Jesus bluntly rebukes Peter, telling him, “You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” There are two contexts for this rebuke: one is the particular circumstance in which Peter himself rebuked Jesus for revealing his Passion; and the other is the general human reality in which all people struggle to understand the division of human things and divine things.

In the first context, an interesting question is, What did Peter actually say to Jesus? Given that Jesus has just disclosed that “the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again,” it is not a stretch to believe that Peter rejected the need for the Son of Man to suffer and die. Jesus’ divinely ordained and freely chosen destiny is, in this context, the “divine things” (the Greek is literally “the things of God,” ta tou theou).

More concretely, though, what might these “human things” (“the things of human beings,” ta tôn anthrôpôn) be? What are the things that draw us away from God’s ways and desires? Although “human things” in themselves are not necessarily negative—avoiding suffering and death is not inherently wrong—what seems to be the case is that whenever (divine) values and (human) preferences come into conflict, one chooses the “divine thing.” Values and preferences are not always at odds, but when they are, the choice must be made for the things of God.

What things did Peter tell Jesus to choose? When we reflect on Peter telling Jesus to choose the “human thing,” it is hard to avoid considering the concrete temptations Satan offered Jesus in the Synoptic Gospel narratives, since it is Jesus who raises the specter of Satan here in Caesarea Philippi. It seems likely that Jesus does not consider Peter as Satan, but that the temptations Peter offers in the guise of helping Jesus are connected to the temptations of Satan that we know from Matthew and Luke—that is, the basic temptations that underlie all “human things.”

In the temptation accounts, Jesus is offered the power to satisfy all his earthly hungers, the power to presume upon God’s will and favor, and the power over all kingdoms. Wealth, authority and fame—what more could a person want? Did Peter tempt Jesus with a plea for him not to die at the hands of foreign oppressors, the Romans, but to institute God’s kingdom by conquering them militarily and installing himself as king? While it is impossible to know precisely what temptation Peter called upon Jesus to accept, it is not too much to believe that he asked him to act on his power and authority and bring about the kingdom of God in a way that aligned with “human things,” that involved shows of force, might and revenge.

When Peter identified Jesus as the Messiah, he must have had particular ideas not just of what this meant for the Messiah, God’s Anointed One, but for those who were the Messiah’s closest friends, his apostles and disciples. Whatever kingdom Peter’s mind conjured, it probably did not involve denying himself and taking up his cross to follow Jesus or losing his life for the Gospel. What kind of kingdom is that? Feel for Peter for a moment. What kind of ridiculous kingdom is built on the broken body of a defeated Messiah?

This is the kingdom of “divine things,” the kingdom of paradox. Tomas Halik, the Czech priest and theologian, says, “If we have never had the feeling that what Jesus wants of us is absurd, crazy, impossible, then we’ve probably either been too hasty in taming or diluting the radical nature of his teaching by soothing intellectualizing interpretations, or (mostly naïvely, illusorily or even hypocritically) we have too easily forgotten just to what extent—in our thinking, customs, and actions—we are rooted ‘in this world’ where totally different rules apply” (Night of the Confessor, p. 27). Jesus offers us the things of God, the things in which we save our lives by losing them and build a kingdom whose divine power is seen as human weakness.

This article appears in August 31-September 7 2015.

John W. Martens is an associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn,where he teaches early Christianity and Judaism. He also directs the Master of Arts in Theology program at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity. He was born in Vancouver, B.C. into a Mennonite family that had decided to confront modernity in an urban setting. His post-secondary education began at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas, came to an abrupt stop, then started again at Vancouver Community College, where his interest in Judaism and Christianity in the earliest centuries emerged. He then studied at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, and McMaster University, with stops at University of Haifa and University of Tubingen. His writing often explores the intersection of Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman culture and belief, such as in "let the little children come to me: Children and Childhood in Early Christianity" (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), but he is not beyond jumping into the intersection of modernity and ancient religion, as in "The End of the World: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film and Television" (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford Press, 2003). He blogs at  www.biblejunkies.com and at www.americamagazine.org for "The Good Word." You can follow him on Twitter @biblejunkies, where he would be excited to welcome you to his random and obscure interests, which range from the Vancouver Canucks and Minnesota Timberwolves, to his dog, and 70s punk, pop and rock. When he can, he brings students to Greece, Turkey and Rome to explore the artifacts and landscape of the ancient world. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and has two sons. He is certain that the world will not end until the Vancouver Canucks have won the Stanley Cup, as evidence has emerged from the Revelation of John, 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, and 4 Ezra which all point in this direction.