Thursday of the Sixth Week in Ordinary Time
(Mark 8:27-33)
The woman has an inoperable brain tumor. The doctor just told her that he can do nothing more for her. Most likely, he said, she will die soon. Of course, the news troubled the woman and her family. They wondered how the doctor could be so sure. "Should he not have held out some hope?" they ask themselves. Disbelieving the doctor’s prognosis, the family resembles Peter in the gospel today. The chief apostle refuses to accept Jesus’ prediction of the suffering he faces.
We can imagine the thoughts racing through Peter’s mind when he refutes Jesus. He may be thinking that Jesus has power to lay his enemies in the dust. Or possibly that he and the other disciples will defend Jesus if anyone so much as lifts a finger against him. Or even that all the Jews will come to recognize Jesus as the Christ. If, as Jesus says, Peter thinks as human beings do and not like God, then Jesus as God knows all too well how human beings think. He realizes that when push comes to shove the disciples will fold like a house of cards. Likewise, he perceives the Jewish religious establishment in Jerusalem as too settled to acknowledge a preacher and healer from Galilee as God’s chosen one. Most of all, Jesus knows the human person as in dire need of redemption from a bloody encounter with the evil one.
“Human kind cannot bear very much reality,” T.S. Eliot once wrote. By “reality” he was referring to both the outrageousness of death and Jesus’ remedy of that affliction with the cross. We like Peter often underestimate human sinfulness and overestimate our ability to help ourselves. Most of all, perhaps, we fail to grasp the intense and unremitting love that moves Jesus to die for us. We have to change our minds or, as Jesus says in another place, to repent and believe.
