The Things of God
But turning and looking at his disciples, Jesus rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
Mark 8:33
We are traveling through Mark’s gospel this church year, and we are now at a turning point in its eighth chapter. To this point, it’s been a lot of healings, feeding thousands, and fanfare, the relatively easy part of the journey of the Jesus movement. The disciples must have been a bit high on it, for they were part of it all. They were bandwagoners on a rising star, and his popularity must have been rubbing off on them. To this point, they thought they only had to be followers of Good Times and Good Vibes Jesus. But now they are learning that the “divine things,” as Jesus says in Mark 8 (more accurately in the Greek, ta tou theou, “the things of God”) are more than this.
Jesus contrasts these “things of God” with “human things.” He is starting to separate his Way more and more from humanity’s; a couple of weeks ago in Mark 7, Jesus talked about the “human traditions” that bound the Pharisees.
For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, debauchery, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.
Mark 7:22-23
Underneath all these are the even more bedrock human traditions of self-preservation, glory, power, ease, and comfort.
Throughout Mark, we learn not only about Jesus, but about ourselves and our failings of discipleship, and the ironic paradigmatic figure of this is Peter. Peter really wants nothing more than to be the model disciple, yet he ends up arguably failing worse than all the others. Arguably, his betrayal of Jesus is even more heartbreaking than Judas. Our reading today marks an important part of his journey of discipleship, which will not be fully completed until the Passion. Peter’s “human things” teach us about ours.
Right Answers and Wrong Rebukes
Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi, and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.”
He asked them, "But who do you say that I am?" Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.”
Mark 8:27-29
Peter starts off well. In response to Jesus’ “who am I,” Peter says, “Christous,” or, “the Messiah.” This is the figure Peter has happily hitched his wagon to. Of course when Jesus is put on trial, he will deny Christ and say, “I don’t know this man.” And he is actually right…he doesn’t really know this man. He does not really know the Messiah.
He never really did. Because as soon as Jesus starts telling him what being the Messiah means—suffering, opposition and rejection, shaming, dying—Peter can’t stand it, even as Christ preaches the good news:
Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes and be killed and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.
Mark 8:31-32
Does Peter have such a visceral reaction because he loves Christ so much? Maybe that’s a touch of it. But it seems more likely Peter has such a strong reaction because of what it means for him. Won’t the Messiah be glorious and victorious? Aren’t there more people to heal, more demons to cast out, much less big political conquests over unjust rulers? What about Good Times and Good Vibes?
So Peter rebukes him. He doesn’t just rebuke Jesus, he rebukes the gospel. The irony—which Mark often shows us so thickly with Peter—is that in rebuking Jesus, Peter is fulfilling the same prophecy he rejects. He is rejecting the Messiah while denying the Messiah will be rejected…who has just told him the Messiah will be rejected.
So it culminates in the big fight: “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind on human things, not on the things of God.”
As I was meditating on this passage this week, it struck me how memorable this moment must have been for the disciples. If you had been there, it would have been a core fight between dear friends, a crisis point of the thing you had just dedicated your life to. For whatever quarrels there were, now it’s come to Peter rebuking the man he just called the Messiah. Was Peter having a breakdown? No! No! It can’t go like that. And the Jesus who responds is not Good Vibes and Good Times Jesus, but rather, “Get behind me Satan.” Satan! Could it be a more vicious rebuke? In a flash, Jesus brings us back to all those temptations in the desert, to the moment when he was utterly alone, before any disciples gave a damn who he was, the Tempter beckoning him away from the cup he had to drink with power and ease and glory. And so yes, the disciple who wants to be the “best disciple” is, in this moment, a pawn of Satan.1 For the Tempter loves “human things.”
The Human Things and the Things of God
So what are the human things? As one pastor put it, the natural temptations that pull us from following higher callings: “I don’t like being opposed, shamed, suffering, or dying.” We prefer the opposite: acceptance, glory, comfort, safety. Are any of these bad in and of themselves? Not necessarily. Is it inherently virtuous to be opposed or shamed? Not for the wrong reasons, lest we seek out shameful behavior and being a contrarian who gets off on being contrarian. But these are still human things that draw us away from the the greater scope and vision of the things of God.
The things of God are not just things that are hard and contrary to our impulses. The things of God are not martyrdom and suffering for no reason at all. The things of God are also greater, and ones that we know we should love more than our actions indicate: the love of God, the peace of God, the wisdom of God, the grace of God, the mercy of God, and the freedom of God in Jesus, the Messiah, Christous.
Peter has his mind on human freedom. That’s normal. But what does freedom in Christ look like?
Peter is still in prison, the penitentiary called “himself.” If he would be known as The Rock, in this episode he is more like that 90s Sean Connery movie about Alcatraz called The Rock. In rejecting God’s things and God’s ways, he has made himself a rock of selfishness in the middle of the sea, a fortress preventing those in it from escaping. Part of the prison is the comforts, the desire to be with the people—I mean, isn’t the Messiah supposed to be with the people?—the desire to be politically powerful and loved and adored, the desire to follow the King in glory.
We have so much to learn from Peter. Peter wants to be a good disciple, and I know many of us reading this newsletter want to. In many days, weeks, and plenty more moments, most of us have followed Jesus before, maybe sometimes by accident. What we have to learn from Peter not only in this story but in his whole journey of discipleship is that getting free in Christ is not about being a “good disciple.” Does this sit at tension with the discussion last week of faith and works? I don’t think so. Because the gospel that sets us free into a life of faith and works (and a faith that is working) is still not about being a model disciple. The gospel is “good news” because we are closer to Peter as an anti-model of discipleship.
It’s the confusing paradox at the heart of Peter and discipleship, a very tricky part of the maze in the prison. You have to want to be a good disciple to follow Jesus, but if you want to be a good disciple because you want to be a successful disciple, you can’t really follow Jesus. To make following Jesus about our success is to make it about human things. But it’s not about us, and following Jesus so often does not look like human success:
If any wish to follow me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?
Mark 8:34-37
In other words, carrying our cross isn’t even about us, just as Jesus’ cross wasn’t about himself, it’s making our lives about others. And when we do so, we taste from his cup of freedom.
Peter was the first to be called by Jesus, and he will be the last to leave him in the courtyard, fulfilling the prophecy he rebuked Jesus for telling him. And all along the way his self-absorption will be there, blocking him from Christ’s offering of freedom, his pride blinding him to the good news right in front of him. “You are setting your mind on human things, Peter.” “You are still in prison, Peter.”
But just as Peter should not give up, neither should we, and we should surely not give up hope. We just have to begin over and again to re-learn what our human amnesia would have us forget.
And there is even good news for us when we are in the moments of denying Christ. Even as Peter rebukes the will of God, he is simultaneously playing his part in it. We can’t help but play our role in God’s story in our human things. We Christians can only discover grace and hope in our brokenness lifted up to God; to build ourselves as disciples is to puff ourselves up on the false freedoms of human things.
As followers of Jesus, we commonly resist the promises of God’s will through our spiritual pride. We can still accept his invitation into freedom by accepting our cross, however small it is today, however large ours is in this life. There will be suffering, but I don’t believe it has to be dour. It can even be joyful, and walking with our cross can even be like “walking on sunshine” if we keep singing along to the music of grace and the wondrous power of God that is working all the time through our suffering, even when we cannot see it. One day, we will.
When we accept our cross, we accept the gift of his cross, the greatest of all the things of God.
As an aside, it’s remarkable that our gospels preserve and attest to all these embarrassing stories about “the rock” of the Church