Matthew 16

In the days of His earthly ministry, the Lord Jesus Christ attracted large crowds because of His tremendous healings. A blind man by the side of the road would have known who to turn to by now in order to receive sight. People had heard that there was a man from God who performed amazing works. Yet the leaders of the Jews spoke to Jesus as if He had done nothing to demonstrate who He was. They asked Him to show them a sign from heaven, as if he had not already cleansed lepers and caused the lame to leap for joy.

The Lord could have performed an amazing miracle at that very moment, but He did not come in order to stand before a Board of Approval from the Pharisees and Sadducees, so He did not comply with their wishes. He did use this opportunity to say that they were unable to see the signs of the time of the Messiah all around them. They prided themselves in being able to predict the weather, but they could not see that a new gospel age was being born in front of their faces. The ultimate sign would soon come, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, an event He cryptically refers to here as the sign of Jonah. That Old Testament prophet spent time like a dead man in the belly of a fish and began a new life when he found himself again on dry land. Christ’s body would soon rest briefly in the grave, but the sign of a new age would come with an empty tomb.

The Pharisees did not understand the meaning of His words, but then there was much that even the Lord’s disciples did not understand, and Jesus spoke to them more plainly. Our Lord warned His disciples that they must beware of the teaching of the leading Jewish parties of their time. In different ways these religious groups had embraced such serious errors that their teaching could not be safely received. It was a dangerous leaven that could soon spread throughout the Lord’s followers. As Christ warned His disciples on this matter, they very mistakenly came to the conclusion that He was making some point about their need for physical bread; this after the Lord had twice shown His ability to supply bread to thousands of people.

Yet it was at this moment, when the disciples seemed to be so confused, that Peter actually confessed Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah, and the Son of the living God. This was absolutely right and was something that could only have come to him by God. The church would be built upon Christ, the true and only Rock, as both Peter and Paul would later write in their letters. He is the cornerstone, and the apostles will be the foundation aligned with that one perfect Stone, rejected by men, but chosen and precious in God’s sight, Jesus Christ. The church that is built upon that apostolic foundation has been granted by her Lord the sacred task of receiving people into her number and declaring their sins to be forgiven according to the Word of Christ. All who would believe in Him are called to profess their faith before God and man, for this Jesus is the divine Messiah, who alone can save us from our sins through His atoning death for us.

It is this last part that Peter immediately rejects, for when Christ speaks to His disciples about His coming suffering, His death, and His resurrection, Peter takes Him aside and has the audacity to rebuke the one He just called the Son of God for suggesting that He would soon die. Jesus is uncompromising in His rejection of Peter’s unholy sentiment. His earlier confession had come from heaven, but this rejection of the cross comes from hell, and the one who speaks it, speaks for Satan.

The cross is the way of God for the Messiah and His followers, but it is not the way of the world. The true followers of Jesus must travel in this way of the cross. They will embrace the death of Christ for them as their only hope, and they will follow in a kind of sacrificial living, since the call of our King will be a call to suffering and even death. We must be willing to face loss now, since we believe that the Son of Man has not only died for us, but He will return from heaven for us. He will come with angels in the glory of God, and He will judge the living and the dead, repaying them according to their deeds.

This is the story of the real Kingdom of God. That kingdom will one day come in glory, a glory that a few of the disciples will shortly see with their own eyes at the transfiguration of Christ. That miracle was a glimpse into heavenly light. We do not live in heaven right now, but we live with the assurance that heaven is real, and that it is better to be in the number of those who are headed toward heaven than to have all that the world can offer us many times over.

The theology of the Pharisees and the Sadducees would never lead anyone to a cross. They surely wanted the crown, but they would get that crown through careful obedience in accord with their own laws or through the cultivation of relationships of influence with the right sort of people. But this is not the way that the kingdom of heaven comes to men. That kingdom comes through a cross and a resurrection. This is the life that has saved us, and it is the life that we are called to live even now, a life that was most powerfully testified to through the real sign of Jonah.