SPEAKER_00: Do we have any Edgar Allan Poe fans here today?
SPEAKER_00: All right.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe a little more if somebody's not so sure.
SPEAKER_00: Theron's like, uh, it depends on what you mean by that.
SPEAKER_00: Um, Edgar Allan Poe was an American author.
SPEAKER_00: For those of you who don't know, he was very well known for his poetry, uh, which he better be with the name Poe, right?
SPEAKER_00: I think.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe not.
SPEAKER_00: He was especially known, though, for his short stories, like the horror and the mystery stuff that he would write.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, he's particularly known for the mysterious kind of macabre nature of his writing.
SPEAKER_00: A perfect example is his short story, The Pit and the Pendulum, where a prisoner awakens to find himself trapped in this dark dungeon, and he's bound to a table with this uh deep, seemingly bottomless pit beneath him.
SPEAKER_00: And as he struggles to make sense of his surroundings and his circumstances, he discovers something horrifying: a razor-sharp pendulum slowly swinging above him, dropping just a little bit lower with every pass, designed by his captors as an instrument not only of death, but of cruel psychological torture.
SPEAKER_00: He desperately looks for a way to escape.
SPEAKER_00: But the blade keeps coming.
SPEAKER_00: It swings back and forth, back and forth, slowly but surely.
SPEAKER_00: Poe writes paragraph after haunting paragraph of the man's internal dialogue and his disorientation and the rank fear that overcomes him.
SPEAKER_00: With the pit below and the pendulum above, his death is inevitable.
SPEAKER_00: And the terrifying thing is that he can see it coming.
SPEAKER_00: But suddenly, not to spoil anything for you, it's a 200-year-old story, so it's kind of your fault, but the story ends with a massive twist.
SPEAKER_00: The man hears a voice above him, and his captors are defeated, and all of a sudden he is saved.
SPEAKER_00: Everything changes in a moment.
SPEAKER_00: Well, today we encountered a similarly jarring shift in the Gospel of Matthew, along with a bunch of other parallels we'll be talking about.
SPEAKER_00: Last week we got to hear Peter's great confession of faith, one of the most beautiful in all of Scripture, and we got to profess along with him that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.
SPEAKER_00: And this was a huge triumph.
SPEAKER_00: Peter gets it.
SPEAKER_00: Peter has understood who Jesus is and declares it boldly and clearly.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus even makes a play on words with his name, which means rock, saying that on this faith expressed by Peter, Jesus is going to build his church.
SPEAKER_00: But what a jarring shift we've had today.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus goes from saying, You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, to get behind me, Satan.
SPEAKER_00: It's an almost comical juxtaposition that Matthew gives us, and that's the point.
SPEAKER_00: Peter has swung wildly back and forth.
SPEAKER_00: Poe gave us the pit and the pendulum, but some 1800 years earlier, Matthew gave us Pete and the pendulum.
SPEAKER_00: Today I'd like to examine all of this together with you and see what Jesus has to teach us.
SPEAKER_00: And it starts with what Jesus began to teach his disciples as he makes a shocking declaration.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus makes absolutely explicit, something he's been implying for quite a while.
SPEAKER_00: This is actually a major turning point in Matthew's gospel, and it can be easy to miss.
SPEAKER_00: But listen to this.
SPEAKER_00: From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.
SPEAKER_00: Throughout the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus has been heading in a very clear and very specific direction from the start, even before his birth.
SPEAKER_00: The angel had told Joseph at the very beginning of the gospel that Jesus was coming to save his people from their sins.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus had talked about the sign of Jonah's death and resurrection.
SPEAKER_00: It's been clear for a while that the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees is amping up and approaching what is going to be a deadly climax.
SPEAKER_00: But here Jesus makes it plain.
SPEAKER_00: He must go to Jerusalem and suffer and die and be raised.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus uses a Greek word that speaks of necessity, divine necessity.
SPEAKER_00: It is necessary that Jesus goes to Jerusalem to die.
SPEAKER_00: It's been his mission all along.
SPEAKER_00: And while his latest trip up north has cooled the tension for a little bit, now it's time.
SPEAKER_00: The rest of Matthew's gospel will be laser-focused on Jesus' trek to the cross.
SPEAKER_00: It's what he came for.
SPEAKER_00: For Jesus, it is necessary.
