Mark 8:31-33

Pennie and I don’t watch a lot of current television programs, except some of the Chicago Fire and Med and the Law and Order and NCIS shows.  I haven’t watched a new comedy show in years.  But we do like to watch classic comedy, like The Andy Griffith Show, and of the Lucille Ball shows, MASH, The Golden Girls, The Mary Tyler Moore Show.  And one of my favorites is My Three Sons. 

Just this week there was an episode called “The Tire Thief.”  Ernie, the youngest of the three boys, was playing with squirt guns with two of his friends.  One of the boys had a squirt rifle which could shoot farther than the pistols the other two had.  No matter how they tried to outflank or outsmart him, they ended up getting soaked.  They tried hiding out in the storage shed, but he found them there.  They were complaining that they didn’t have enough money to buy squirt rifles for themselves, when one of the friends said they should sell some of the junk in the shed to get some money.  The other one noticed two tires hanging on the wall and said they should sell them to the guy at the gas station.

Well, in spite of the fact that Ernie really didn’t want to go along with the plan and kept offering up reasons why they shouldn’t sell the tires, the two friends kept pressuring him to sell them so they could all have squirt rifles, and made him feel like he really had no choice but to agree with them.  So off they went, and they came back with the new squirt rifles.

In the meantime, Uncle Charlie came home from shopping and noticed the door to the shed was open.  He also noticed the two tires were missing.  Since there had been some recent robberies in the neighborhood, he called the police to report them stolen.  The three boys were up in a tree house when the police car pulled into the driveway.  They all heard Uncle Charlie tell the police officer about the stolen tires.  But not one of them opened his mouth to tell them what had happened.  In fact, both of Ernie’s friends decided it was time to go home, and they left him there alone.

Ernie’s conscience bothered him all that afternoon and into the evening.  He talked to his sister-in-law, Katie, who spoke to his dad for him.  Finally, before he went to sleep, his dad came in and talked to him about what he had done.  And the next day, he made Ernie go into the police station and tell an officer at the front desk everything that had happened.  For Ernie, the temptation to do something wrong – the evil that he needed to be delivered from – came in the form of a friend, not an enemy.  And that is what happened to Jesus one day.  Jesus was tempted by his best friend, Peter.

Jesus and his disciples had been having a conversation about who he really was.  He had asked them, “Who do people say that I am?”  And they had shared with him a variety of answers that people suggested.  Then he asked, “And who do you say that I am?”  Peter answered, “You are the Christ.”  He knew that Jesus was the Messiah.  Right away, Jesus began to teach them what that meant.  He said that he would suffer many things.  He would be rejected by the respected and respectable people in Jewish religious society – the elders, the chief priests, and the teachers of the law.  These were the people that you would think would be the most likely to accept the messiah.  And then Jesus would be killed.  And after three days he would rise again.  I wonder if the disciples even heard that last part, they were in such shock when he said that he would be killed.  Because nothing Jesus said fit into their previous understanding of what the messiah would be like or do when he came.  Jews expected a messiah who would come in power and drive out the Roman occupiers, establish the throne of David again, and make Israel a great nation.  They did not in their wildest imagination expect a messiah who would be weak enough to be killed.  But Jesus spoke quite plainly about this.  There was no mistaking what he meant.

So Peter took Jesus aside and rebuked him.  To rebuke someone is to scold him in a sharp way.  I don’t know exactly what Peter said to Jesus.  But maybe he was trying to convince Jesus that he had the power to establish a kingdom on earth, that there was no need for him to worry about being killed, that the people would rise behind him and support him.  And that might just be tempting when you compare it to a future that held a cross in it.  In any case, Jesus knew that what Peter was proposing was not the will of God, but the desire of human beings.  He rebuked Peter with the words, “Get behind me, Satan!”  In other words, “Deliver me from evil!”  In Peter’s words, he was hearing another choice for his future, and it was not the choice that God had planned for him.

Can you think of a time when your friends tried to lead you astray?  When they tried to convince you to do something that you knew was wrong?  When you said to yourself, “Deliver me from evil”?  When your integrity was being called into question?

When I was a junior or senior in high school, I took an English class on the Bible as literature.  I found it to be a fairly easy class, because I was pretty familiar with the Bible, having grown up in church and attending Sunday School my whole life.  Some of the other kids seemed to think it was going to be an easy class, but when they got into it discovered that it was harder than they expected it to be.  When it came to our first test, the teacher handed out the papers and left the room.  Some of the students read the questions and panicked and started asking the rest of us for the answers.  Some of my friends started giving them answers.  I had never been one of the “in” crowd.  I knew that my popularity might go up if I helped these “in” kids get a good grade.  But in the end, I didn’t give any answers.  I knew that I had studied, and apparently, they had not, expecting the test to be easy.  It wouldn’t be fair to me or to them to help them get better grades than they deserved just so they would like me.  Get behind me, Satan!

On a more serious level, my dad had a situation that arose in his workplace where he had to make a decision about whether or not to compromise his integrity.  He was working on a project and needed to put in a little extra time on a Saturday.  He went into the office and caught the vice-president of the company with one of the secretaries in a less than dignified position.  He turned around and left.  Over the course of the next week or so, the vice-president, a man he had worked with for years, all of a sudden started inviting our family to come out to his lake house for the day, and suggested that my dad might be looking at a promotion in the near future, and hinted that perhaps he would be getting the option to purchase stock in the company.  There were other similar rewards dangled in front of my dad.

As it turned out, two other men that my dad knew had decided to leave the companies they worked for and start their own engineering firm.  They had been trying to convince my dad to join them.  He made up his mind that this was what he was going to do.  There was nothing that the vice-president of his current company could tempt him with that could compare with keeping a clean conscience.  He wasn’t going to allow the temptation to defeat him.  Deliver us from evil!  So he turned and went in the other direction.  It probably cost him a lot of money, but his integrity was intact.  I never forgot that decision, and I have always respected my dad for making it.

Sometimes the biggest temptations come from our friends or from people who are close to us.  It is at those times that we need to pray the most earnestly, “Deliver us from evil.  Get behind me, Satan!”