Thinking As Human Beings Do

 24th Sunday, B

Today we have St. Mark’s account of Peter’s great confession of faith, the definitive answer to the question Jesus puts to all his followers, 

“Who do you say that I am?”

Peter, first among the Apostles, answers with the confession that includes within it the whole of our Catholic faith,

“You are the Christ.”

But then, as we heard, something goes wrong. Once Peter makes this glorious statement, Jesus begins to explain to him what being the Christ will mean, and Peter has a hard time accepting it.

Jesus “began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and rise after three days.”

Peter doesn’t approve of this, and he rebukes Jesus. Perhaps Peter wasn’t looking for a suffering servant messiah, but someone powerful in a worldly way.

So then Jesus in turn accuses Peter,

“You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”

What’s going on here?

Well, in the simplest terms, this scene points out to us that it is one thing to confess that Jesus is the Christ but quite another to understand what being the Christ means.

What is our image of Almighty God?

Is it a stern judge, always watching to see is we are passing the test of this life? Is it a ‘supreme being’ mostly removed from the nitty gritty of our earthly doings? Is he mostly a distributor of graces and punishments, like some heavenly bureaucrat?

It is easy enough to create a god in our own image, to see God as if he were a human being writ large, what God would be like if I were God. Left to our own devices we are in fact very likely to imagine and think of the Almighty Creator of all in human terms.

But this, as Jesus says, is thinking as human beings do, not as God does.

The living God revealed in and by Jesus Christ is perhaps something quite different than we might imagine. His almightiness is revealed in what looks to us like weakness – the vulnerable infant at Christmas, born away from home and with no room at the inn, the condemned criminal of Good Friday, unable to move his hands and feet, much less control the world in the way we human beings tend of think of power and authority.

And Jesus assures us that our own salvation also lies in taking up our cross, in embracing a love for our neighbor that is willing to suffer, in letting go of our tendency to seek domination but rather in giving ourselves to others in humility. True greatness lies in making ourselves less, in becoming the servants of one another. This is the way of the Cross and in this sense the Cross is our freedom, our liberation from thinking “as human beings do.”