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Father Riley's homily:
PROPER XVII - A- 20 - JER.
15. 15-21, ROM.
Why doesn’t God act the way we want Him too? Is it because we do not understand His ways? Look at Peter, does he not speak for all of us. Just last week he proclaimed Jesus as the only Son of the Living God and Christ applauded him for his confession, one that was divinely revealed through faith.
In today’s follow on passage, Jesus reveals the true nature of his messiah ship: the mystery of the Passion. It was expected that Messiah would reign forever so that the idea that Christ would die was perplexing to Peter. Peter unwilling speaks for Satan, as the devil did not want Christ to fulfill his mission and save mankind through suffering and death on the cross.
Here, Peter takes two steps backwards. He rejects the idea that Jesus must suffer and be killed. It doesn’t fit with his notion of Jesus as the Christ. Messiah was not supposed to be crucified. For his rejection of God’s plan, Jesus admonishes him and charges him with being opposed to God.
His idea of God and the ways of God are too earthly. Suddenly the divine revelation that enabled him to confess Jesus as the Son of God has left him. He is looking at it all wrong like looking through a pair of binoculars through the wrong end.
As I mentioned in last week’s homily, Peter still has much to learn. The learning curve for him just got a lot steeper. As it does for each of us as we journey through this life. None of us sets out to defy God and to identify with the world in its wickedness and sin. Peter certainly did not on the heels of his declaration of Christ as God’s only Son. But it is easy to do.
The path to conformity, to worldliness, to spiritual destruction begins with small seemingly harmless steps. Those steps away from God and can be as seemingly insignificant as assenting to something we know is not right. Or remaining silent when we know in our hearts we should speak out but yet we do not.
God has a plan for Peter, as He does for each of us.
We are the ones that get in the way of God’s plan when we have both feet firmly planted in this world. For then, our thoughts and ideas about God become skewed and we are unable to see God as He really is nor able to hear His voice above the noise and clamor of the world.
Such rationalization like that of Peter’s can close our hearts and minds to being able to hear the word of God at all. Jesus interrupts Peter to warn him that such thinking is destructive. Peter was playing into Satan’s hands. Thus, Jesus rebukes Peter and makes it clear to him that what he has just said places him opposite of God and in the camp of the enemy.
How easy it is for any of us to do the same, to excuse ourselves, for example, with the thought that we are only acting like everyone else. How easy it is for us to focus on the world around us and forget that this is not our true home. How easy it is for us to unwittingly play into the hands of the enemy when our thoughts of God are earthly and our interests are entirely selfish.
Having rebuked Peter in front of his peers, Jesus turns his attention to the others disciples with the hope that they have understood the reason why he chastised Peter. He instructs them that the way of discipleship is the way of the cross. To take up one’s cross is to live a life of self-denial for the sake of the love of God and the gospel.
The central paradox of Christian living is that in grasping for temporal things, we lose the eternal; but in sacrificing everything in this world, we gain eternal riches that are unimaginable (1 Cor. 2.9).
To follow Jesus is an all or nothing proposition. Following him will cost everything and require that we give everything. There are no half measures on this journey. One can’t follow Jesus by clinging to the font. You have to let go and take up your cross and follow Christ.
Cling to your life and you will lose it Jesus tells us. That is a hard lesson to learn. And for some the learning curve is simply too steep for them to climb. However, in every generation there are, it seems, a few people who are prepared to take Jesus seriously, at his word. Ask yourself if you are one of them. For what will it profit us to gain the whole world and lose our souls?
This morning you will come to the altar of God to receive the Blessed sacrament of Christ’ own Body and Blood.
Moreover, in that moment when you kneel and extend your hands to receive Him you will be bound into a different reality from one that dominates your daily routine and thoughts. In that moment, you will be bound into the reality of Jesus who as he predicted walked the path of obedience and met his death on the cross.
He did not deny that death was coming to him. Yet in the night in which he was betrayed, he blessed bread and broke it and gave it to his followers, and to all who come after him. And when he rose from the dead, he promised that he is with us always and everywhere, to the close of the age.
Peter’s greatest fear that caused him to unwittingly oppose God’s plan for the salvation of mankind, that Jesus the Christ would be killed, was forever dashed on Easter.
We see in today’s gospel that both in the warning and in forgiving, in loving and rebuking, in living and in dying, God comes to see that we do not lose our lives but find true life in the world that is restored to us through Christ’s death on the cross.
And to our joy we discover through our faithful response to that new life, the unimaginable riches of the kingdom that surpass anything this earthly life has to offer. AMEN+
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