Homily from the Parish Priest for the Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings for Year A: Jeremiah 20:7-9; Romans 12:1-2; Matthew 16:21-27
I wonder if you remember some of those awful photographs of the site of what was the World Trade Center not long after the terrible tragedy of September 11th 2001: of what remained of the buildings, the dust and the dirt, bits of scaffolding hanging like branches of trees, and what remained of the towers standing jaggedly but defiantly amid the devastation? And there was one image - it was on several photographs which really stuck out.
That picture which captured how some bits of scaffolding, timber and stone had formed themselves simply by crossing over each other mid-air into a rough – it couldn’t have been anything else but rough but quite distinct cross. And many in the media of course noticed it, reproduced it and it became an image which spoke to many. It spoke to many because the cross still means something very real to us.
At this time too I’ve heard many speak of what we’ve been going through in terms of the cross. Not to say God sent this virus to give us a taste of the cross – that is a distorted image of a loving God really – but that this experience of the cross – a time of tragedy, grief, anxiety, paralysis in fear, like the cross, is not the end but points the way to light at the end of the tunnel. Yes, in the cross, if we ponder what the cross really entails, there lies, through the outpouring of God’s love for us, hope: hope for a different world in which we are called now to rebuild, to rise again from the rubble of the destruction this pandemic is causing for so many.
Today’s Gospel, once again, is bringing us back to the cross and what it represents. But it’s a Gospel which is not just showing us the cross and inviting us to reflect on it. Rather the command he gives to Peter, on behalf of the fledgling Church, God’s People on this pilgrim journey with all its twists and turns, is actually asking us to take this cross with us into our everyday life. The cross which somehow, in a way we cannot begin to understand, is pointing the way, the narrow way, to hope at the end of the tunnel. Pope Francis is echoing this call to take up our cross in all he is saying at this time. A time not simply to reflect and discern but to look ahead to the victory over selfishness, destruction, evil around us in our world, and to rebuild, be renewed, take the narrow road to new life, in a new world where we learn from and act on the mistakes we have made in our relationship with our creator, with each other, with the planet we inhabit.
And that’s when the argument starts: that’s when Peter says “no – I’m not on for this – I don’t want to go any deeper” and Peter’s response is so very human: he is – as Jesus says – thinking as humans do, not as God does:he naturally doesn’t want to go through the business of Jesus suffering, the rejection by the important religious figures of the day, the tragic death of his Master, and the three days lying in the tomb. He’d rather cut to the chase and move straight to the resurrection. He’d rather move to the new creation without the necessary day of judgment.
And why not we may legitimately ask? Why do we have to stay with the cross at all? questions to ours: “why do people have to suffer?”. “Why do I suffer?”; “Why the coronavirus?” Why bother being a Christian if God does not seem to intervene in a world where disease envelops creation. Where is God in the paralysis of our lives through this pandemic, as people die and loved ones are lost, where we enter recession, where good hard working people lose jobs and homes and the most vulnerable are consigned to the abyss on the streets of London? Where is God right now? There’s no answer except to look at the cross and to live out the hope in the certain truth of victory of the good over all that is evil. There’s never a quick fix. Never an easy road with no hold-ups, no rerouting where the GPS simply takes us there, no accidents. The cross is the narrow path.
Jesus has no answer to Peter. No easy immediate response. And Jesus has no easy answer to his contemporary followers, us, the Church here and now. But what Jesus does give us once again in this Gospel is an invitation to go back to that image of the cross all too obviously amid the rubble of everyday life and to take it up.
We make the sign of the cross so often. Maybe this week we can pray that the sign we make is more and more for us a reality in our lives: of a mystery we can’t understand but a power in which we believe, the power of love which really can bring hope to world even in the darkest of times.
Fr Dominic Robinson SJ