rebuked

It's kind of hard to imagine that anyone at any time has had the temerity to rebuke Jesus. But Peter did. It tells us so in Mark 8:31-33. 

"He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. 'Get behind me, Satan!' he said. 'You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.'"

I'm curious exactly what Peter rebuked Jesus about. Was it that he didn't think Jesus should be so negative about the future? That he shouldn't be so disrespectful of the Jewish leaders? That all this business about dying and rising again in three days sounded like crazy talk? Did he want to advise Jesus that if he would just moderate his tone a little bit and look for ways to get along better, he wouldn't have so much conflict in his life?

Mark doesn't tell us, so I guess exactly what got Peter going isn't the point. The point is that whatever it was, it didn't reflect Godly thinking. Jesus called Peter "Satan," and accused him of only being concerned about human things.

It's an interesting comment, because Jesus combined in himself the full deity of God and the full humanity of mankind. He would be in a position to know of the concerns of both, and you would think he might sympathize with both. But maybe it wasn't Peter's mindfulness of human concerns that disappointed Jesus. Maybe it was that Peter didn't think of Godly concerns along with his human concerns.

It's a challenging thing to think about, because it seems like there would be clear implications for my own thinking, but it's not easy to see what they are. I get that I need to be mindful of Godly things, but what does that look like? Or what does it look like when I don't? Is this a caution against pushing for my personal preferences in church, or trying to impose my faith standards on believers?

Or maybe the message is more pointed than that. Is this more about not trying to put Jesus in a box with my expectations of how he should work or who he should save? Or who he should damn, as seems to be a more likely point of disagreement.

This is a good example, I think, of why it's good to wrestle with scripture. Even when the answers aren't clear, the questing for them takes me to good places. Maybe in the end that's a part of what it means to be always working to be holier.