Saturday, May 17, 2014
Proper 17 - notes on Peter Petrified
those who want to save their life will lose it, and
those who lose their life for my sake will find it
What
is this life that we must lose in order to find it? What are the divine
things that Peter fails to set his mind upon, so that the rock of
truth turns into another kind of rock – a stumbling block and an obstacle in
the way of life? What are those words that Jeremiah said he ate and
they became to him a delight and the joy of his heart? What is the
life that we shall lose if we try to save it?
Among
the inexhaustible profundities of this paradox, there is one to be found in the
epistle, where the Apostle continues to advise the Romans how to live it
out. Last week, we heard his analogy of
the body.
We
who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of
another.
This week he explains a bit about what that
means: no haughtiness, no revenge, kindness toward immigrants, and so on. To
look for life anywhere else than in this Body is to lose our life. To imagine ourselves
to be independent of it is death. To live as though we were a law unto
ourselves is to die. Such a mistake petrifies a soul, like
Peter, the Rock was petrified by setting his mind on human things. .
The
mind set on human things ~ the worldly, fleshly consciousness, conformed
unto the world, as Paul put it, is a sense of self APART from the Body.
Apart from others. And therefore APART from God, because a refusal to obey the
second great commandment, to love your neighbor As YOURSELF, is a refusal also
of the first, which is like it. One who declares himself apart from neighbor
declares himself APART also from God, whom his neighbor resembles.
The
opposite of this apartheid is the solidarity of
the Body, in Paul’s great analogy. It is not confined to the Church: this
solidarity extends to all humanity and to all created matter to be united in
the Mystical Body of Christ at the end of time, a unity of which the visible
Church in the Holy Eucharist is a foretaste and pledge. But not only at the end
of time. We are all members of one another right now, in and out of the visible
Church. Furthermore, the mystical solidarity of the Body of Christ is not to be
distinguished from the social solidarity with one another here and now, which
the Gospel calls the Reign of God.
The
mystical theology of the Christian tradition here yokes itself to a political
economy that can be called Christian, and to a principle the Bl. Pope John Paul
II called the priority of labor. God did not create us to strive against to get ahead of one another as individuals. That is to set our minds
on the human thing, like Peter. God
created us to love one another, and to grow to recognize that we are one another. This solidarity with one another and with all creation is the Divine
Thing, on which we must set our mind, if we wish to find life.
Christian
spiritual teaching must never divide the world from God, heaven from earth, the
historical from the eternal. Just as it
is heresy to separate the divinity from the humanity of Christ, so it is
heretical to imagine that Christ’s redemption is out of this world. Heresy
means seizing on one to the exclusion of the other – petrifying the truth, to suit our own, limited consciousness.
Notice that
Peter’s confession is followed by today’s rebuke. The Lord calls him satan, which means adversary or accuser. Like
the D.A. in a criminal trial. Satan
is not the Pan-figure of male fertility, as in later Western art; neither is satan a charming, Mephistophelian
tempter, urging us to have fun; but satan
is the inclination to one side or the other of the great Mystery of the
Incarnation. Satan is the liar: the personification of the illusion of
apartness, alienation, apartheid.
So, there was
Peter, no doubt thinking to himself, “well, now, if I am the Rock and so solid
that the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church built on me, I must
be the Messiah’s chief counselor, I had better let Him know when He is getting
it wrong! The Messiah is not going to suffer – certainly not to be crucified…and so on”. But Jesus tells
him to shut up – his advice expresses exactly the kind of consciousness Jesus
is come to change. His thinking is all tied up in “human things”, and not in divine
things”. He has slipped back into old, petrified patterns of thought. The Rock
that was last week’s life-giving gusher, is this week’s stumbling-block – an obstacle
in the path of everything Jesus is come to accomplish.
In the Gospel
account, right after this little episode, comes the Transfiguration, which we
celebrated a couple weeks ago. The Lord took Peter and others up on top of a
high mountain, where He appeared in the Glory of the Uncreated Light with Moses
and Elijah, conferring with them about the New Exodus, which He was about to
accomplish in Jerusalem: that is, about His suffering, Death and Resurrection.
Peter didn’t have a clue what this was about. Nor do we, really. But we do know, now, that it involves the
marriage of earth and heaven, the liberation and transfiguration of the whole
cosmos.
The Messiah’s
work is NOT just freeing Israel from the Romans, nor is it just paying for our human
sins, nor is it even showing us how to live well in this world. The Messiah’s
work is about way more than YOU AND ME and any
of our concerns (human things). It
includes us, but it is not confined to us. That is why Peter’s petrified
thinking was such bad advice. And why it became the occasion for Jesus to utter
the ultimate paradox:
those who want to save their life will lose it, and
those who lose their life for my sake will find it
I think it
means – among many other things – that we
have to stop thinking of ourselves as APART from everybody and everything else
– what the Buddhists call the illusion of self, what Jesus calls setting our
mind on human things. Instead we have
to identify ourselves as members of one another [setting our minds on DIVINE things].
This will seem like death and loss to
our human consciousness, and indeed it IS death and loss to what Paul calls flesh, and we might call ego.
But if we are to live at all, like Jeremiah we must EAT the
words of God as they are found, so that they may become our joy and the delight
of our hearts:
-
This
is true religion, which we pray in today’s
Collect may increase in us.
-
This
is the awful Love of the Name, which we pray today God may graft into our hearts.
-
This
is the fruit of good works, which we
pray today God may bring forth in us:
the life of
solidarity in the Body of Christ, in the human commonwealth of labor and in the
cosmic dance of creation: His Kingdom come on earth as in heaven.
