Main news for 23 September 2025

These words of the Savior always caused the apostles only fear and bewilderment. Why was that? The simplest answer is that they feared for their beloved Teacher and were afraid of losing Him. And yet the matter was probably not only this. It also had to do with those messianic ideas that Jesus' disciples shared with their contemporaries. In those days people expected from the Messiah, above all, the restoration of an independent Jewish state and the establishment in that state of laws corresponding to the Torah.

The Messiah was seen as the King, the conqueror of the Gentiles, and as a righteous Ruler whom God would help to win victory and establish His authority by sending a heavenly angelic host to His aid. Such a Messiah simply could not die. True, the image of a suffering Messiah was known to Jewish tradition in that era. But a suffering Messiah is not the same as a dying Messiah.

It was supposed that the Messiah might not, of course, come to power immediately. The war would be long, and perhaps in that war there would be moments when the Messiah would be in danger, when He would quite possibly find Himself even on the brink of death. But God would not let Him perish: such a death would mean the end, the failure of God's plan, and the collapse of all the hopes of God's people. Meanwhile Jesus speaks, quite clearly and unambiguously, precisely about His death, and about death not in battle but on the cross, the death of a criminal rather than of a warrior-hero.

This simply did not fit into Peter's head. Nor, for that matter, into the heads of the other apostles. But Peter was more decisive in his frankness and dared to say what the others did not dare to utter aloud. And he found himself, of course unintentionally, on the side of Satan, who had tempted the Savior in the wilderness. For the traditional messianic ideal presupposed exactly what Satan had offered Jesus during that trial: to establish His Kingdom on earth according to the laws of the fallen world lying in evil.

To establish it not as the Kingdom of love, but as a kingdom of force. It is no accident that Satan was not even opposed to giving Jesus the opportunity to act freely in exchange for a single, purely symbolic sign of acknowledgment of his, Satan's, authority. In exchange for one single bow, about which no one would ever know, since there were no witnesses. He knows that any kingdom built according to the laws of the fallen world will belong to him. Peter, unlike his Teacher, does not understand this. And he receives an extremely severe answer. For his own good.