22nd Sunday in Ordinary time
Readings
Jeremiah 20: 7-9
Romans 12:1-2
Matthew 16: 21-27
Reflection
We do well to remember that Matthew’s gospel was written to a community of Jewish Christians facing many challenges, some fifty years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. Has there been any era when communities of Christians have not faced ‘many challenges’? At their core, many of these challenges are similar. Matthew reminds these Christians that to follow Jesus faithfully can seem a contradiction. Surely they too, would have been protesting, like Peter, that being cruelly executed can hardly be the right thing to happen.
So like the readers of Matthew’s gospel, we sometimes ask if taking up the cross of authentic discipleship and carrying it faithfully, is really God’s way? Can’t discipleship be more comfortable than that?
Of course, any of us by now have had a taste of the power of self-emptying love, and whenever we see or hear examples of a citizen acting this way, our admiration is profound. We know it is God’s way of loving.
Surely, had we been there in Jesus’ time, we would have protested like Peter, “this must not happen to you”. How could we do otherwise, when we think as humans and not ‘like God’. How could we see the cruel death of an innocent man, filled with love and goodness as ‘God’s way’?
Yet, that is what we profess and celebrate at each Eucharist, and in the liturgical remembering of Holy Week each year. It is what we dimly experience in our own acts of generous love and in the acts that others perform for us or around us. We have an degree of insight into why this ‘must be’.
Through our years of discipleship, we have come to appreciate that we have to put God and God’s way first (deny yourself), take up our cross (accept and embrace the seeming contradictions of love and suffering, and follow Jesus (being self-giving and full of trust in God’s way. Like Jeremiah in the first reading we know in our heart that we have no choice. We are covenanted. Like Peter, we will fail, but hopefully also like Peter, we will become a rock of faith.
Brian Traynor CP has been involved in faith formation for many years especially in the form of parish missions and through the Passionist Family Group Movement. Brian is a member of the Passionist community at Holy Cross, Templestowe.