Inadvertently Peter’s horror over the prospect of Jesus’s crucifixion reveals the greatest moral danger that we face – our fear of ‘what people will think’ if we are disgraced, even if that disgrace is entirely unmerited.
Surely Peter’s recognition of Jesus as the Son of God includes the expectation that it is Jesus alone who will have the power to decide who will live and who will die, for that was the way to ‘glory’ in the ancient world. To forget that crucifixion was above all an act of social shaming – and that Peter himself, as Jesus’s foremost supporter was sure that he would necessarily share in the shame of his master’s disgrace – is to miss the most important aspect of this exchange.
It is also to miss the point of Jesus’s reference to Satan – whose greatest power over us is our fear of ‘what people think’. In giving way to this fear Peter is standing in the way of the supreme event in human history – the facing by one man, alone, of the fear of what people think. This is what Jesus meant by saying ‘I have overcome the world’.
That Jesus faced that fear solely to placate his Father is entirely to miss the Trinity’s intention for our own liberation – this side of death – from the fear of ‘what people think’. That we recite the Creed these days from mere habit is the unfortunate effect of a medieval theology that replaced the earliest understanding of the Cross – that it broke the power of Satan – he who makes us shame one another rather than realise that no one has the power to shame anyone for doing what love commands.
It was Caesarism, human imperialism, that deployed the power of Satan, the power to kill the body, as the ultimate weapon against Jesus. It was Jesus who destroyed that power, as Peter was to realise. As a consequence Christianity has long outlived the Roman empire. If it is to overcome the secular challenge it must recover the full meaning of Jesus’s claim to have overcome the world.
‘What people think’ is almost always transient, insecure – and passing away. Only the truth endures, and He is at our back.
We need to say the Creed in that firm belief, especially whenever we feel challenged nowadays by ‘what people think’.
Inadvertently Peter’s horror over the prospect of Jesus’s crucifixion reveals the greatest moral danger that we face – our fear of ‘what people will think’ if we are disgraced, even if that disgrace is entirely unmerited.
Surely Peter’s recognition of Jesus as the Son of God includes the expectation that it is Jesus alone who will have the power to decide who will live and who will die, for that was the way to ‘glory’ in the ancient world. To forget that crucifixion was above all an act of social shaming – and that Peter himself, as Jesus’s foremost supporter was sure that he would necessarily share in the shame of his master’s disgrace – is to miss the most important aspect of this exchange.
It is also to miss the point of Jesus’s reference to Satan – whose greatest power over us is our fear of ‘what people think’. In giving way to this fear Peter is standing in the way of the supreme event in human history – the facing by one man, alone, of the fear of what people think. This is what Jesus meant by saying ‘I have overcome the world’.
That Jesus faced that fear solely to placate his Father is entirely to miss the Trinity’s intention for our own liberation – this side of death – from the fear of ‘what people think’. That we recite the Creed these days from mere habit is the unfortunate effect of a medieval theology that replaced the earliest understanding of the Cross – that it broke the power of Satan – he who makes us shame one another rather than realise that no one has the power to shame anyone for doing what love commands.
It was Caesarism, human imperialism, that deployed the power of Satan, the power to kill the body, as the ultimate weapon against Jesus. It was Jesus who destroyed that power, as Peter was to realise. As a consequence Christianity has long outlived the Roman empire. If it is to overcome the secular challenge it must recover the full meaning of Jesus’s claim to have overcome the world.
‘What people think’ is almost always transient, insecure – and passing away. Only the truth endures, and He is at our back.
We need to say the Creed in that firm belief, especially whenever we feel challenged nowadays by ‘what people think’.