Can You Imagine?

Read Matthew 16.21-28

Pentecost +13

Can you imagine? One moment, Jesus is saying you’re “the rock on which I will build my church” and the next he’s calling you “a stumbling block.” That’s not just great wordplay – from cornerstone to stumbling block, but it’s also such a massive reversal of relational fortune, and because of that it had to be incredibly painful for Peter.

Can you imagine? And perhaps that’s the difficulty, Peter couldn’t imagine. He couldn’t imagine that Jesus had come not just to comfort people but to free them.