22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
(Sunday 3rd September 2017)
We are called to be disciples of Christ – (Matthew 16:21-27)
All of us are called to be fully in love with a God who is in love with us. This enables us then, to do what St. Paul says to the Romans in Romans 12 when he explains that we are to offer our very bodies, our entire life as a living offering, as a living sacrifice to God. For what? So as to be consumed by Him. We need to be consumed as a sacrifice is consumed, we need to be interiorly conformed to Christ. We need to be more and more transformed by Jesus Christ until we are perfected and become totally pleasing to God.
This being totally conformed, transformed and perfected until we become totally pleasing to God is exactly what Jesus makes reference to in the Gospel today. He tells Peter and the apostles that He is going to suffer and die at the hands of his enemies. However, Peter, who is a man whose heart is full of love, who is enamored, who’s soul longs for the Lord, can’t bear that and sets Jesus aside and says ‘Heaven preserve you Lord’. God Almighty, Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, says to him, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle in my path, because the way you think is not God’s way but man’s.’ In other words, Jesus is telling Peter that he is thinking with worldly ways and not thinking as God does. So this transformation must lead us from thinking in merely human terms to thinking with a Divine mind. Thinking not only the way that men and women think but as God thinks. This should lead us to be able then, to do what Jesus calls each one of us to do, when He says, ‘If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me’. Jesus is asking us to deny ourselves by denying the ways of the world, the ways that are fleshly, the ways that hold us back, the ways that do not allow us to put on the mind of Christ, as St. Paul would say. We need to take up our Cross, we need to take up the way of God, we need to take up our share of the sufferings of Christ, we need to unite ourselves fully with Him even to the point of allowing the Word of God to burn within us, like we see with Jeremiah in today’s first reading. Then we must follow Jesus which means we must imitate the Master. We must observe and imitate and emulate until we image Him fully, so that in seeing us, others may see Jesus.
So what are we called to this week? We are called to discipleship knowing that it leads to life, that it has an amazing return, that we profit from following the Lord even though his mathematics or the economy of salvation seem to be backwards when we look at it with the eyes of the world. Losing our life in order to gain it, giving up in order to receive. However, we have the assurance that Jesus knows what He is talking about. The call is to follow Him as disciples knowing that what seems like folly and a stumbling block to the world is, indeed, the wisdom and the power of God. We can and we must be disciples, and we can trust the Master who calls us.