Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year A
For today’s Gospel reading click the link below:
Mass Readings
(Jeremiah 20:7-9, Rom 12:1-2, Matt 16:21-27)
Homily Reflection by Fr. JJ Fenelon
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,
Over the years I have often asked all those who have become Catholics through the RCIA Journey, how do they find life as a Catholic? The answer is always the same. ‘Father, I thought going through RCIA was tough and challenging, but now I find that living a Catholic life is even more difficult because doing God’s will each and every day of our life is really tough.’
Then there are Catholics who come regularly for Confession struggling with the same sins and getting discouraged because they don’t seem to be able to get rid of those sins and growing in holiness no matter how much time they spend in prayer and dedicate themselves in ministry. Often those who strive generously to serve God seem to get more than their fair share of suffering and hardship.
Take Jeremiah in the First Reading; he never wanted to be a prophet, but found that there was no way of evading the divine call. Boldly and shockingly he says: “God seduced him, overpowered him, deceived him. He finds himself reaching out to a people who won’t listen to him, ridicule him and even make fun of him. Here is his dilemma. On the one hand he wants to relinquish his prophetic role but on the other hand he is unable to do it. “There seemed to be a fire burning in my heart”; it was the fire of his love for God and it made the prophet carry on his apparently hopeless task. It’s a real struggle wanting to be right before God without wanting the challenges.
It isn’t only God’s friends who had to suffer, but even God’s own Son. In today’s Gospel, we have a very peculiar interaction between Jesus and Peter. Jesus reveals to his disciples the anguish and agony he feels as he sets out to Jerusalem, knowing that great opposition and rejection and a cruel death await him there. Peter is shocked and cries out: “Heaven preserve you, Lord… This must not happen to you.”
The response of Jesus seems rather harsh: “Get behind me, Satan… the way you think is not God’s way but man’s.” Jesus had just declared a few verses earlier in last Sunday’s Gospel, that Peter is the rock on which he will build his Church. Now Jesus calls Peter “Satan.” What did Peter do that was so wrong for Jesus to rebuke him like that? Jesus had just revealed how deeply he dreads what lies ahead. Like Jeremiah, he is feeling the heat and anxious about the suffering his mission will entail. Jesus though divine is also fully human. Feelings are a natural part of the human person. Yet why does He want to go through with it? It is because of the fire of love for His Father and for us that burns in His heart; that eventually leads Him resolutely to Jerusalem and to the Cross.
The problem with Peter is that he is OK with believing that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the Living God, but he can’t handle the thought of Jesus’ suffering and death. But this is the course Jesus is on and so Peter’s opposition to the cross is not helpful — indeed, his concern for Jesus’ physical well-being is an obstacle and a temptation. Peter wanted to prevent Jesus from fulfilling the Father’s mission.
He allowed himself to be drawn from the Kingdom of God. He conformed to the thinking of the world.
In the Second Reading, St Paul tells us “Do not model yourselves on the behaviour of the world around you, but let your behaviour change, modelled by your new mind”. That means that we sacrifice the pagan aspects of life in order to live for the Lord. To live for the Lord means to take up the cross. Truth is we all like a Christianity without the cross but a Christianity without the cross wouldn’t be Christianity at all. In the Gospel, Jesus reminds us: “If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him take up his cross and follow me.” The cross was not only at the end of Jesus’ life but the shadow of the cross was already looming at his birth. Soon after his birth, his parents will have to take him to Egypt and live as a refugee in exile to escape from King Herod’s slaughter of the innocents.
Even though we recognize our dignity as sons and daughters of God, we often give in to our failings and shortcomings. Jesus knows our frailties and weaknesses like He knew it in his disciples. St Paul’s appeal in the Second Reading, is quite close to this. To “offer our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” entails a similar preparedness to discern and follow what is not the way of the world but the way of God.
As I was growing up I had wanted to be and do many things but never a priest. For 15 years I was involved in music and entertainment and later a career in sales and marketing in life assurance. During these 15 years I had 3 serious relationships. For some reason they ended. I finally answered the call to the priesthood and entered the seminary. As I reflected on my decision, I realised that the call to the priesthood had actually come 15 years earlier. But I was too young to pay any attention, dismissing the thought as a fantasy. I was 35 when I entered the seminary. Now 22 years a priest, I realise that it is not a one-time yes but an ongoing yes to remain faithful to Christ as His priest. It’s the same for marriage, the religious life or the single life. Each day is a concerted yes. In good times and in bad, in sickness and in health.
Our blessed Mother’s yes was not just yes to the Angel Gabriel once at the Annunciation but throughout her life. She met with one disappointment after another. No place to give birth to her first born but in a stable, flee to Egypt, returning to Nazareth and not long after to become a widow and be a single mother, losing her son to do his Father’s will, hearing news about her son being involved with tax collectors, sinners and prostitutes, condemned by the religious leaders and finally suffering a humiliating death on the Cross like a common criminal. She faced the cross and carried it every time she had to say yes to God.
Mother Teresa might be the most famous, and most widely admired, Catholic personality of the 20th century. She dedicated her entire life to what Jesus called “the least of these” — not just the poor in the financial sense, but all those marginalised, in every sense of the term. Was it easy for her? Certainly not. She spent a long period of her life struggling with faith, losing the presence of God, and even believing that she didn’t believe in God, as she wrote in many pained, distressed, poignant letters that were only released after her death.
According to Catholic spirituality, this is all normal — indeed, to be expected. According to classical Catholic spirituality, the road to spiritual enlightenment includes what the great spiritual master Saint John of the Cross famously called “the dark night of the soul.” Yes, faith and the spiritual life can be exhilarating just like Peter’s experience at Caesarea Philippi. Great profession of faith. Yet in today’s Gospel he becomes an obstacle to Christ’s mission.
When Mother Teresa experienced her own ‘dark night of the soul’ she had to experience a process of purification. What makes you a kind person isn’t how kind you feel, it’s the kind acts you do. And doing kind things for those around you, even when you don’t feel like it, even though it’s work, makes you a more meritorious person than someone for whom it comes easily.
It’s the same for all of us. Whatever vocation we have chosen to express our Catholic life, we will experience what Mother Teresa, Jeremiah and Jesus, experienced in their lives. But for us to be like them, to be faithful to the end, we need to make today’s Responsorial Psalm our daily prayer.
Let us pray for this grace, Amen.