The Message of the Cross

 

Deacon Dave · The Message of the Cross

Homily for the 22nd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Sept. 3, 2023. Gospel of St. Matthew 16:21-27. Theme: The Message of the Cross 

Last Sunday we heard Jesus bestow great honor upon Simon the Fisherman, making him “Peter the Rock” on which he would build His Church and to whom He would give the keys of the kingdom. And yet today we hear the Lord calling this same disciple a “Satan” (which means adversary or opponent) and tells him to “get behind me” (which is Hebrew slang for “know your place!”). What happened? Why the drastic change in attitude and outlook? 

Well, I think the answer isn’t hard to find and it’s something that every one of us can relate to: Peter didn’t want the cross. He wanted to follow a Savior who promised joy and glory, not One who foretold struggle and suffering. Everything was just fine for him until Jesus mentions the cross which is a most challenging and uncomfortable (yet indispensable and unavoidable) aspect of Christianity. Like Peter we don’t want it either. We find the cross to be just fine for decorating our churches or worn as jewelry around our necks, but not as a stark reality in our everyday lives because it reminds us of difficult and challenging truths. 

First, the cross reminds us that sin is real and that we are sinners. Those two concepts aren’t very popular to speak about these days but they are at the heart of the Good News of Jesus. Yet they are precisely the reason why Jesus came to live among us. We humans have an in-born tendency to rebel against God’s love and mistreat one another in many ways. And when we do so intentionally, knowingly and freely we sin. The cross reminds us that sin is deadly serious bringing with it the potential to separate us from God and from love eternally. We may be tempted to dismiss or downplay both the reality of sin and our innate status as sinners, but to do so is to dismiss and downplay Christ Himself. 

Second, the cross reminds that real love is sacrificial and unselfish. While this description of love sounds noble and inspirational to us, the reality is that we don’t normally live that way. We applaud the heroism of love in others and even make best-selling movies and books about it, but then we go on living life in the opposite dynamic, with ourselves as the center focus. But deep down we know that we are called to be better than that and the cross becomes an annoyance reminding us of this fact. The cross silently shouts out to us that we are called to love as Jesus loved: putting God first, others second, and myself last. The cross reminds us that true love is not based on how we feel but on how much we give of ourselves to others. When we really look at a cross it makes each one of us ask ourselves: is my love a reflection of Christ’s love? Am I choosing to place my freedom at the service of love? 

The cross also reminds us that suffering, struggles and difficulties are an inescapable part of life. None of us would choose these for ourselves but nonetheless they come to each one of us in some way, shape or form. And like Peter, we don’t want the cross. We want to somehow bypass it but we can’t. However, the good news is that they can be transformed into a pathway that leads us to Heaven, to eternal fulfillment in the after-life. It’s all in what we do with them. Because of the spiritual union we have with Jesus through Baptism, we can do what He did with the cross: we can carry it out of sacrificial love and by doing so break through the suffering and so enter into glory and happiness. We have the sure and certain promise of Christ that if the cross is carried in loving union with Him we will go where He has gone before us. And this should give us great hope. 

Peter struggled with the message of the cross for his entire life. When it got too close to him during the Passion of Christ, he denied even knowing the Lord. But he repented and was forgiven. Then 30 years later as an old man, Peter tried to escape from the cross once again in the city of Rome. He almost succeeded until he encountered a stranger on the road out of town. He asked the man where he was going and got the reply, “I am returning to Rome to be crucified again.” At that moment Peter realized that it was the Risen Lord Jesus appearing to him. Once more he repented and returned to the Eternal City where he himself was crucified. The cross that he first protested about so many years before ended up becoming his pathway to eternal life.

Crucifixion of St. Peter by Caravaggio, 1601 AD