Charles Ellicott Commentary Matthew 16:23

"But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art a stumbling-block unto me: for thou mindest not the things of God, but the things of men." — Matthew 16:23 (ASV)

He turned, and said to Peter—Mark adds the significant detail that Jesus turned about and looked on His disciples. We can imagine that they stood behind Him, watching the effect of the protest Peter had uttered as their spokesman. Therefore, because the Lord was reading their thoughts, the rebuke was addressed to Peter but spoken so that the other disciples could also hear.

Get thee behind me, Satan—The sharpness of these words indicates a strong and intense emotion. The chief of the Apostles was addressed in the very same terms that had been spoken to the Tempter (see the note on Matthew 4:10). It was, in fact, nothing less than a renewal of the same temptation. In this suggestion—that He might gain the crown without the cross and attain a worldly kingdom as earthly princes do—Christ saw the return of the temptation that had offered Him the glory of those kingdoms on the condition that He abandon the path His Father had appointed for Him.

You are an offense to me—The Greek word here means a stumbling block or an impediment. Understood this way, it presents a striking contrast to the previous promise. Peter is still a stone, but now he is a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense (Isaiah 8:14; 1 Peter 2:8). He is hindering, not advancing, his Master’s work. For someone who loved his Lord as Peter did—and whose very love prompted these rash words—this was at once the sharpest, most tender, and therefore most effective rebuke that could have been given.

Thou savourest not the things that be of God—The verb, though found in all English versions from Wycliffe downwards and suggested by the sapis of the Vulgate, was never a perfect choice and is now so archaic that it can be misleading. To understand it, we should remember that our word savor and the French savoir both derive from the Latin sapere, and so the translators were justified in using it to describe a mental state or action. Elsewhere, the underlying Greek word is translated as “to mind” or “to set affection on,” as in mind the things of the flesh or of the spirit (Romans 8:5), and set your affection on things above (Colossians 3:2), which is clearly a more satisfactory translation. Peter’s sin was that his mind was set on earthly things—its outward pomp and pageantry—and that he was measuring the future by a human, not a divine, standard.

It is not a needless digression from the work of interpretation to suggest that Peter’s weakness has been reproduced again and again in the history of Christendom. This is most conspicuous in the history of the Church that rests its claims on the greatness of the Apostle’s name.

The history of the Papacy—from the colossal sovereignty that was the ideal of Hildebrand down to the last struggle for temporal power—is a record of zeal without knowledge. It is the story of those who savored not the things that be of God, but those that be of man.

To the extent this was true, they were working for evil and not for good, though they did not know it. In this, they were like the chief of the Apostles himself. When he aligned his mind with the spirit of the world—which is also the spirit of the Tempter—he placed himself for a moment on the same level as the disciple our Lord had called a “devil” (John 6:70), because the seeds of treachery and greed were already at work in his soul.