Deacon Dave Etters
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Can we learn to think as God thinks? This homily reflects on St. Paul’s call to become a “living sacrifice” and allow God to transform us through the renewal of our minds. As we cooperate with God’s grace, we gradually develop the mind of Christ—marked by humility, service, generosity, sacrifice, and a willingness to carry the light of the Gospel into the world.
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Peter, you are thinking, not as God does, but as human beings do. Is it possible for us to think like God? And the way that God thinks, that’s a question that just really goes deep within us. Can we really do that? I mean, it seems, yes, we can, but in another way, it seems like impossible.
Peter vehemently opposes Jesus proceeding to Jerusalem to suffer and die at the hands of the authorities and be crucified. Because he’s protecting life. He’s protecting his Lord.
He wants to not see his Lord go through that. He had that determination all the way to the Garden of Gethsemane, when he brandished the sword on the eve of the crucifixion and sliced off the slave’s ear. He didn’t give up on that zeal in his heart to protect his Lord.
But there’s something that’s different here. God thinks differently than Peter was thinking. What God was thinking was the suffering and the cross are intended to bring about a greater good, the salvation of the world.
Peter couldn’t see that. He could see the short game, but he couldn’t see the long game of God’s plan. Now, bringing it to our time right now, if you had some friends that their house burned down and they lost everything, heirlooms, pictures, irreplaceable things, would that be an acceptable or a good thing? We would probably shake our heads and say, absolutely not.
That’s a tragedy. It’s awful. Now look what they’re going to have to do.
They’re going to have to rebuild. They’re going to have to go on and put things back together. But how about this? What if that loss shook their lives to the core and it changed them where they turned, repented, and came to faith in God and started a whole brand new life? That would put a different spin, a different perspective on what we go through in this world.
We all go through hardship. We all go through suffering. We all have things that set us back.
But we’ve got to back up and think and see it as best as we can as God sees it. Now, in the second reading today, I’m going to read it in the RSV version for the reason of the word of the text here. It reads this way.
Therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. Do not be conformed to the world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. When St. Paul uses the word, therefore, he’s referring to all of the previous part of the letter.
There’s 11 chapters that precede this 12th, of course. And everything that leads up to this point, he’s saying, therefore, in other words, based on everything that he has said up to that point, then present ourselves to God. Now what preceded this was the love of God that Jesus came and died for us when we were yet sinners.
He’s speaking of the mercy of God, the justification of our lives before God and his great love for us and the whole grand plan of salvation. Because of all that, our proper response is to present ourselves to God as a living sacrifice in light of that. Now, let’s look at the parts of this.
It breaks down pretty easily. The living sacrifice in the Jewish temple, the understanding which would have been in their thought was a sacrifice is an animal that has died. And a living sacrifice, it would seem perhaps as an oxymoron, a living sacrifice.
Present yourselves as a living sacrifice to God. In other words, given to God just as though you were a sacrifice to death, but are still living. In other words, the totality of ourselves is what is given in this living sacrifice.
We are alive, but yet we give God everything of ourselves as if we actually had died and we had nothing left with which to give. The second thing he tells us is do not be conformed. This is an outward conforming to the world.
Don’t go with the flow of this world, following the crowd and just mindlessly meandering through this world. The message of Christ is counter-cultural. A dead fish floats downstream rather easily, but it’s a live fish that can swim upstream against the current.
And we’ve got many currents in our contemporary world that need to be countered with the direction of our lives. And then be transformed inwardly. It could be stated this way, permit God to change you inside by giving you a completely new mind.
The high definition of commentary makes a very interesting observation and analysis of this verse, and I’ll quote, our former slavery to sin affected every part of us just as the creation has been affected as well. We could go so far as to say that we were brainwashed, brainwashed by sin. So as we believers await the complete redemption of our bodies on the last day, we undergo a transformational process of sanctification, which is a becoming holy, becoming set apart, becoming dedicated to God through discipleship.
Understood in this way, discipleship is not simply about changing our behavior or changing or learning a few lessons. It’s about, it requires a complete cognitive makeover, a complete cognitive makeover. In a sense, a renewed mind is the mind of Christ.
It’s contrary to the world’s way of thinking. Now, St. Paul could boldly say this to the Corinthian church when he said, we have the mind of Christ. That’s a very strong statement.
We have the mind of Christ. Paul was speaking of himself and his coworkers. And so should we.
Now, what does that look like? What is the mind of Christ look like? First of all, it’s a mind. It is humility. It’s a humility beyond our ability to grasp.
The idea of the second person of the blessed Trinity coming to this earth and mission to take on a human nature to suffer and die for us for our sins is beyond our comprehension. How could this be? Why would this be other than the love of our God? The mind of Christ is a servant. When the sons of thunder, James and John agreed, they aspired to sit at the right and left of Jesus when he came in his glory.
Jesus said to them, whoever wishes to be great, truly great among you, you shall be a servant. And the mind of Christ is redemptive suffering and death. We like to avoid that, but that’s a part of life.
We are also to embrace suffering, redemptive suffering and death. We as living sacrifices must be willing to suffer misunderstanding, ridicule and persecution and all other hardships for Christ. And the mind of Christ is graciousness and generosity beyond justice.
We could list a thousand things about Jesus that are his mind, his way of going about life. The generosity and graciousness, consider the vineyard workers, the guys that work one hour and the disdain and anger of the others that worked all day and they get paid the same. God’s generosity is almost reckless with us, his mercy and generosity.
Centuries before the great prophet Isaiah said it this way, for my thoughts are not your thoughts and neither are your ways my way, says the Lord, for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. And so for us, the challenge today as we come to the altar is to present ourselves as a living sacrifice to God. And then we in being renewed are going to be transformed into the image of Christ Jesus, which is a cooperative work of our free choice and his grace.
You got to have both. The abbots sent questions to the grand abbot of the day, Bernard of Clairvaux was a doctor of the church and they asked him questions and getting guidance and he said, they asked, is it free will or is it grace? Is it our choice or God’s work, grace? And he said, yes. Basically he said, yes.
And here’s the way it works. Grace does the whole work and so does our free choice. Now here’s the difference.
The whole work is a work of grace. The whole work is done in free choice. Same thing as the parable of the sower, you have to have the seed, but you also have to have the soil, the mystery of God’s cooperation with us.
And today as we pray for the renewal of our minds in Christ that he would give us his mind, we go forth from this Eucharist as Pope Leo has encouraged us in this month of August to pray for the evangelization of our cities. It’s with a renewed mind in Christ that we can bring the light of the gospel to our hungry and dark world. Let’s go with the grace of God with our free choice in our hearts today.
God bless you.