The 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
August 31, 2014

Click here to listen to this homily (.mp3 file)

     You couldn’t exactly call today’s scriptures light summer reading.  They read more like Crime and Punishment than Harry Potter!  The Church doesn’t seem to care that we are still trying to hold onto summer, savoring the last week or so of vacation.  But there is no vacation from the gospel; no vacation from following Jesus.

     Jeremiah sets the tone today.  His words are pointed and even gutsy.  He pulls no punches when he tells God, “You duped me, Lord, and I let myself be duped.”  No tip-toeing around there!  And who can blame Jeremiah?  His call from God came when he was in the womb.  Later, as a young man, he was given a message to deliver – a message no one wanted to hear, a message that turned everyone against him -- made his life one long tale of woe: of opposition, arrest, imprisonment, and public disgrace.  No wonder he felt “duped,” no wonder he cried out, ‘enough!  I’ve had it with speaking in your name, Lord!’

     But Jeremiah went on speaking in spite of himself.  God’s word was a fire burning within him and, try as he might, he couldn’t contain the fire.  Talk about a no-win situation.  If he didn’t speak God’s word it consumed him from within like a fire, and if he did – and when he did -- it only got him into trouble.

     We should be able to identify with Jeremiah.  If we take our faith at all seriously, if we honestly try to live that faith beyond just paying it lip service –- and we do -- then sooner or later we’re going to feel that we’ve been duped because God will take us to places we really don’t want to go; God will ask us to give what we don’t want to give.  For the truth, my friends, is that, for a follower of Jesus it’s not going to be all that different from what it was for Jeremiah.  Jeremiah was a prophet, it’s true, but we are called to be prophets.  We are. Prophets are not forecasters of the future; prophets are people called to speak God’s Word and to live it. Pope Francis makes that so very clear in his wonderful Apostolic Exhortation, “The Joy of the Gospel,” that many of us read and studied back during Lent. Pope Francis reminds us that the call to be prophet came with our baptism just as Jeremiah’s call came while he was still in his mother’s womb.  And we can’t escape it any more than he could. There is no easy way out.

     But Peter thought there was. He thought there must be a way to skirt suffering, to dodge difficulty, even a way to escape death.  He didn’t want any of those things to happen to Jesus and I am sure he didn’t want them for himself.  “Far be it from you, Lord.  God forbid that you should suffer!”  And Peter’s effort to stake out an easy way earned him a stern rebuke from Jesus: “Get behind me, Satan.  You are thinking not as God does but as human beings do!”

     There – in those few words of Jesus – is the heart of today’s message.  God’s way of thinking and our way of thinking.  They are not the same.  Not even remotely.  God’s way of thinking turns our ways upside-down and inside-out.  In God’s way, losing becomes saving, giving up becomes gaining, dying becomes living.  “Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.  What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life in the process?”

     My friends, when we signed up to be Christians we received no ‘signing bonus’, and certainly no entitlement to a suffering-free or a sacrifice-free life.  Just the opposite, in fact.  In the words of St. Paul in today’s passage from Romans, when we signed on with Jesus Christ we agreed to “offer our bodies – our very selves – as a living sacrifice to God.”  And sacrifice is a costly thing.  Sacrifice is a counter-cultural thing, too.  It was for Jeremiah, it was for Jesus, and it was for Peter – as he would one day find out.

     Our culture, good in some ways but driven by self-indulgence, conspicuous consumption, and avoidance of pain at any cost, does not place much value on sacrifice.  But sacrifice is at the heart of the Christian life.  Sacrifice is at the heart of our worship, too. Sacrifice is what we do every time we gather around this altar to celebrate the Eucharist, for this is precisely the place where the sacrifice of Jesus intersects with our lives: where his sacrifice becomes our sacrifice.  “Do this in memory of me” is far more than an invitation to repeat a ritual, it is an invitation to a way of life!

     So, dear friends, St. Paul’s words in today’s second reading: “Do not conform yourselves to this age,” are meant to be taken to heart. And so are those disturbing words Jesus spoke to Peter: “You are thinking not as God does but as human beings do!”

Father Michael G. Ryan