Sometimes, we can become so comfortable with our notion of Jesus that stop growing in our relationship with him.
Jesus often did and said shocking things. His statement in Luke 9:22 is surely one of the most shocking of all. For the first time, he connected his mission as Messiah to the necessity of suffering and death. Sometimes, we can become so comfortable with our notion of Jesus that stop growing in our relationship with him. We need to be shocked by the wisdom, vision, and grace of Jesus.
He sternly ordered and commanded them not to tell anyone, saying, “The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.”
Devotion
Sometimes what Jesus says and does is truly shocking. Today’s passage from Luke contains one of the most startling and unsettling things Jesus ever said, as a prelude to one of the shocking things he ever did.
When Peter confessed that Jesus was the Messiah, he no doubt believed that Jesus was the one he and his fellow Jews had been hoping for.
Jesus’s response to Peter was at first surprising and then shocking. The surprise came when he “sternly ordered and commanded [his disciples] not to tell anyone” that he was the Messiah (Luke 9:21). Surely they would have expected the opposite, an order to tell everyone this amazing news. Instead, Jesus called for silence.
The shock came from what Jesus said next, “The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised” (Luke 9:22). Connecting his role as Messiah with the enigmatic figure of the Son of Man (see Daniel 7:13-14), Jesus predicted that he would suffer, be rejected by the authorities, and be killed, after which he would be raised from the dead (Luke 9:22). Why would this have been shocking to the disciples? Because this prediction of the tragic fate of the Messiah-Son of Man was about as far as anything could have been from what the disciples of Jesus would have expected. The Messiah was to be a victorious warrior and an exalted ruler. Similarly, the Son of Man was to be “given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him” (Daniel 7:14). What could be less like this than suffering, rejection, and death?
When we read Luke 9:21-22, we tend not to be shocked because we know so much more about Jesus than his disciples did at that point in their relationship with him. Our familiarity with Jesus is, in many ways, a good thing. But I fear that sometimes this familiarity can keep us from a deeper and truer encounter with Jesus today. We can miss the radical and completely unexpected way Jesus envisioned his messianic ministry. We can fail to be stunned by the fact that God’s kingdom was coming, not through victory and domination, but through suffering and death.
As we’ll see in future devotions, Jesus connects his mission with that of his followers in a most unsettling, indeed, even a shocking way. For now, let me invite you to reflect on Jesus’s first prediction of his suffering and death. See what the Lord wants to say to you about this today.
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