He turned, and said to Peter. — St. Mark adds, significantly, “when He had turned about and looked on His disciples.” They, we may believe, stood behind, watching the effect of the remonstrance which Peter had uttered as their spokesman, and therefore, the Lord reading their thoughts, the rebuke, though addressed to him, was spoken so that they too might hear.
Get thee behind me, Satan. — The sharpness of the words indicates a strong and intense emotion. The chief of the Apostles was addressed in the self-same terms as those which had been spoken to the Tempter (see Note on Matthew 4:10). It was, indeed, nothing less than a renewal of the same temptation. In this suggestion, that He might gain the crown without the cross, and attain a kingdom of this world as the princes of the world obtain their kingdoms, the Christ saw the recurrence of the temptation which had offered Him the glory of those kingdoms on condition of His drawing back from the path which the Father had appointed for Him, with the associations that had gathered round its original.
Thou art an offence unto me. — The Greek word is, of course, to be taken as meaning a stumbling block, an impediment. So taken, it presents a suggestive contrast to the previous promise. Peter is still a stone, but it is as “a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence” (Isaiah 8:14; 1 Peter 2:8). He is hindering, not forwarding his Master’s work. For one who loved his Lord as Peter did — his very love in this instance prompting the rash words — this was at once the sharpest and yet the tenderest, and therefore the most effective, rebuke that could have been uttered.
Thou savourest not the things that be of God. — The verb, though found in all English versions from Wiclif downwards, and suggested by the sapis of the Vulgate, was never a very happy one, and is now so archaic as to be misleading. It may help us to understand it, to remember that our savour and the French savoir are both forms derived from the Latin sapere, and that the translators were so far justified in using it to describe a mental state, or rather act. Elsewhere the word is rendered “mind,” or “set affection on,” as, e.g., “mind the things of the flesh,” or “of the spirit” (Romans 8:5), and “set your affection on things above” (Colossians 3:2); and this is obviously a more satisfactory rendering. Peter’s sin lay in the fact that his mind was set on the things of earth, its outward pomp and pageantry, measuring the future by a human not a divine standard.
It is hardly a needless divergence from the work of mere interpretation to suggest that the weakness of Peter has been again and again reproduced in the history of Christendom at large, most conspicuously in the history of the Church which rests its claims on the greatness of the Apostle’s name. The annals of the Papacy, from the colossal sovereignty, which formed the ideal of Hildebrand, down to the last struggle for temporal power, is but the record of the zeal not according to knowledge of those who “savoured not the things that be of God, but those that be of man.” So far as this was so, they were working, though they knew it not, for evil and not for good, even as the chief of the Apostles when he thus became of one mind with the spirit of the world, which is also the spirit of the Tempter, placed himself for the moment on a level with the disciple whom our Lord had hinted at as a “devil,” because the seeds of treachery and greed of gain were already working in his soul (John 6:70).