Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time 2014
Jeremiah
20,7-9; Psalm 62,2.3-4.5-6.8-9’ Romans
12,1-2; Matthew 16,21-27
You can’t turn on the TV these days
without hearing about politics. Will Rogers told a story about politicians. One
politican said to the other: I’ll stop
telling lies about you, if you’ll stop telling the truth about me.
Jesus would have made a lousy politician. Politicians are
busy telling us how they are going to solve all of our problems if we vote
them. Jesus is telling us today that if
we follow him it is going to bring us problems.Jesus said: Whoever sishes to
come after me must take up his cross and follow me.But let us not assume that
if we decide not to follow him we will be without problems. Having problems
comes with being human.Problems and crosses are part o everyone’s life whether
we believe in Jesus or don’t believe in Jesus.But following Jesus helps us to
deal with our problmes more easily because the cross that we take up will lead
us to life everlasting.
Religion has always tried to understand
the mystery of suffering, espcially the difficult problem of why good people
suffer. Books have ben written about the ways we can overcome suffering. But none of them take away the mystery from
suffering.The best answer is always found in the words and example of Jesus
which we find in the Bible. By his own suffering Jesus has promised us that if
we follow him in our faith that will
lead to a happy life that never ends.
Again today we hear about Peter. Last
week Peter said that Jesus was the saviour.But those words were hardly old when
jesus tells him today that he will have
to suffer and that he would be put to death. But that was not the kind of
Saviour that Peter thought Jesus would be. Peter thought that Jesus was not so
much a religious savour but more of a politician. Peter and probably many of
those who listened to Jesus thought of him as a person who would defeat the
Romans who occupied Palestine and he bring back the good old days when the
Jewish people had peace had their own king. That Jesus would have to die a
horrible death was not in Peter’s plans for Jesus.
Peter wondered how Jesus could ever
save them by suffering for them. For Peter, and maybe for some of us, that is
ridiculous. Jesus scolded Peter for thinking that way telling him that he was
thinkging like the devil. Jesus was not telling Peter that he was the devil,
but that he was like the devil tempting that what Jesus had come to do for
humanity was easy. But Jesus knew
history a lot better than Peter. Jesus knew the history of the Jews how they
had suffered century after century because of their faith in God, or how John
the Baptist, Jesus’ cousing who have
been put to death because by Herod, the Roman emperor. Jesus was telling Peter
that he was not thinking like God but thinking as people often think.
In a sense we too might be like Peter
in our thinking, especially about suffering or when we have difficult times in
our life. It is easy for us to think like others do about our difficult times,
rather than to thing how God does. But to think as God does means that we must
learn from God, to listen to God and to believe what he tells us. We do this by
doing what we are doing now. We do it by praying and by knowing our Catholic
faith. We then start thinking as God does. We know as God does. The problem
with Peter was that he stopped listing to Jesus when Jesus started talking
about suffering. He started to tell Jesus what Jesus should hear rather then to
listen to Jesus.
Coming to Mass as you are doing now
helps us to think like God thinks. We listen to God as he speaks to us from our
Bible readings. As we struggle with our own difficulties and sufferings we also
learn how Jesus overcame his suffering.
We also come to church to learn. We
can’t know God or Jesus by looking at a
blank sheet of paper. Anything that we know and are good at doing we have had
to learn from someone and then put it into practice. The same is true about our
faith in God or Jesus which we call our religious faith. As adults most of you
have had to update yourself in most every thing that you do. Otherwise you
would be out of date in the same way we may think about food or medicine. So
too with our religion. We don’t have to take new courses in religion but we do
have to update ourselves from what we learned as young children. There are many
ways to doing this. That is why in our parish we use the type of Sunday
bulletin which provide you each week a short answer to a question being asked
by thousands of Catholics about our faith. The answer can be a means of
learning, not only for indviduals but for families as they discuss the answers
together.
