8/30 - 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Dear Parish Family,

Of all the Old Testament prophets, Jeremiah comes closest to the New Testament understanding of what it means to be a bearer of God’s word. In the First Reading, we hear the beginning of a prayer or conversation that Jeremiah has with God. He admits some good things about himself and how, at times, he would rather not be who he is. He is hesitant to follow God’s promptings as he is getting into deep trouble with the people but at the same time there is a deep insatiable yearning to be close to God. In the end of course, Jeremiah did faithfully play his part in God’s work of redemption.

In the Gospel, Jesus is presenting to his friends the real meaning of what it is going to mean to be the Christ and the Son of God. He will have to show up in Jerusalem for a sure and certain humiliating death. There is a deep reality to Jesus’ being the Christ, and a deeper reality of the disciples’ being followers of the Christ. Jesus invites them to come with him by means of being faithful to their relationship with him. That is what has made them who they are
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His “cross” was more than the wood of Calvary. It was flesh and spirit, the history and destiny of his whole life. He, his very self, was his cross! He was who he had heard he was, the “Beloved of the Father.” St. Paul describes it best when he says, “He humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, death on a cross.” (Phil.2:8)

Today we might say, easily, that certain other people are our crosses. We might say that a certain physical disability or personality defect is our cross. But it is more interior than that. What Jesus is offering the disciples and us, is the personal embrace of the totality of our reality: creature, limited, a mind that thinks like an imperfect creature.

We are invited by today’s readings to our being faithful to our true identities and this involves living with the tensions which come from opposition. We pray in preparation for celebrating Christ’s faithful journey toward his cross and the self-surrendering act of his death. We walk toward this celebration of the liturgy, or we remember it, as we walk toward our own final surrender to being limited creatures. We can pray with our own awareness of how easy personal infidelities are. Life has many crosses, but the heaviest is that one of our being grateful and accepting of our God-given, God-blessed selves.

We who are followers of Jesus, who proclaim like Peter that Jesus is the Son of God, we are not seduced nor fooled. We believe and struggle with the verticality of our souls and the horizontality of our human ‘creature-liness’. The cross is not an event of time, but the time-bound movement toward our own Jerusalem and resurrection.

We live in an age when, by all cultural accounts, our faith is foolish. Our ritual is weirdly transcendent. Our vows appear to be ‘unkeepable’ promises, our sacraments quaint. The practices we aspire to are held in high suspicion. It is impossible, we are told, for people to be chaste or faithful for life. It is idiotic not to choose what pleases or fulfills us. Hedonism is on the rise and extolled by a ‘just-do-it- all’ clarion call of rebellion. This cultural skepticism is so deep in our own bones that we, like Peter, balk before the truth Christ proposes. The way of faith reaches too high; its paths are too arduous. Like Peter we must weep for our failures and become a bolder witness.