Have you ever tried to teach something to someone, and they just don’t get it?
That was the problem that Jesus constantly faced with His followers and His disciples.
You know the story of Matt. 16:13-20.
I always picture it it’s the end of a long day. Jesus and His disciples are sitting around the fire. Jesus asks His disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” They give various answers: John the Baptist, Elijah, one of the prophets. Then Jesus asks, “But who do YOU say that I am?” Complete silence. They had been with Jesus for 3 years. They saw the miracles and heard Him teach. And now Jesus was saying, “After all this, who am I to you? Who do YOU say that I am?” After deep thought, Peter finally breaks the silence and gives that great confession: “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God!” and Jesus says, “Blessed are you Simon. Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.
Jesus says, “Bless you Peter! That’s it Peter! You get it!” You are now Peter: a solid rock.
Don’t miss the obvious by living in the familiar: Jesus called Peter Blessed!
Immediately after that, Jesus began teaching his disciples that He had to go to Jerusalem and suffer many things. He would be killed, but the third day He would rise again. Blessed Peter took who just made that wonderful confession takes Jesus to the side and rebukes Him saying, “God forbid it Lord! This shall NEVER happen to you.”
Jesus who just called Peter ‘a blessed rock’ now says to him, “Get behind me, Satan! You are not a blessed rock; you are a stumbling block. You are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.” Peter went from being a solid rock to a stumbling rock.
On Palm Sunday, Jesus is finally acting how the people feel a king should act. Jesus tells His disciples to go get the colt and if anyone asks, to say the Lord needs it. Kings don’t ask. Kings command. They take without asking. Jesus riding a donkey, fulfilled Zechariah’s prophecy, He was openly claiming to be the King of Jerusalem, the successor of King David’s throne.
Peter, like many others, were thinking that the baby born in Bethlehem, the backwoods youth of Nazareth in Galilee had finally come to be the promised Messiah who would overthrow Roman oppression and bring peace, prosperity, and power to Israel. The Bible tells is that the people assumed that the kingdom of God would immediately appear.
The people cheered “Hosanna! Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord!” They waved palm branches and spread out their coats because Jesus was acting like the king the they wanted. They wanted a king who would work miracles, to heal them and feed them.
That’s the Jesus that the world accepts: all blessings: no blood, no suffering, especially no cross.
Little did the people know that on that day – “Selection Day” when the Passover Lamb was to be chosen, they were selecting Jesus, the spotless and sinless Lamb of God, to be their Passover lamb who would once-and-for-all save them and open the eternal gates of Heaven
That was Palm Sunday, now it’s Good Friday. Pilate has Jesus beaten and presents Him before the crowd and says, “Behold your King!”, but Jesus was not looking or acting like a king. The voices that previously had shouted ‘crown Him’ on Sunday now shouted, “CRUCIFY HIM!”
‘And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised and rejected, and we esteemed Him not.’
The people shouted, ‘we have no king but Caesar’. So Pilate crucifies Jesus and posts a sign above the cross, “The King of the Jews”
When Jesus rebuked Peter in Matthew 16, He says, “If anyone would come after Me, let him deny himself take up his cross and follow Me. Whoever saves his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.”
That’s not fun entertainment of healings and miracles. That’s not bread and fish. That’s radical.
That’s too much to ask because the King Jesus that the people wanted then and the King Jesus that we want today is a Palm Sunday Jesus, not a Good Friday Jesus. We don’t want a Jesus who has been tortured and beaten and crucified. We don’t want a Jesus who takes up a cross and calls us to follow Him and do the same thing. Crosses are ugly and painful, permanent ways to die. You don’t live on a cross; you die on one. That’s not the comfortable Jesus we think we want and we most definitely don’t want to live or die that way.
We want the ‘warm fuzzies’. We want the ‘miracles’. We want the ‘Jesus loves everybody’. We want a miracle working Super Jesus we can brag about–not a bloody, beaten, crucified Jesus. We want a Jesus who gives us a good time and does what we want. All roses and no thorns. We want a Jesus who would slaughter OUR enemies, not a Jesus who would be slaughtered and sacrificed Himself — and He wants me to do the same? That’s crazy! That’s too much to ask!
And here we are on Good Friday at 3:00, the same time that Jesus was crucified. We don’t shout out praises to God on Good Friday, but the very moment that Jesus died on the cross, as the world mourned, the rocks of Jerusalem cried out in praise with a great earthquake — not for the king we wanted, but for the King we needed.
It is interesting when Jesus died, there was an earthquake and 3 days later when He rose from the tomb — victorious over sin, death, hell and the grave, once again the earth quakes and once again the stones cry out in loud praise — not for the king we wanted, but for the King we needed.
Yes, we all need a King who hurts alongside of us, we all need a King who intercedes for us, but most of all we need a King who is able to do something we cannot: we need a SAVIOR who will die in our place, we need a REDEEMER who will pay a price we cannot pay, and we need a VICTORIOUS KING who has defeated sin, hell, death, and the grave so that the grave is not the end, but actually is the end of the beginning.
We wanted a king who would serve us — not one who would die for us.
But the king we needed – the King that you need is a King who would suffer and die – not for sins that He committed (Jesus was perfect and never sinned) – but the King who would be the sacrificial Passover Lamb and die in my place, for my sins, someone to pay a price that I could never pay so that I could spend eternity with Him in Heaven.
So now we come back full circle to the same question that Jesus asked Peter:
Who do you say that Jesus is?
Are you willing to take up your cross daily and follow Him?
To truly live, we must surrender to the King we really need, not the one we imagine for ourselves.
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