There is a part of me that feels the twinge of being scolded whenever my name is spoken to me. “Jill, what are you doing?” “Hurry, Jill, we need to go.” (Perhaps those of us that share this idiosyncrasy got in trouble a lot as kids.) But I have often wondered how Peter felt when Jesus’s scathing rebuke confronted not “Peter,” which would have yet had its sting, but “Satan.”

In those days, Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, chief priests, and teachers of the law. He began to explain to those who loved him that he would be put to death. Peter, like most of us reacting to the suffering of our loved ones, swore to protect him. “Never, Lord!” he said. “This shall never happen to you!” I can only imagine his shock at Jesus’s response. Jesus turned to Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.”(1)

I cannot read that story without picturing my own reaction to those words. I probably would have been devastated. But I also know that when Jesus seems to say something devastating I should probably pay attention all the more. The intensity of his reaction to Peter portrays the intensity with which he knew he had to suffer, the weight of history, prophecy, and purpose he felt on his soldiers, and his severe understanding of the world’s need for his affliction. To get in the way of his necessary suffering, a refrain uttered repeatedly in the gospel accounts and especially by Luke, was to be as an enemy obstructing the plan of God.

As I look at Peter standing before Christ with good intentions, not wanting to see the one he loved broken or defeated, I wonder how many times I, too, have obstructed suffering God deemed necessary for reasons I do not understand. My gut reaction in the face of pain—my own and others—is to make it stop. Like Peter I vow to fix it, not knowing what I mean, just wanting it gone. Yet in the midst of suffering, Jesus says, we can have in mind the things of humanity or the things of God. This is not to say that Jesus wants us to suffer. On the contrary his own suffering is an attempt to put out the sting of suffering and death.

But the Christian understanding of suffering is forged at the foot of the cross. At the cross, we are reminded that God’s purpose will not ignore suffering but will confront it fully and personally and painfully. Christ was wounded and crushed for our iniquities. By the suffering and shame he endured, we are offered a balm for our own mortal wounds. Can God not also have a plan for our own pain?

As one theologian notes, “Jesus did not die in order to spare us the indignities of a wounded creation. He died that we might see those wounds as our own.”(2) At the cross, we see our sin and the suffering that we have caused because of it. But we also find meaning even in suffering that doesn’t come as a direct result of our sin. We see, as Paul observed, that suffering can mysteriously move us, that in its injustice God weeps with us, and that what was meant for ill God can move for good. We see that Christ who suffered for us, so walks with us in our own suffering. “For just as the sufferings of Christ are ours in abundance, so also our comfort is abundant through Christ” wrote one disciple who suffered much. At the cross, we see that some suffering is not only necessary but meaningful.

Peter not only picked himself up from a rebuke more severe than anything he heard Jesus give the Pharisees, he took Jesus’s words to heart. In a letter meant to encourage fellow believers, he wrote, “It is commendable if a man bears up under the pain of unjust suffering because he is conscious of God.” Having witnessed the unimaginable suffering of one he loved in a most scandalous, unthinkable way, Peter saw the mysterious gift of somehow keeping in mind not the gut reactions of humankind, but the strange and wonderful ways of God.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

 (1) Matthew 16:23.
(2) Peter Gomes, Sermons (New York: Morrow, 1998), 72.
(3) 1 Peter 2:19.