SEDUCED BY GOD

22^nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Mt 16:21-27

         One of the well-known Old Testament prophets is Jeremiah.  His story is likewise one of the most dramatic!  The Liturgy of the Word this Sunday opens with his dramatic indictment of God: “You have seduced me, Lord, and I have let myself to be seduced….”  Jeremiah accuses Yahweh of enticing and fooling him into becoming His prophet, for now he suffers on account of the mission he reluctantly received from Him.  Jeremiah was such a melancholic and heartbroken prophet!  To begin with, he does not want the ministry he has to fulfill and so he goes around carrying it like any heavy burden.  If becoming a preacher were a job, he did not apply for it.  And what makes the load heavier on his shoulders is the fact that because of his pronouncements in the name of Yahweh his own countrymen turned hostile against him.  “I am a daily laughing-stock, everybody’s butt,” he says.  He continues, “The word of the Lord has meant for me insult, derision, all day long.”  All these he endures because he fulfills his mandate from God to warn the people of Judah and Jerusalem that they will be defeated by the Babylonians and be exiled because of their sins.  Obeying God causes him such pain: he is attacked by his own people, imprisoned, tortured, and isolated from his loved ones.

          Like you and I, Jeremiah is not a robot; he is made of flesh and blood, capable of being hurt, afraid, resentful, and confused.  He wants to quit and let God worry about His own business with the people of Judah and Jerusalem.  But like fire in his heart, fulfilling God’s command refuses to die but steadily consumes him.  To make matters even more worse for him, Jeremiah has no other human to turn to; no one to pour his heart out and console him in the end.  People ignore him, going about their normal chores.  Is it not a fact of life that when our face falls the sun continues to rise?  Laugh and the whole world will laugh with you.  Cry but the world continues laughing.  Worse, the world may be laughing at you when you cry.  Suffering happens while the sun rises and sets, while business is as usual, while people go to work and the young to school, while nothing seems to be more than the ordinary.  

         As it was in the days of Jeremiah so it is in the days of Jesus in the Gospel.  Our dear Lord has His own troubles on account of His messianic mission.  Today, He speaks openly about His impending rendezvous with death in Jerusalem.  He views His suffering as a necessary component of His liberating message to the whole world.  It is not His Father’s plan for Him to be mangled and murdered, but His staring at death straight in the eye is simply consequential to His fidelity to God.  Jesus’ relationship with God, His Father, involves personal suffering in the form of rejection, ridicule, and even death.  Violent death.

          As it is with Jesus so is it with you and me: suffering on account of our fidelity to God comes as an indispensable reality in our discipleship.  As far as faithfulness to God our Father is concerned, we follow the path traced for us by the One who carried a cross and was nailed to it.  There is no other way.  The cross is the law of discipleship.  Without it, we may be disciples of anyone except Jesus.  For a cross-less Christ is a deception and a Christ-less cross, perdition. 

To understand Jesus is to understand the cross.  This is what Simon Peter failed to understand in the Gospel today.  To love Jesus is to love the cross.  This is the difficulty of many from the time of Simon Peter to ours.  And if the ultimate joy of any disciple is to become like his master (and, indeed, it is!), there is no other way we can become like Jesus apart from the cross to which we may even be crucified like Him.  We have no option, unless we decide to live apart from Christ.  And anyone who hinders us from embracing the cross is Satan as Simon Peter is Satan to Jesus in this regard.

Indeed, in our following of the Lord, sometimes what proves to be more difficult is not what we have to give up but what we need to embrace.  The cross is certainly the first among those we must embrace…freely, joyfully, quietly, faithfully, and, most of all, lovingly.

What is your cross?  How do you carry it?  Do you carry it at all?  Please do not forget to carry it with Jesus.  Only Jesus gives meaning to our crosses.  Carry your cross for the love of Jesus.  Only Jesus makes your cross meritorious.  With St. Paul the Apostle, who in the second reading today encourages us to offer our living bodies as a holy sacrifice to God, may we view our crosses in the light of our vocation to follow Christ and to proclaim Him to all.  In Col 1:24, he says, “I rejoice in my afflictions for your sake, and in my body I complete what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ for the sake of His Body, the Church.”

But while we need to recognize what our crosses in life are, it is equally important for us to know who and what are the Satans that tempt us away from them.  May we never give in to their enticements.  May we never be fooled by their appeal.  May we remain steadfast in our faith, in our hope, and in our love. 

If we are to be duped at all, it is always infinitely best to fall prey to God’s seduction.  Like Jeremiah, we cannot help but be consumed with our passion for God.  He, indeed, has seduced us.  And we willingly surrender to His embrace…on the cross.

