22ND SUNDAY HOMILY OF ORDINARY TIME — YEAR A
HOMILY THEME: FOLLOWING CHRIST INVOLVES SUFFERING AND THE CROSS
BY: Fr. Celestine Muonwe
Jer 20: 7-9, Ps. 63:2-6, 8-9, Rom 12:1-2, Matt 16:21-27
In the first reading, we read the lamentation of the Prophet Jeremiah (650-570 BC), who is usually known as a weeping prophet. Why? Yahweh had called him to prophesy disaster and violence to the people of Judah—his own people (Jer. 1:4-16), who refused to listen to him, even as his mission proved abortive and helpless. He grew despondent most of the times and thought of leaving the ministry out of frustration.
Yahweh had told Jeremiah that the people would fight against him, but promised him “‘They will not prevail against you, for I am with you to deliver you’” (1:19). However, Jeremiah had to suffer intensely in their hands, to the point that his eyes were a fountain of tears as he wept day and night (8:18 – 9:1). The people threatened Jeremiah with death (11:18-23); he had to contend with lying prophets, who countered Jeremiah’s prophecy with their own reassurance that all would be well for the people (14:13-14); he had to endure the hard realities of a celibate life as commanded by the Lord (16:1-2).
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Even the priest, Pashhur, struck Jeremiah and put him in stocks (20:1-2). Stocks were used to punish offenders by humiliation. The prisoner is made to sit on a bench with arms and legs thrust through holes in a wooden frame and locked in place. They were located in public areas where passersby could see the prisoner and taunt him. Up till then, Jeremiah never very well understood that the Lord’s promise of deliverance does not exclude the possibility of having to endure great pain.
Hence, in the reading of today, Jeremiah almost blasphemed against the Lord, by lamenting that the Lord had deceived him. “You duped me O Lord, and I let myself be duped”. The cry of Jeremiah is our own cries at times, when we are met with misfortune, and we pose difficult questions to God on the grounds of our misery. When we face persecution on account of the Gospel. Even our Lord, Himself, at the night of His agony and excruciating pain on the cross felt abandoned by the Father and cried out: “My God, my God, why have You abandoned me?”
Jeremiah expresses sorrow that God’s work, which he was persuaded to take on by the Lord is a very difficult one, and he was persuaded because God was a higher being, He moved him to take it up out of his own normal volition. He had become a laughing stock, as his message was a hard and difficult pill for the people to swallow: violence, destruction and ruin, were his unfortunate prophetic calling:
“Whenever I speak I must cry out, violence and outrage is my message.” God’s words meant persecution and pain for him daily, but the worst form of distress is that he finds out that he cannot resist the passion in him to preach the word, which burns inside of his heart like a fire, which is irresistible.
In the second reading, St. Paul urges the Romans that having seen the immensity of God’s mercies and redemption in their lives, they should present their bodies as a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God. The concept of the body, understood in this text is different from the Platos’ dualism of the western philosophy, which sees the body as something external to the spirit, worldly and opposed to God, often translated as sarx in Greek.
However, in the concept applied by Paul, the body, though physical, mortal, weak, is not external to the person but is rather one aspect of the person, who is united as body and spirit. In this holistic understanding, the body, in Paul’s usage is translated as soma in Greek. Hence, the body and spirit is to be presented to God. Just like the Jews would offer only animals that are without blemish according to Leviticus 23:18, the Christians in Rome, who were mainly Gentiles, have sacrificial obligations to sacrifice their own lives for the mission of the Gospel, to God Himself.
Hence, they now become a living sacrifice—a life dedicated to the service of God—a life committed to doing God’s will—a life lived in faith and lived out in faithfulness to God’s service on Sundays, and also on Mondays and the rest of week, in the workplace, schools, hospitals, farm lands, civil service, wherever we are assigned to work for others. There is no moment or circumstance in which the obligation does not apply. This is the true sacrificial worship to which the cult of the Jerusalem Temple had all along pointed.
