Take Up Your Cross!

(Homily 22^nd Sunday in Ordinary Time Yr-A)

     The message of this Sunday centers on the themes of divine will and call, a call to a religiosity of sacrifice orchestrated with the examples of Jeremiah’s prophetic passion, Jesus’ invitation to renunciation and cross and Paul’s admonition for a living sacrifice. As we see in the readings, the will of God was the supreme norm for prophet Jeremiah, for Jesus, and ought to be for every Christian. Here, the will of God is the divine plan for the salvation of man, which requires the human collaboration. And this plan, being divine has a logic that is different from human logic; sometimes it can even appear contradictory and hostile. Indeed, prophet Jeremiah experienced this, he was a peaceful and calm man, but God called him to a vocation opposed to his natural inclinations: he has to shout “violence and ruin”. The ‘passion’ of Jeremiah as he recounts in his ‘confession’ is the most sincere expression of his fidelity to the mysterious plan of God for the salvation of mankind. In his experience we see the synchronization of self-realization and self-abnegation, cross and love, faith and living sacrifice.

     In the first reading (Jer. 20:7-9) Jeremiah shares his prophetic ordeals, a sort of a dramatic confession before God. The people corrupted temple worship, priests were performing pagan rites. God told Jeremiah to condemn their wickedness. Then the prophet took an earthen jar, went to the city gates and smashed the jar. Then he announced to them that like the jar, Jerusalem will be smashed, for the people have become so corrupt. God sent him to announce “violence and destruction”, a period of suffering and trial, to a people that listens only to prophets that tell them what they want to hear, announcing to them previsions of peace and security. They say within themselves that they have the temple of the Lord. In this situation and with people of this frame of mind, a prophet who truly speaks in the name of God is an object of derision and mockery. To speak in the name of God becomes a heartbreaking and lacerating adventure. Upon hearing his words and seeing his actions, the priests felt criticized, so they arrested him, beat and threw him into jail. As he sat in the jail, the prophet felt betrayed by God. In his words: “For me, Yahweh’s word has been the cause of insult and derision all day long” (v.8). He arrived at the point of saying to himself: “I will not think about him, I will not speak in his name any more…I could not do it” (v.9). In his personal experience, Jeremiah felt a sort of rebellion inside him, because the Word of God “seemed to be a fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones” (v.9). He felt reluctant to speak the word of God, because if he does, he will be reproached by the people. For he prophesied violence and ruin for the evil deeds of the people. He was tempted not to speak the word of God, but on the other hand, he acknowledged: “the effort to restrain it wearied me, I could not do it”.

     Jeremiah faced the temptation of escaping from the exigencies of the prophetic mission, the temptation of not to speak again in the Lord’s name. But the prophet declares that he could not, because God has a kind of seduced him. God’s word entered in him and in his bones like a devouring fire that the prophet could not contend. Thus, he will not keep silence. So, he was confronted between fear of the reproaches of the people and the supremacy of God’s will, and upon consideration of the supremacy of God’s will he chose to speak the word of God irrespective of what the outcome might be. He carried his prophetic cross. Extrapolating from Jeremiah’s experience, passion and confession, we can say that of all the Old Testament prophets, he is the one closest to the New Testament conception of what is meant to be a bearer of God’s Word. His ordeal and passion serve as a prelude to Jesus’ invitation to renunciation and carrying of cross in the Gospel narrative.

     Today’s Gospel (Mt. 16:21-27) is a continuation of last Sunday’s Gospel about Peter’s profession of faith in Jesus as the Messiah and the Son of God. Jesus wanted to make it clear to his disciples the meaning of his messianic mission according to the design of God: “to go to Jerusalem and suffer grievously at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the scribes, and to be put to death and to be raised up on the third day” (Mt. 16:21). Here, Jesus announces for the first time what is the will of God for him, for Jesus started manifesting to his disciples that he has to go to Jerusalem, to suffer and die. However, we see Peter in that episode, probably moved by the desire of being a protagonist, wanted to distance that (the passion and cross) from Jesus’ way. But Jesus knows the will of his Father, and he cannot allow someone to interfere in their relationship. He has ardent passion for the will of God, that he called Peter “Satan” (from Rock to Satan), because he is like the devil who wants to thwart the will of God and distance Him from the divine plan. The devil tried to use the compassion of Peter to thwart the mission of Jesus. It is still green in our minds the episode of the Gospel of last Sunday, where Jesus called Peter the rock of faith. But today, Peter gives in to ideas from below, to worldly ideas; and Jesus tells him: “Get behind me, Satan”. It does appear Peter’s aim was for Jesus to lower the standards and give people what will please them and they will become Jesus’ followers. After rebuking Peter he told his disciples to take up their crosses and follow him. Indeed, the discipleship of Christ entails following the Lamb wherever He goes (cf. Rev14:4).