A SIGN OF CHRIST'S FIDELITY TO US

21^st Sunday in Ordinary Time

Mt 16:13-20

          The Pope is in Madrid, Spain as I write this homily.  His Holiness Benedict XVI is with thousands of young pilgrims for the 26^th World Youth Day.  With the theme, taken from Col 2:7, “Rooted and Built Up in Jesus Christ, Firm in the Faith”, the Holy Father not only makes more tangible to the young people, on whom, in his very own words, the Church depends (Message of His Holiness Benedict XVI for the Twenty-Sixth World Youth Day, 10 August 2010), the unfailing love of the Lord but also brings closer to them the mandate to venture into the world even as they keep their lives strongly anchored on and ever-nourished by Him.  In a world about which Pope Benedict XVI laments to be suffering “amnesia” about God, there is indeed a lot of reminding and remembering each of us – young and otherwise – must do.

I remember reading a witty anecdote.  One day, Pope Leo XIII visited a church that was reported to him to be very much neglected.  Quietly and unnoticed, he entered the church and knelt down on one of the pews.  After praying, he went to the rectory to pay his courtesy to the Pastor and mingle with the Pastor’s household and some parishioners.  When it was time for him to go, the Pastor made a request, “Holy Father, may we have a remembrance of this surprised yet very happy visit that the Vicar of Christ deigned to bestow upon us?”  “O, a remembrance, you said, Father?” Pope Leo XIII asked.  “Yes, Your Holiness, a remembrance please,” answered the Pastor excitedly.  The Pope smiled and said, “Go inside your church and find the pew I knelt upon and there you shall see the remembrance I left for you.”  As soon as the Pope left, the Pastor, his household, and the parishioners hurriedly went to the church to find the remembrance that the Pope left for them.  Lo and behold, on the layer of dust covering the pew they see his name written in large strokes: “Leo XIII”.  That was their remembrance they got!

Certainly, when the young people present in the World Youth Day in Madrid, Spain these days go back home to their respective countries, they will be bringing with them many remembrances of the Pope and their several encounters with him.  Perhaps, in large strokes, the name “Benedict XVI” will likewise be written in many hearts that maybe were already otherwise covered with layers of dust.  As it was with my own experience of the World Youth Day in Manila in 1995, when I was one of the deacons of the now Blessed John Paul II, the young people in Madrid will never forget Pope Benedict XVI and will always remember their days in Madrid as one of the significant moments, if not turning points, in their individual lives.

But they are not the first to remember.  Neither am I.  Not even Benedict XVI.  In fact, Benedict XVI would not have been pope had this guy forgotten who Jesus really is.  He was Simon, son of Jonah, a fisherman from Bethsaida, one of the Twelve closest friends of Jesus.  To him, Jesus entrusted the ministry of uniting His disciples from every place and time, shepherding them in truth and charity, and leading them in humility and fidelity.  He was the first pope.  And Benedict XVI is his 265^th successor.

When Jesus threw straight to the Twelve the question who they say He was, it was Simon who remembered the correct answer.  He spoke up on behalf of the group, saying, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”  Indeed he got it but not without some help from God, Jesus commented.  Nonetheless, Simon did get it.  And having recognized the true identity of the Christ, the Christ gave Simon a new identity that came with a new name: Kepha which in Greek is Petros, meaning “rock”. 

Two thousand years before Pope Leo XIII traced his name in bold letters on that dusty pew inside a neglected church, Jesus already wrote in clear strokes the name Kepha on the otherwise sandy heart of Simon the Fisherman.  And sandy though that heart was indeed – for the gospels attest to the blunders that Simon did – Jesus built His Church on it.  That Church still exists today – sinless yet made of sinners, holy but still being purified – and, led and held together by the successor of Simon Peter, continues to serve humanity as the sacrament of Christ’s love in the world.

Again, I remember reading somewhere that a papal nuncio once wrote that a Protestant approached him and asked, “Does the Pope still exist?”  “Of course, he still doest exist!” surprised, the nuncio replied.  “Then, there is nothing clearer,” commented the Protestant.  “You see,” the Protestant continued, “Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism, claimed that he would be the death of the popes.  Now, if after four centuries the Pope still exists today, Luther must have lied.  And God would not have chosen a liar to reform the Church that still has and always has had a pope.”

          The unending line of Peter’s successors reminds us of Christ’s fidelity to His Church.  Among other things, the person of the Pope points to the faithfulness of Jesus to us.  Even given the dark corridors in the Church’s history, the Pope is still a sign of Christ’s fidelity to us.  In return, let us be faithful to Jesus.  Let us respect, obey, and love the pope He has chosen for us.  He is a gift to us by Christ, the Son of the Living God.