This is a sermon about Jesus, adversaries, and Dolly Parton.
When Jesus says to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan”, I imagine the other disciples all sucking in their breath and averting their eyes. None of them would have imagined Peter as a red devil with horns and a pitchfork, that’s an image from much later.
Jesus is giving the disciples information they need to know about the kind of opposition, pain, and grief they are going to face when they come into Jerusalem. It is going to come from both civil and religious authorities, Jesus warns, but God’s authority is greater and trauma and destruction will not be the end of the narrative.
Peter either cannot comprehend what Jesus is telling them or doesn’t want to. The careful explanation and spiritual preparation do not comport with the image he has in his mind of the one he has already named as Messiah. The healings he’s seen, the teachings he’s heard, the miracles he’s observed, surely all of this will not end in the horrific way Jesus is describing. Surely, God will not let it happen.
Jesus’ rebuke has two directions. First, the Savior identifies the disciple as an adversary. The original meaning and phrasing for “satan” (or ha satan) is an adversary or the adversary. In this language context, Peter’s denial of Jesus’ truth-telling will make him an opponent rather than a follower, if he keeps arguing.
Called out for resisting Jesus’ prophetic words, Peter then is forced to grapple with whether God will act in accordance with his (Peter’s) will or with the Divine will. Peter’s spiritual struggle is one to which we can all relate. Jesus is describing some terrible things. Why is God going to permit these things to happen? What makes these horrors acceptable? Why shouldn’t Peter, indeed any of us, be an adversary to pain and suffering?
There’s more than one way to fight against suffering. Peter’s way was to demand that it never happen, at least not to Jesus and, preferably, not to him. We can be adversaries to suffering by denying it, by believing it won’t happen to us if we believe enough, pray perfectly enough, study enough. We can be adversaries to suffering by demanding that we know God’s plan and how it will work and exactly who will be affected and why. And when people have questions or doubts, we can shame them because they don’t believe the way we do.
That’s one way to do it. The way that Peter was determined to embrace for a hot minute.
There is, though, another way to be an adversary to suffering and to be on the side of Jesus. There’s a way to honor and glorify God and to not claim more knowledge than you have and to be an opponent to pain, hardship, and struggle. That’s the Dolly Parton way. In the past week, no one thinks she was perfect. No one says she didn’t struggle. No one is attesting that things were easy for her or that she didn’t have griefs and pain.
Every story about Dolly Rebecca Parton Dean this week pointed to how she did not close her hand. She reached behind her; she pushed people ahead of her; she not only didn’t pull up her ladder behind her; she built additional supports for it so that others could climb up without fear or hindrance.
She paid for books for children, for college for employees, for band uniforms and instruments in predominantly black high schools, for vaccine research, for support for victims of fires and hurricanes. Her nephew said, in his statement from the family, that she made sure everyone in that family had the support to achieve their goals.
You can be an adversary to suffering. You can be an opponent of pain. You can resist the terrible things that human beings do to each other and the awful things that happen that are beyond our understanding. We can choose together, and as individuals, to embrace the fullness of what Jesus speaks over his hearers earlier in Matthew, to be the light of the world.
Peter is going to make a few more mistakes before he gets it right. He does not want to be a satan, an adversary, to Jesus, yet he’s going to fumble, he’s going to deny, he’s going to doubt the resurrection.
We, on the other hand, have information he didn’t have. We have the whole story, we have the faithfulness of God in Christ, we have the Holy Spirit. What do we do with what we have, with the grace we have been given?
We have a choice every day when confronted with suffering. We can be like Peter and reject it, turning away because it doesn’t fit with what we want to be true. Or we can be like Dolly. We can profess our love for Jesus, acknowledge the suffering we can plainly see, accept that we cannot do everything, but we can do something. And then go about it.
Take up your cross and follow doesn’t always mean crucifixion. Sometimes it just means hard work, a genuine smile, and a sincere effort to be an enemy of suffering in whatever form you find it. In living that way, Miss Dolly set her mind on divine things, and we can to. Amen.
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