P ♰ C

– by Jean Allen

“Get behind me, Satan!” Who among us has not thought, “Whoa! That’s a pretty harsh thing to say to a concerned friend!” Perhaps it would be less of an over-the-top insult and more accurate if the translation had been, “Get behind me, Peter. Don’t tempt me with your worldly perception of power and success!” That’s what Peter was doing. He was tempting Jesus and setting up his visions as the ones Jesus should emulate. Could Jesus have been tempted by Peter’s perceptions? Absolutely.

Jesus was human and he was not wildly enthusiastic about what lay in store for him. This is why he said to Peter, “You are a stumbling block to me;” The word translated as stumbling block is ‘skandalon’ (from which we get ‘scandal’) and Jesus actually spoke often about not being a skandalon to others: not setting up a way of believing or perceiving and inviting others to emulate this way, which engenders competition and always ends in a struggle for power and control. This is the way of all humanity and why Jesus said, “For you are thinking not as God does, but as humans do.”

The only person Jesus was determined to emulate was the Father. What we have to ponder on is that Jesus imitated God throughout his life. His suffering and death were imitations of God. I think that too often we envision God as someone ‘out there’, detached and watching as Jesus navigated life and suffered horrendously on the Cross. No. God had invited his Son to imitate his whole way of being and Jesus was determined to the end to imitate his Father, not the strategies of the world (Satan’s domain) as Peter’s words tempted him to do.

We, too, are tempted by the worldly perceptions of power but our place of truth and power is in imitating Jesus and the Father. We should do nothing except we see them doing it first. That requires relationship of the kind that Jesus and the Father had. Jesus did nothing except he saw the Father doing it first.

That kind of relationship is power indeed.