If animal sacrifices were holy and acceptable to God, then Christian lives lived without blemish, and offered to God as living sacrifices will be holy and acceptable to God, since they represent lives lived in accordance with the will of God. Such a life is a spiritual worship, since it is dedicated to God’s service, whether as a clergy or as a lay person.
St. Paul further warns us not be conformed to this world and its standard of life, to the sinful ways of thinking and living that is prevalent in the society in which we live today, like secularism, Neo-paganism, buying and selling on Sundays, moral relativism, etc. Christians should not be like a leaf blown by the wind, never knowing exactly where to go next and how to achieve one’s goal in accordance to God’s will.
Instead of conforming to the world, we are to let the Holy Spirit transform us at the very core of our being, so that we can have a faith that is solid enough to help us maintain a right course, even in the midst of winds of popular opinion that are contrary to the truths of the Gospel. So that being led by the Spirit, one choose only what is good and acceptable to God in body and soul.
The Greek word for transformation is metamorphous, from which we get our English word, metamorphosis. A vivid example of metamorphosis is the caterpillar, which is transformed into a butterfly. So also, it is that by the grace of God and the work of the Holy Spirit, those who were conformed to this age can be transformed (metamorphosized) into something wholly different, to Godly and holy people.
In the Gospel last week, Peter had confessed his faith that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of God. However, Jesus told the disciples not to tell anyone, because they do not yet understand what messiahship means; they still thought of the Messiah as a warrior-king like David. In verse 21, Jesus begins to outline for them what to expect of the Messiah, what messiahship and discipleship truly entails, and Jesus’ account was the exact opposite of their expectations.
Hence, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer heavily till death in the hands of elders, chief priests and the scribes. Jesus needed to tell them over and over again, because of their ignorance of His mission. The movement to Jerusalem was a divine necessity, God’s most holy will, which is central to His mission on earth. Just like Jesus, Jerusalem is a necessity for every Christian disciple and follower of Christ.
However, just like the Jews, suffering is an aberration in the Igbo cosmology, where every misfortune or suffering is attributed to the anger of the gods or to some malevolent spirit that needed to be appeased through sacrifices of various kinds. This understanding has fueled the modern surge of paganism in our society today.
Even in the midst of the present hardship in the country, just very few Christians are ready to follow the Lord to Jerusalem, instead they would listen to pastors and preachers who would prophecy an end to all sufferings and difficulties of life in the name of Christ, that is, prosperity gospel.
Jesus’s prediction of His death merited a very sharp rebuke from Peter, who took Him aside, saying, “Far be it from you, Lord! This will never be done to you.” Peter had recently confirmed Jesus as the Messiah, but cannot bear to behold Christ’s message of the cross. How can Jesus be killed and still be able to save others as the Messiah? How can a dead man save anyone? How can a messiah save other people if he cannot save himself? How could God send anyone to do something such ungodlike as dying?
Even if death is necessary, it is scandalous for the Messiah to die the ignominious death of a cross instead of the glorious death of a battlefield. With this rebuke, Peter actually crosses a red line, moving to challenge his Lord’s leadership—he puts the Lord aside and moves to the front. In Jewish religious practice, disciples are expected to follow their rabbi. Jesus is our teacher and master, if we really follow Jesus, we must be ready to embrace the cross like Him.
However, sometimes, we tend to think that God has made a mistake in our lives, whenever difficulties and trials come our way. We tend at times, to ask the Lord, and His bitter will to take a back seat and allow us to seek our lives, to seek ourselves, our wills and desires outside of Gods’ plan. This leaves us therefore, more often, in the terrain of the evil one, whose greatest sin was the negligence of God’s will and who led our first parents to the same goal.
Hence, Jesus confronts Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block (Greek: skandalon) to me, for you are not on the side of God, but of men.” Jesus commands Peter to take his correct and rightful place as a disciple—behind the master—following the master. Peter becomes Satan to Jesus. According to Barclay, 164, “Satan is any force which seeks to deflect us from the way of God”, which exactly defines what Peter is doing; trying to deflect Jesus from His God-given path to the cross.