     This passage presents the programmatic statements and invitation of Jesus to his sequela, “If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me…Anyone who wants to save his life will lose it…What, then, will anyone gain by winning the whole world and forfeiting his life? (vv. 24-26). Jesus in his invitation does not propel anyone or impose His sequela on people, He says: “If anyone”. There is no imposition; rather it is a personal choice. Jesus gives conditions for following him: renouncing oneself (to renounce oneself does not mean to throw away one’s talents and capacities, rather it entails the understanding that the world does not revolve around us, is a call to move out from the idolatry of “I”, from one’s ego). The second condition is to take up one’s cross and follow Him, many a times we tend to make use of this quotation wrongly, just to portray suffering patiently, to accept the crosses of life, but Jesus did not say “bear” the cross, rather he says “take” “carry”, as such, a disciple is not asked to suffer passively, but actively. The Gospel ends with a divine logic: loosing and finding, that has existential, spiritual and eschatological imports.

     Jesus tells us to renounce ourselves, to learn how to lose, to lose even our life. Jesus proposes to us apparent alienation from oneself, in a society where the supreme value is personal realization. In a society where work, occupation, culture, promotion, social emancipation and all are seen in function to self-realization, the invitation of Christ to self-renunciation sounds like a contradiction to the philosophy of the world. The contemporary man wants to win, and not to lose, not even to talk of losing his life. The obsession to domination and self-worth are in reality mortal obstacles to the true and authentic realization of the human person. The renunciation that Jesus requires, in reality is our ultimate self-realization and our true recovery; losing ourselves is the only way to find ourselves: for who loses his life will find it.    

     What in reality is Jesus asking us to renounce? He is not asking us to renounce our authentic human possibilities and values, but the sick part of us, the part that is in enmity with God, of the old man, the egoistic man, dominated by cupidity and concupiscence, who is not capable of loving anyone but oneself, and even this, in a wrong way. It was in this sense that St. Paul said that “All who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified self with all its passions and its desires” (Gal. 5:24). The renunciation of Jesus therefore, entails the crucifixion of the old creature in order to give way to the new, of the old man in order to give way to the emergence of the new man, created in the image of God, called for eternal life, a free man in Christ. Another important question we have to ask ourselves is this: renunciation for who and for what? It is for one’s sake for the love of God, because of the choice we make, the choice of God in place of our “I” and Ego, because of the hope the Lord offers us beyond death. When Jesus invites us to carry our cross and follow him, he is not inviting us to do something strange and unknown to Him, rather He is inviting us to follow his footsteps. In the present Gospel passage, we see that Jesus spoke about the cross of his disciples, after he must have finished talking about his passion, death and resurrection (cf. v.21). Indeed, the dying and rising of Jesus, is the foundation and model of the losing and finding of oneself, of dying in order to live.

     Be that as it may, we are therefore called today to proclaim to you the severe words of the cross, words that discomfort and perturb. To renounce oneself certainly is not an evangelic word or phrase that the people of our time love to hear. It is easier to speak of the Christ who invites us to fight against injustice in the world, than the Christ who invites us to carry our cross. In this situation, our temptation as heralds of the Good News is not different from that of Jeremiah and Jonah: the apparent unappreciated duty of announcing to the people of our time the words that they do not want to hear. However, we cannot remain silent, in fact, we have to be ashamed of ourselves any day we stop speaking with courage and audacity like St. Paul that what we preach is the Christ and the crucified Christ (1Cor.1:23).

     In the second reading (Rm. 12:1-2) St. Paul admonished the Christians of Rome, that the real and authentic cult consists in offering oneself as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. In this chapter, St. Paul presents the Christian ethics as “oun” ethics, that is “therefore ethics”, as such, the Christian ethics is a response to what God has done in Christ. It is indeed, the ethics of response, which does not involve meticulous observance of the code of law, rather a renewed mind and non-conformity to the world. For him, the true Christian cult and worship is to be seen in ethical behavior not in the cultus, in the renewal and transformation of minds. In all, we are called to renew our minds, which is a responsibility for the “new men” in Christ, those who make effort not to conform themselves to the mentality of this present world (Rm. 12:2).

     Jeremiah, Jesus and Paul manifest to us today, the necessity and importance of knowing the will of God, and consequently adhering to it with one’s heart and conviction. And from the knowledge and love of the divine will one has to pass to life (its existential dimension). They want us to appropriate the value of readiness in doing God’s will with all the sufferings, difficulties and trials that come with it. Little wonder, Jesus made it clear: “if anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mt.16:24). In all ramifications, the readings of today invite us to frown at a type of pick and choose religiosity, where we build up our religion with the parts of the Good News that appeal to us, where the parts of the Gospel that secure the logic of our comfort zones become indestructible. Today, Jeremiah, Jesus and Paul are telling us to accept the Good News in full, and not in parts. We really need to allow the Word of God to challenge us out of the complacency with a comfortable and a conformist religiosity. Jesus is hitting us hard, just as He did to Peter, He is inviting us, not by force, to do away with our double standards and quest for “cheap grace” (that is salvation at a slashed price without personal involvement in sacrifice). Lord Jesus help us to be ready to lose ourselves in order to find ourselves for eternal life! Amen!

(Fr. Vitus M.C. Unegbu, SC)