“Human Things/Divine Things”
Mark 8:27-35
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
9/13/15
Simon Peter. The Rock. Bold, and brash to a fault. But
faithful, too, even though when denying Jesus, Peter denies all the Christ-like
qualities in himself.
In Mark 8, Peter steps out in prophetic faith to declare out
loud what others have surely begun to hope: Jesus of Nazareth is God’s Messiah.
Jesus affirms Peter’s confession, and it seems to embolden the disciple all the
more. When Jesus turns and speaks of his suffering, rejection, and death, Peter
grants himself authority to scold God’s Anointed One.
With a blistering rebuke of his own, Jesus refers to Peter
as “Satan,” and basically tells him to get lost. Then he says, “You are setting
your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
My heart goes out to old Saint Pete. His mouth is not
getting all that far ahead of his brain. He has seen Jesus do some pretty crazy
things, and they have all been human things. Peter has watched Jesus touch
people, heal people, feed people, argue with people. He has listened to Jesus teach
through those grounded, earthy stories called parables. If Peter sets his mind
on human things, who can blame him?
The problem is that human things are all that Peter sees. And Jesus says that it is time to behold human
things differently, because woven
into those tangible, earthy realities are strands of holiness and eternity.
Jesus is starting to hold his disciples accountable for recognizing divine things
within human things. When he speaks of his imminent suffering, Jesus wants his
followers to hear more than bad news. He wants them to smell the air, taste the
water, and feel the sand beneath their feet in that new realm where divine and human
things are being reconciled and reunited. If they fail to experience the
eternal wrapped up in the temporal, then Friday will never become Good Friday.
Setting our minds on divine things does not mean ignoring
that which is human and earthy. It means to look ever more closely at the
creation around us and to open our hearts and minds to those places where
earthy things and divine things intersect. Revelation tends to occur when
material and spiritual realities deny their margins and meld into one another
like lovers.
Such holiness is everywhere. There is very little in God’s
great creation which cannot, in some way, convey something of the divine things
that Jesus invites us to see. In his poetry, Wendell Berry consistently
acknowledges and beautifully illustrates the divine in the midst of the earthy.
Listen to his poem entitled “The Heron.”
The Heron
While the summer’s growth kept me
anxious in planted rows, I forgot the river
where it flowed, faithful to its way,
beneath the slope where my household
has taken its laborious stand.
I could not reach it even in dreams.
But one morning at the summer’s end
I remember it again, as though its being
lifts into mind in undeniable flood,
and I carry my boat down through the fog,
over the rocks, and set out.
I go easy and silent, and the warblers
appear among the leaves of the willows,
their flight like gold thread
quick in the live tapestry of the leaves.
And I go on until I see, crouched
on a dead branch sticking out of the water,
a heron – so still that I believe
he is a bit of drift hung dead above the water,
and then I see the articulation of feather
and living eye, a brilliance I receive
beyond my power to make, as he
receives in his great patience
the river’s providence. And then I see
that I am seen. Still as I keep,
I might be a tree for all the fear he shows.
Suddenly I know I have passed across
to a shore where I do not live.1
Imagine yourself in that small boat, out on the easy flow of
the river, in the rising mist of a late summer morning. You float silently on
the dark water, watching, listening, expecting. You eye the heron who is eyeing
you. When your human presence does not cause the bird to flee, you find
yourself a part of the river’s life. Suspended between the two shores, you
share space and consciousness with a wider, deeper creation. There, on the
water, you are grounded in God’s peaceable kingdom where all things live together,
healed and in harmony.
When
the two who look at each other are both people, things get more complicated,
don’t they? If we look at fellow human beings and see only human things, we will see only differences, and we will find excuses
to judge, discriminate, and even persecute. As long we are governed by fear,
greed, competition, and a need to control, it will always boil down to us against them.
We are making some progress, perhaps. Then again, as
election seasons always illustrate, we still have so far to go that one must
wonder if the divides can be crossed,
if the wounds can be healed. The
Gospel declares that healing is not only possible, but underway. Still,
complications arise when we discover that crossing over to that new shore feels,
at first, like moving backward. The Holy Spirit, scandalous rascal that she is,
always leads us to live over against institutions and attitudes that have made
us feel safe, but that hide the fresh workings of the divine within the
creation. And because we have so revered some of those institutions and so
nurtured some of those attitudes, the Jesus-Journey of discipleship may feel
like unfaithfulness. Jesus calls the
burden of this journey our cross, and
taking up our cross necessarily includes denying, dying to whatever separates
us from the Divine Presence within us and within our neighbors.
In his book A Generous Orthodoxy, Brian McLaren says
this about discipleship: “Jesus has taught us that the way to know what God is
like is not by determining our philosophical boundary conditions…before
departing, but…by embarking on an adventure of faith, hope, and love, even if
you don’t know where your path will lead (think of Abraham…),” says McLaren.
“The way to know God is by following Jesus on that adventure…Anyone who doesn’t
embark on the adventure of love doesn’t know God at all…for God is love…”2
Remember, discipleship is not “sin management.” Sin is real,
of course, but it is not our fundamental reality. Sin obscures our eternal
nature. It distorts our God-imaged
selves. So instead of trying to avoid sin so that we can “go to heaven when we
die,” discipleship is about living into the kingdom of heaven here and now,
with the people who are next to you – the ones whose perfume you smell, whose
stomachs you hear rumbling, who will vote differently than you.
True disciples claim the holiness within them and hold it up
like a mirror so that others may see it in themselves, as well.
May
you shoulder your cross and die whatever death you must to see the holiness
within yourself.
May
you die that more challenging death through which you see the holiness in others.
And
through these deaths, may you live as a reflection of God’s eternal-yet-here-and-now
realm of Resurrection.
1”The Heron,” Collected Poems, 1957-1982,
Wendell Berry. North Point Press, San Francisco, 1984, pp.137-138.
2Brian McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy,
Zondervan, Grand Rapids, MI, 2004, p. 207.
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