I remember very clearly how my father liked to travel early in the morning. It might have been 5 am but for us children it felt like 3 am. Dad probably had finished night shift six hours earlier, the children were loaded in the truck and then the stuff was packed and we were grumpy. One of my brothers was complaining about how cold it was and that the truck door should be shut, and whining loudly about it repeatedly, perhaps using strong language. So, I being closest to the door, leaned out to close the door when my angry father came around the corner, slightly annoyed at the whining and strong language, and took out some of his frustration on the closest child, which happened to be an innocent bystander, me. It is challenging, to say the least, to reason with an angry parent who might perhaps have had a hard day at work (who knows). My brother though did not step up to explain the situation because, after all, who likes discipline or correction.
What is my point? Well in today’s Gospel, Peter gets severely corrected and called Satan and told, “You are not thinking as God but as man.” We might be tempted to sit by and think it doesn’t matter, that this is not for me, and let this whole thing go but the truth is the Gospels are written for us, so you and I must ask what is the correction for us here, what are the ways that we don’t think like God? We may think, “I am only human so why would I think like God?” First we must ask what is Peter’s error? Peter’s error is that he thinks love should be cheap and easy and the cost of man is not worth much. No one is worth dying for. This is his error and tempting Jesus to believe that. He then gets the whole cost of discipleship – the call to carry the cross and to lay down your life. Wow. This is not cheap or easy.
What Peter said was not unnatural for us to think like. There is in fact a whole brand of the Gospel called the, “health and wealth,” gospel, that is if you follow Jesus you will not suffer and you will be well off. Many churches subscribe to that gospel and it is a natural desire of man to have those things – health and wealth – but we only want them because we believe they will make us happy. Yet they do not. What makes a person happy is giving and receiving love. That is why Jesus had to set the example of what love looks like and that is why He so adamantly corrected Peter.
How then do we think the way God does? We must receive His love. We must pray to love Him and be open to His love because what He is calling us to is not natural but above our nature. Naturally we want to think like Peter. We want to think that love is easy and people are cheap and don’t take much effort and grace to love. We, as Christians, have the ability with grace to see everything in our lives as an opportunity to grow in holiness. I want us all to take some time and look at the correction we have been offered today to think like God. We can pray to see areas where we are not thinking that way. I was thinking about pro-life. I admit I, too, struggle with a higher thought on the matter. As Catholics, and as a human, we should respect life and we should do what we can to save lives. But in truth, we are not thinking this way about it. We still allow abortions to happen in our country. I am not blaming or accusing anyone for having them, I have heard and journeyed with men and women who have been part of an abortion and heard their grief. People should not have such a terrible option available to them in their times of fear and anxiety. If we believe it is life, and we say we do, then we should be doing all in our power to stop abortion and euthanasia. But we are not thinking like God and not picking up the cross. I know I am as guilty here as anyone for not thinking that life has a value that is worth sacrificing for. It is something I certainly must pray for. You see we should make tokens of love and we should not give a little for the protection of life, we must give all. There was once a judge who was hearing a trial of a man who stole bread because he was starving. The judge fined him five dollars for stealing, and then the judge reached into his own pocket and paid the man’s fine. The judge looked around the court and told everyone there that they were guilty of living in a city where someone must steal bread in order to live and he fined them all.
It is a hard thought and it is challenging to put on the mind of Christ. I hope that we all can see how much we need to spend time with God so we can accept the cost of love and pay it as we are called to live our lives abundantly as our Master did.