We’re working through the Gospel of Mark at the moment, and we came to one of the more vexing exchanges between Jesus and Peter in Mark 8:27-33. First, Peter gets an A+ for being the first of the disciples to correctly identify Jesus as the Messiah and the Christ.
But moments later, when Jesus is trying to explain to the disciples that he’s soon going to be killed, Peter rebukes him for saying so, prompting Jesus to respond, “Get behind me, Satan! You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”
That cannot have felt very good for Peter, who was probably thinking, Just a minute ago I’m on top of the world because I figure out that you’re the Christ. Now I’m Satan?”
But here’s the thing. Jesus wasn’t saying that Peter is Satan. He was correcting a worldly misconception about the mission of the Messiah. Israel had been under the oppressive hand of other nations for centuries – the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians and now the Romans. The expectation of most Israelites was that the Messiah would merely restore Israel to independent nationhood. From that perspective, it would make sense that Jesus being killed was the last thing Peter wanted to see.
But that wasn’t the full mission of the Messiah. It was to free the entire world from the slavery of sin and death, and to open up the possibility of eternal life. Israel’s suffering under the rule of other nations was just an archetype for the real problem – that the world was suffering under the rule of Satan because it had drifted into disobedience to God.
So in saying “Get behind me Satan,” Jesus was rebuking Satan for misdirecting Peter into a wrong understanding of what the Messiah was to do and why.
Eventually, as we see in Acts 2 and Acts 3, Peter comes to understand this very well and teaches it to the others. But he needed a pretty stern correction from Jesus to help him get there.