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The Sacraments of Hospitality ˜ 223
they seem, and illusion and reality get confused. In this text, Peter becomes
Satan. Here the Messiah—the one expected to crush Israel’s enemies and to
reestablish Israel’s power—is the one who will be rejected and who will suffer
and be executed. In this text, death is life and life is death; we save our lives by
losing them, and we lose our lives when we try to save them. Here the cross—
the most brutal means of execution imaginable—is the way of power. In this
house of mirrors we enter a world in which everything seems off balance. Truth
and illusion do battle, and it’s hard to tell one from the other.
That’s what happens when Jesus comes face to face with Satan. A battle ensues
between truth and illusion. Satan, you see, is the spirit—the driving force—
of what we call “The System” at the Open Door, and what Walter Wink calls
“The Domination System.” Satan works by capturing our spirits and by shaping
our imaginations—by “stealing our souls,” to borrow an image from a recent
article in Hospitality. 1 Satan works by the power of illusion, luring us to believe
that the System’s way is the way of life, when it is really the way of death.
That’s what Satan tries to do to Jesus in the wilderness; he tries to lure Jesus to
the way of the System, rather than to the way of the cross. In our text, Jesus faces
the same kind of temptation in his encounter with Peter. So Jesus has to battle
the power of Satan’s illusions. He has to battle at the level of the imagination.
He has to help Peter and the disciples and the crowd and the church see the
world differently. He has to try to free imaginations that have been captured by
Satan’s house of mirrors—by the illusions of the System.
We know those illusions, don’t we—the illusions of the System. They
sound something like this: “Real life comes from gaining power over others”—
men over women, whites over Blacks. “Real life comes from feeling superior to
others”—insiders superior to outsiders, heterosexuals superior to homosexuals.
“Fullness of life comes from possessing more than others”—so folks consume
and accumulate until some have more than they could ever use, while others live
on the streets with nothing. “Real life comes from winning”—so “We’re number
one!” becomes the rallying cry of our culture. “Victorious living involves violently
defeating our enemies,” whether killing them with weapons or putting
them in prison.
These are the illusions of the System. And this is the spirituality of the System—over,
superior, more, win, violence, defeat. This System seeks to steal our
souls; it wants to become the air we breathe, until we cannot imagine alternatives.
On his journey to the cross, which begins in our text, Jesus time and again
seeks to expose these illusions. He seeks to help his disciples and us see the world
differently so that we might live in it differently. Not surprisingly, the story before
the story we read this evening concerns Jesus healing a blind man. Jesus is
1. See “The Soul Stealers” in Part Three (ed.).