One of the main themes so far that we have seen is that people continually are amazed by Jesus, but yet only the demons recognize who he truly is. Here, it seems that after all of the miracles that he has witnessed, Peter finally gets it right (although in Mark he only says that Jesus is the Christ, not the Son of God). What we see Peter really meant is that he thought that Jesus was the Messiah who would come and set the people of Israel free from the political oppression that they had faced at the hands of the Romans.
Jesus blows this idea of the Messiah out of the water when he immediately begins to teach them for the very first time that he must die. This seems like the dumbest thing that Peter has ever heard, and so he lets Jesus know about it. Of course, this doesn’t go well at all! The rest of the book of Mark is a gradual walk towards the cross, where God took one of the most humiliating symbols of the world and transformed it into his greatest victory.
Similarly to Peter, we have a tendency to make Jesus who we want him to be instead of who he really was, is, and always will be. We often try to make him out to be more of a sugar daddy than a savior, someone who spoils us with riches but yet calls us to no life change. His response to Peter is not only to teach him that Jesus must die, but that we must take up our crosses and die to ourselves as well. That is a big part of what Lent (and the entire Christian life) is all about: dying to ourselves and our own way of thinking. What false ideas of Jesus do you still hold on to today?
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