Then Peter took Jesus aside and began to rebuke him,
"God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you."
Peter had a very human response to the idea that his friend and teacher should need to suffer and die. The compassion that motivated it was a strength, not a weakness. But the human way he expressed it was limited and insufficient. If Jesus really was what Peter had said of him it implied that he, and not Peter, would dictate the plan. The Christ and the Son of God would not benefit from the suggestion of an alternate path or from second opinion in regard to his next steps. Yet Peter could not wrap his head around the fact that Jesus should have to suffer in this way. When he arrived at this apparent contradiction he had the choice to trust his own wisdom or to assume that Jesus had a reason for what he said. But what Jesus said seemed so wildly unlikely that Peter reverted to treating Jesus like any other friend. He acted as though he were talking someone who was saying crazy things back from a ledge. No doubt such dark words would have been difficult to accept. Doing so would have been in the same ballpark as Abraham agreeing to offering his beloved Isaac in obedience to God even though the promise made to him by God could only be fulfilled through him.
"Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me.
You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do."
Human thinking might reason rightly about merely human realities. But it was insufficient to assess the strategy of God for establishing his Kingdom on earth. If we were interacting with a purely natural world, that had no interpenetration with spiritual realities, we might have been able to content ourselves with the type of thinking that comes naturally to us. But as things stand, the spiritual has always been present and working to shape our reality, sometimes in hidden ways, sometimes through the parts of the story the prophets like Jeremiah were able to illuminate, but now made explicit in the coming of Jesus himself. If we are to align our lives with God's design for the world we can't really on merely human modes of thinking. Instead, we need to do what Paul suggests in our second reading.
Do not conform yourselves to this age
but be transformed by the renewal of your mind,
that you may discern what is the will of God,
what is good and pleasing and perfect.
Only when our minds are renewed do we understand the logic of sacrificial love that made Jesus go to the cross for us. It is the revolution in our thinking that allows us to make the transition from the initial appeal of our callings and vocations to persistence even during the hard times and difficult aspects those things entail. We may feel for a moment as though we were duped by the Lord. But our transformed minds will help us end by choosing obedience.
Jeremiah's human mind did have something to say:
I say to myself, I will not mention him,
I will speak in his name no more.
But ultimately he chose to remember the spiritual truth of which his renewed mind was certain:
But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart,
imprisoned in my bones;
I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure it.
Jeremiah didn't want to cry out violence and outrage as his message. Humanly speaking, he would have preferred to stay positive. He wanted people to feel affirmed and to remain in their good graces himself. But to do so in that time and place and circumstance would not have been truly loving. He had to believe God's word, which told him that there were higher goods that mattered more. In ruminating on that word he received the fiery motivation necessary to persevere even amidst great difficulty.
"God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you."
Peter had a very human response to the idea that his friend and teacher should need to suffer and die. The compassion that motivated it was a strength, not a weakness. But the human way he expressed it was limited and insufficient. If Jesus really was what Peter had said of him it implied that he, and not Peter, would dictate the plan. The Christ and the Son of God would not benefit from the suggestion of an alternate path or from second opinion in regard to his next steps. Yet Peter could not wrap his head around the fact that Jesus should have to suffer in this way. When he arrived at this apparent contradiction he had the choice to trust his own wisdom or to assume that Jesus had a reason for what he said. But what Jesus said seemed so wildly unlikely that Peter reverted to treating Jesus like any other friend. He acted as though he were talking someone who was saying crazy things back from a ledge. No doubt such dark words would have been difficult to accept. Doing so would have been in the same ballpark as Abraham agreeing to offering his beloved Isaac in obedience to God even though the promise made to him by God could only be fulfilled through him.
"Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me.
You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do."
Human thinking might reason rightly about merely human realities. But it was insufficient to assess the strategy of God for establishing his Kingdom on earth. If we were interacting with a purely natural world, that had no interpenetration with spiritual realities, we might have been able to content ourselves with the type of thinking that comes naturally to us. But as things stand, the spiritual has always been present and working to shape our reality, sometimes in hidden ways, sometimes through the parts of the story the prophets like Jeremiah were able to illuminate, but now made explicit in the coming of Jesus himself. If we are to align our lives with God's design for the world we can't really on merely human modes of thinking. Instead, we need to do what Paul suggests in our second reading.
Do not conform yourselves to this age
but be transformed by the renewal of your mind,
that you may discern what is the will of God,
what is good and pleasing and perfect.
Only when our minds are renewed do we understand the logic of sacrificial love that made Jesus go to the cross for us. It is the revolution in our thinking that allows us to make the transition from the initial appeal of our callings and vocations to persistence even during the hard times and difficult aspects those things entail. We may feel for a moment as though we were duped by the Lord. But our transformed minds will help us end by choosing obedience.
Jeremiah's human mind did have something to say:
I say to myself, I will not mention him,
I will speak in his name no more.
But ultimately he chose to remember the spiritual truth of which his renewed mind was certain:
But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart,
imprisoned in my bones;
I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure it.
Jeremiah didn't want to cry out violence and outrage as his message. Humanly speaking, he would have preferred to stay positive. He wanted people to feel affirmed and to remain in their good graces himself. But to do so in that time and place and circumstance would not have been truly loving. He had to believe God's word, which told him that there were higher goods that mattered more. In ruminating on that word he received the fiery motivation necessary to persevere even amidst great difficulty.
Jeremiah could, no doubt, have made a more concerted effort to forget his calling, to distract himself whenever something reminded him of what had been spoken to him by God. Little by little he might have deadened the fire within him. But he chose not to be conformed to his age. Thus, not only was he transformed as an isolated individual, but God's will was accomplished through him. In truth he became an example of the sort of "living sacrifice" about which Paul wrote, whose very life availed for the well-being of his people. It did not do so in the way he might have hoped, by avoiding the Babylonian exile, or even mitigating the horror of that exile appreciably. But nevertheless, at the end of the book of Jeremiah, in the beginning of the exile, we do see immediate signs of hope. Not only that, but future generations who read his words would come to understand more deeply the importance of wholehearted obedience to the Lord. Moreover, his word contained promises that helped prepare for the coming of the Lord Jesus himself:
“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
(See Jeremiah 31:31-34)
Jeremiah's own life as a living sacrifice had sufficient parallels with the life and career of Jesus that his life, and not only his message, served to prepare people for the coming messiah. When our own minds are renewed and our lives correspond to that fresh spiritual way of thinking we help make Jesus intelligible to others, to whom the cross often seems as strange as it did to Peter.
Jeremiah's own life as a living sacrifice had sufficient parallels with the life and career of Jesus that his life, and not only his message, served to prepare people for the coming messiah. When our own minds are renewed and our lives correspond to that fresh spiritual way of thinking we help make Jesus intelligible to others, to whom the cross often seems as strange as it did to Peter.
For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
It isn't so much that we are called to seek out misery and suffering, as though they were good in themselves. But we are called to be able to put God's Kingdom first and ourselves second. We must not be so fixated on self that we are unwilling to hear where God is calling us. We need to be willing to speak when and what we are called to speak, even if there are consequences. We must be willing to demonstrate our love for both God and neighbor, when it is difficult, and not only when it is easy. We must be faithful to the Gospel and "be ready in season and out of season" (see Second Timothy 4:2), as Paul told Timothy. It is important for us to overcome the patterns of human thinking that tell us to prioritize our selves and our lives in this world as though they were the highest goods. Let us replace a mindset that asks "What about me?" with one that meditates trustingly on God's word, seeking his will and then carrying it out by his grace.
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