SPEAKER_00: But for Peter, it's unthinkable.
SPEAKER_00: Last week we were rightly impressed by the boldness with which Peter confessed his faith, but now Peter puts that boldness to work in all the wrong ways.
SPEAKER_00: Matthew says that he takes Jesus aside and rebukes him.
SPEAKER_00: Can you imagine rebuking the one you have just declared to be the Christ, the Son of the living God?
SPEAKER_00: Peter's reaction to the shocking declaration of Jesus is so visceral that he can't help himself from recoiling from it and proclaiming to Jesus, Far be it from you, Lord, this shall never happen to you.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus had said it must happen.
SPEAKER_00: Peter says it shall never happen.
SPEAKER_00: Peter is directly confronting the one he knows to be the Son of God, and this directly on the heels of his great profession of faith.
SPEAKER_00: What a disappointing vacillation.
SPEAKER_00: Like the pendulum in Poe's dark story, Peter has swung all the way from one side to the other.
SPEAKER_00: And this is not a gradual drift.
SPEAKER_00: Matthew presents it as near immediate.
SPEAKER_00: Peter, the rock of true faith, has immediately become a stumbling block, an obstacle placed squarely in Jesus' path.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus himself has never wavered.
SPEAKER_00: His mission has never changed.
SPEAKER_00: But now Peter's rejection of that mission is threatening to divert Jesus from the road to the cross down a different path.
SPEAKER_00: A path devoid of suffering, devoid of death, and therefore a path devoid of resurrection.
SPEAKER_00: So Jesus responds by making clear exactly where this rejection is coming from.
SPEAKER_00: It is truly diabolical.
SPEAKER_00: Peter has gone from being the mouthpiece of the believing disciples to speaking for the great adversary.
SPEAKER_00: He has set himself against God and his anointed.
SPEAKER_00: And the only thing that can be done with such an obstacle is for it to be removed.
SPEAKER_00: The uncomfortable thing about all this, of course, is that we have the same problem that Peter does.
SPEAKER_00: Like Peter, how often do we fall into the trap of insisting that God's way of dealing with the world and its evil should conform to our way?
SPEAKER_00: How often do we see true triumph as consisting only of the exertion of power and superiority and the trappings of worldly success?
SPEAKER_00: How often do we recoil when we or those we love experience great suffering?
SPEAKER_00: Like Peter, we vacillate wildly.
SPEAKER_00: We swing like a pendulum back and forth, back and forth, between faithfulness and unfaithfulness, trust and doubt, great strength and withering weakness.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes with a terrifying immediacy, we sway between generosity and selfishness, humility and pride, purity and lust.
SPEAKER_00: We deal with mood swings, rapidly changing life circumstances that knock the wind out of us.
SPEAKER_00: Our obedience and commitment and confidence all waver and swing wildly back and forth with deadly effect.
SPEAKER_00: We confess our faith with boldness one day, and find ourselves questioning it the next.
SPEAKER_00: When the hard things of life press in on us like the walls of an ever shrinking pit, we end up feeling like Poe's protagonist, trapped and hopeless.
SPEAKER_00: Like Jeremiah did in our Old Testament reading today, with pain unceasing and wound incurable.
SPEAKER_00: Like Peter, our faith gets mingled with misunderstanding.
SPEAKER_00: We look for forgiveness without repentance, discipleship without self-denial, resurrection without crucifixion.
SPEAKER_00: Martin Luther talked about this type of thing in the Heidelberg disputation in 1518.
SPEAKER_00: There he famously contrasted what he called theology of the gl of theology of glory with the theology of the cross.
SPEAKER_00: A theologian of glory sounds really good, but he's way off base.
SPEAKER_00: Luther says that he prefers works to suffering, glory to the cross, strength to weakness, wisdom to folly.
SPEAKER_00: Now we love all the stuff in the left column as we think about what the theologian of glory prefers.
SPEAKER_00: And yet Jesus came to us with all the stuff on the other side: suffering and cross and weakness and folly.
SPEAKER_00: Peter found it foolish.
SPEAKER_00: But it was necessary for Jesus to suffer, die, and rise.
SPEAKER_00: Peter is trying to tell Jesus what he is the Christ ought to do.
SPEAKER_00: But Jesus is teaching us today that you cannot understand him at all apart from the cross.
