e confession of Peter
indicated to him simply that the first stage in his work had been
accomplished. He immediately began to prepare the disciples for the end
which for some time past he had seen to be inevitable. He taught them more
than that his death was inevitable; he declared that it was divinely
necessary that he should be put to death as a result of the hostility of
the Jews to him ("the Son of Man must suffer"). All the contradictions
which he had offered to the Messianic ideas of his disciples paled into
insignificance beside this one. When they saw how he failed to meet the
hopes that were commonly held, they needed only to urge themselves to
patience, expecting that in time he would cast off the strange mask and
take to himself his power and reign. But it was too much for the late
confessed and very genuine faith of Peter to hear that the Messiah must
die. So unthinkable was the idea, that he assumed that Jesus had become
unduly discouraged by the relentlessness of the opposition which had
driven him first out of Judea and later out of Galilee. Accordingly Peter
sought to turn his Master's mind to a brighter prospect, asserting that
his forebodings could not be true. It is hard for us to conceive the chill
of heart which must have followed the glow of his confession when he heard
the stern rebuke of Jesus, who found in Peter's later words the voice of
the Evil One, as before in his confession he had recognized the Spirit of
God.

158. The sternness of Jesus' rebuke escapes extravagance only in view of
the fact that the words of Peter had greatly affected Jesus himself. At
the outset of his public life he had faced the difficulty of doing the
Messiah's work in his Father's way, and had withstood the temptation to
accommodate himself to the ideas of his world, declaring allegiance to God
alone (Matt. iv. 10). Yet once and again in the course of his ministry he
showed that this allegiance cost him much. Luke reports a saying in which
Jesus confessed that, in view of this prospect of death which Peter was
opposing so eagerly, he was greatly "straitened" (xii. 50), and at the
near approach of the end "his soul was exceeding sorrowful" (Mark xiv.
34). It should never be forgotten that Jesus was a Jew, and heir to all
the Messianic ideas of his people. In these, glory, not rejection and
death, was to be the Messiah's portion. That he was always superior to
current expectations is no sign that he did not feel their f