One God, the reality of being ruled by pagan Romans who worshipped false gods was chafing or degradingly undignified, to say the least. Like for example to have a “Chinese or Indian” PM in a certain country. Hence, to consider Christ as a rebel leader opens up possibilities and Peter was not wrong in thinking about this. If Christ were to be the new Daniel, then Peter must have had an inkling about how Jesus should behave. Given the first of three predictions about the coming Passion that Jesus had to endure, Peter would have struggled to reconcile the concept of a leader with that of a servant. More than serving, this is a Leader who will lay down His life for His sheep. Indeed this was a paradox which Peter could not grasp.
But Peter is not alone in rejecting Christ as the Suffering Servant.
The mystery that all Disciples must come to terms with is the Cross. Good Friday comes before Easter Sunday. But the world is increasingly uncomfortable with even a fleeting shadow of the Cross. There is a stream of Christianity that preaches the Gospel of Prosperity which in a way rejects the Cross. This theology is not entirely unfounded because it flows from an Old Testament mentality which spoke little of the afterlife and focused more on this life. God blesses and He cannot be outdone in his generosity. Prosperity or material progress, which is a good, is the result of God’s blessing and it roughly follows a principle of tit for tat or reward and punishment. Blessing is God’s reward and mishap is God’s punishment. That was how Job’s friends conceived of his misfortunes.
This kind of Gospel is tempting. Be generous with God and He will bless you. However, the life of Christ stands against this kind of simple equation. He gave everything to His Father and yet He paid the price for our salvation with His Body crucified and His blood poured out.
Akin to the rejection of the Cross found in the Gospel of Prosperity is the idea of wellness in the Gospel of Therapy. The central tenet of a therapeutic religion is that people are supposed to be happy and feel good about themselves. In fact, God wants that of us, if we were to follow the definition of God as love. We have an entire supplement industry that promotes well-being to achieve wellness. There is a hunger for spirituality and relationship with God; a vacuum which wellness capitalises on. Wellness is endorsed as a holistic approach to healthy living, characterised by physical, mental and social well-being. We need to be well in order to live a more meaningful and beautiful life. The demand for therapeutic wholeness also tries to blot out discomfort or suffering.
Nobody likes to suffer. Perhaps we can understand from a human health perspective why Peter reacted the way he did to Jesus.
Christ offered an alternative which in a way Job may have understood. Job’s friends felt that his misfortunes were signs of God’s displeasure though the answer that Job finally received from the Lord was ambiguous. In a way, the righteous Job prefigured Jesus. Like righteous and moral Job, Christ Himself was innocent and yet His would be a life marked by suffering and ultimately by His humiliating death on the Cross.
Even if we do not preach a Gospel of Prosperity, many of us are like Peter in rejecting the Cross. Somehow, we have embraced its fruit by believing that God should bless us because we have been good and we have come to believe that discipleship is incompatible with suffering.
Imagine your grandparents or great grandparents. Divorce was almost unheard of amongst that class of people. Was it because of taboo? Maybe. Perhaps our ancestors held a view which did not exclude suffering from their discipleship. On the day of their wedding, they made a promise to God that they would remain together through thick and thin, in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. They accepted the suffering they had to endure, not that they deserved to endure it.
Given that we live with both prosperity as a right and wellness as a goal, it is unthinkable to propose to a person who believes that he or she has made a mistake, to stay in a marriage because we operate under the principle that suffering is something to be avoided at all costs. Again, this does not mean that a person deserves to suffer.
Both the Gospels of Prosperity and Wellness have as their goal, the attainment of heaven or whatever conditions are associated with heaven here on earth. Unfortunately, heaven cannot be located within this realm, no matter how much we try. Thus, we are left unfulfilled and in a way that explains why there is suffering.
Broadly speaking there are two types of suffering. Firstly, according to Buddha, the root of suffering is desire or ignorance. For example where there is lust, you would think that satisfying one’s lust would lead to fulfilment. The reality is that when there is unbridled lust, there is never enough “love”. In a way, some people will have to suffer not because they deserve it but because they need to purify their desires and wants. The second type of suffering which Jesus tried to school Peter and the rest of the Disciples arose from His mission to save souls. In Him, suffering is not incompatible with life. In fact, in Christ, innocent suffering has been raised to the dignity of redemption. Look at the recent saints who suffered bodily. Therese de Lisieux or Bernadette Soubirous. Both suffered painful deaths. Or think of Carlo Acutis who died from leukaemia at the age of 15. He taught us what it means to suffer. He offered his sufferings for Pope Benedict XVI and for the Church, saying "I offer all the suffering I will have to suffer for the Lord, for the Pope, and the Church”. We suffer because heaven is not meant to fit us. Instead, we are meant to fit into heaven which means we suffer as we die to selfishness and sin. However, there is always innocent suffering which means that we have been called to follow Christ closely like the saints mentioned above. Setting their eyes on heaven these saints endured profound suffering because they have faith that after their Calvary there is the Resurrection and Ascension. This beatific vision rests on the assurance that the end of this earthly journey is a hope which lives forever and a happiness that is complete in Christ Jesus our Lord.