Pride is one vices that is behind every sin, which is a rebellion against God; the desire of man to put God behind him and assume the authority to decide for himself or herself. It was the same pride that led to the fall of Lucifer or Satan, it is the same force that led to the fall of our first parents, it is still the same vice that leads to theft, sexual immorality, in fact, all kinds of sin. Hence, one can say that the devil is behind every sin committed by man, since the rebellion of our first parents was by the instigation and collusion with the devil, hence, the Lord again sees the devil behind the rebuke of Peter.
The same evil one, had tried to persuade Jesus to take the easy way out of prayer and fasting in the wilderness (turn these stones into bread—make a spectacular display of yourself—bow down before me and I will give you the world), so now Peter calls Jesus to abandon the narrow, rough road that leads to the cross for a wide, smooth road that leads to death and hell. This is contrary to Jesus’s teaching that the wide, smooth road leads to destruction, but the narrow, rough road leads to life. Today, we become a stumbling block to Christ and the Gospel, when we try to achieve success without handwork, when we bribe our ways to lucrative posts in the civil service and government, when we support our kids to steal in examinations, when we avoid the cross by seeking healing and company with evil spirits and the occult.
Jesus calls the disciples to a life of the cross, to a life of discipline and sacrifice. “If anyone desires to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me” (v. 24b). These disciples had earlier left everything to follow Jesus, but Jesus after his lessons to Peter, asks the rest who have come, to reassess their ideas of the Messiah, of discipleship, it is not the road of an easy life, but that of self-denial and the cross. Self-denial involves sacrificing one’s own interests in favor of serving Christ, doing God’s own will.
The life of missionaries signify this call of Jesus, according to Jim Elliot (who was killed by natives on the mission field), “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” We carry our crosses when we are ready to suffer for the sake of the Gospel, to lead lives of daily martyrdom, for Christ’s sake. A life centered on Christ and His interests, implies that one loses his or her life in order to save it on the last day, while the life lived in self-indulgence in sin and iniquity and in the search of one’s personal selfish goals means that one seeks to save one’s life on earth by one’s standard in collusion with the devil.
According to Jesus, such a life will be lost at the last day. This is because the attempt to save one’s life through the world standards and one’s desire to gain the whole world, would lead to the loss of one’s soul. A single soul is very precious to God, and its worth is more than the whole world, such that nothing on earth should be equated to one soul created by God and redeemed with the precious Blood of the Son of God.
Those who fail to listen to the teachings of Jesus and decide to take the easy path to life, will certainly receive a harsh judgement on the last day, but those who follow Christ through the cross will be rewarded accordingly.
Some Lessons to Note
1.Christian life is a life of suffering. Jesus and Jeremiah suffered in the hands of their own people, they both lamented to God at their weakest moments in the course of the cross.
2.Suffering is a divine necessity for entering into heaven, Jeremiah had no option that to accept it, while the disciples persuaded Jesus against the cross, they lost out completely.
3.Every Christian, in the following of God’s will offers oneself to God, just like martyrs who died for God’s will, we should always die to ourselves.
4.By virtue of our baptism, we are prophets, and just like Jeremiah, we are obliged to preach the word of God, and just like the word was like a fire in the bones of the prophet, such it ought to be in the lives of every true Christian. He or she works to expand the reign of God in the world beginning from oneself.
5.A Christian is one who abandon the worldly ways of thinking, the sinful thoughts of the age and follows the ways of God, he is a tired sinner and follows all the teachings of Christ, till death, not a half-hearted follower of Christ.
6.Pride is the greatest weapon of the devil against. We should follow God and His will, and not try to force God to follow our own wills and selfish desires.
7.The devil lacks discipline and tries to lead us to lives of indiscipline and lawlessness, which are contrary to the will of God. Hence, he hates the cross and wishes us to follow him to this goal, to this doom.
Prayer
Lord Jesus, You called us to follow You to the cross, please help us to avoid the grasp of Satan and his hatred for the cross, to embrace our daily crosses with You towards the everlasting life in heaven.
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