When Jesus tells his followers the horrors that are to befall the “Son of Man,” Peter takes him aside and admonishes him. “Don’t be talking like that! How can anything bad happen to you? I’ve just said I believe you’re the Messiah!”
And Jesus in turn rebukes Peter, quite harshly, tellling him: “For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
Jesus was asking a lot of Peter to think in divine terms. Yet that neatly describes the task of discipleship: learning to think like God. Paul writes that those who would follow Jesus “Have the mind of Christ.” This makes sense – if we are united with Christ in baptism, if he takes up residence in us, as it were, through the presence of the Holy Spirit, then we have his mind as well, not replacing our own, but informing, even transforming them.
Our minds and capacity for thought are among God’s greatest gifts to us, and also the seat of our strongest resistance to God. Funny how that is… Before we can set our mind on the things of God we have to become aware of the distinction between our own thoughts and God’s thoughts. Whenever we become aware that we are thinking solely out of our own reality – say, when anxiety or anger are leading the way, or we're convinced faith is irrational, or when we’re set on a course of action that we know is other than the way God would work in us – we can ask God to show us situations or people as God sees them. Often a broader perspective opens immediately.
This weekend, try to notice when your thoughts are purely human, and when they seem tinged with the holy. Like anything, this is a spiritual practice we can cultivate; as we become conscious, gradually we learn to think more like God.
It is a delicate balance to prize the gift of human nature and yet allow God’s life to grow in us and uproot everything that is not of God. Perhaps this is best summed up in the old adage, “God loves us just the way we are – and far too much to leave us that way.”
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