SPEAKER_00: Peter looks at the cross and sees the death of the Son of God as the ultimate, most unthinkable evil.
SPEAKER_00: God looks at the cross as what is going to bring about the greatest possible good for sinners.
SPEAKER_00: Peter is swinging toward a theology of glory.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is swinging like a divine wrecking ball straight toward the cross.
SPEAKER_00: Peter was setting his mind on the things of man, not the things of God.
SPEAKER_00: And by correcting Peter in this way, Jesus is teaching us that the things of God are found in weakness and suffering and death.
SPEAKER_00: You cannot understand Jesus at all, apart from the cross.
SPEAKER_00: But the cross is the very solution to our wildest vacillations.
SPEAKER_00: The approaching crucifixion of Jesus will be the very thing that will arrest the swing swing from the tangles of our hearts and stop our sin dead in its tracks.
SPEAKER_00: Like the protagonist in the pit and the pendulum, Jesus knows death is on the way.
SPEAKER_00: The circumstances are dire and unavoidable.
SPEAKER_00: Just like in that story, death is inevitable, and the terrifying thing is that he can see it coming.
SPEAKER_00: But unlike in that story, Jesus is no helpless victim.
SPEAKER_00: He goes willingly, with glorious purpose.
SPEAKER_00: And the story ends not with Jesus' escape from death, but with ours.
SPEAKER_00: Like Peter, our hearts and our words and our faithfulness are unstable.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is not.
SPEAKER_00: Peter vacillates, but Jesus doesn't.
SPEAKER_00: Not for an instant.
SPEAKER_00: He is on a collision course with sin, death, and hell, and it will cost him his life.
SPEAKER_00: But that's been the plan all along.
SPEAKER_00: That's the kind of Messiah Jesus is, the one prophesied throughout the ages.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, and what that means is that he came to give up everything for us.
SPEAKER_00: Peter wants Jesus to save his own life.
SPEAKER_00: But Jesus knows that whoever would save his life will lose it.
SPEAKER_00: And so Jesus loses his life for our sake, so that our life might be found in him.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus took all of our mingled and mangled misunderstanding and put it to death.
SPEAKER_00: And that's why Jesus says all that stuff he says today about discipleship.
SPEAKER_00: He calls us to deny ourselves, to take up our cross, to follow him, to lose our lives for his sake.
SPEAKER_00: When it comes to true discipleship, Jesus shows us that it's only available in one model, the one shaped exactly like his cross.
SPEAKER_00: Peter wants to take Jesus away from the cross.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus calls Peter and all of us to follow him to the cross.
SPEAKER_00: And Peter, redeemed by the love of Jesus, would answer that call.
SPEAKER_00: When our family was in Rome a couple months ago, we got to see so much amazing stuff, and included in that is just world-class art.
SPEAKER_00: It was truly humbling.
SPEAKER_00: And one of the most humbling and striking paintings that we saw was this one by Caravaggio.
SPEAKER_00: It's a depiction of Peter's martyrdom.
SPEAKER_00: In the end, Peter followed Jesus to the cross.
SPEAKER_00: Literally.
SPEAKER_00: He set his mind on the things of God.
SPEAKER_00: And that cross led to a crown.
SPEAKER_00: Following Jesus means finding his presence in suffering and sorrow.
SPEAKER_00: True discipleship is not the one that proves itself strong enough or saintly enough or even sacrificial enough, but the one that finds in the sacrifice of Jesus true and eternal life.
SPEAKER_00: Because it was necessary for Jesus to suffer and die.
SPEAKER_00: And then it was necessary for Jesus to rise from the dead.
SPEAKER_00: And he did.
SPEAKER_00: And those who spoke to Jesus that day when he corrected Peter would see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.
SPEAKER_00: And so will we.
SPEAKER_00: Our crucified and risen Lord Jesus is coming again.
SPEAKER_00: And his call and his invitation is for us to set our mind on the things of God, to look to his death and his resurrection, to trust that even when we vacillate and find ourselves all over the place, what he did for us at the place of the skull has ransomed us for all eternity.
SPEAKER_00: Today we may we continue to confess with Peter that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.
SPEAKER_00: And may we follow him to the cross through death in the grave and into eternal life.
SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: May the peace of God, which transcends our understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord, now and forever.