Last Sunday St. Peter was magnificent. “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
Our Lord calls him blessed.
He gives him the keys of the Kingdom.
And within a few verses Christ says to the same man: “Get behind me, Satan.”
Peter has not stopped loving Christ.
That is precisely the difficulty.
He loves Christ, but for the moment he loves Him wrongly.
He wants a Messiah without sacrifice.
A Kingdom without Calvary.
Glory without humiliation.
Resurrection without death.
And that is not Christianity.
It is one of Christianity’s counterfeits.
Peter hears that Christ “must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things… and be killed.”
That word must is important.
The Cross is not an unfortunate accident which interrupts Our Lord’s mission.
It is the mission.
Christ came to offer Himself to the Father for the sins of the world.
The Cross is sacrifice.
And sacrifice stands at the centre of the Catholic religion.
That is why Saint Paul’s words fit the Gospel so perfectly:
“Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.”
Christianity is not chiefly the art of making ourselves comfortable in God’s company.
It is the restoration of right worship.
We were created to offer ourselves to God.
Sin says: I belong to myself.
God’s Grace restores the truth: I belong to God.
Here modernity and Christianity part company.
The modern instinct says that freedom consists in having no master.
Christianity says that freedom consists in having the right Master.
A violin is not liberated when its strings are cut.
A train does not become free when it leaves the rails.
And we do not become free by escaping God.
We simply become ruined in a more independent fashion.
Saint Paul therefore says: “Do not be conformed to this world.”
The world is always trying to catechise us.
It has its commandments. Its beatitudes. Its sins. Its saints. Its excommunications.
It tells us what we must celebrate, what we must be ashamed of, what we may desire, and what we dare not question.
Saint Paul says: do not let the age make you in its own image.
“Be transformed by the renewal of your mind.”
Catholicism does not ask us merely to behave differently.
It asks us to think differently.
To judge things according to eternity.
To call good what God calls good. To call evil what God calls evil.
To recognise that suffering is not the greatest evil.
Sin is.
That is what Peter has not yet understood.
He sees suffering and immediately says: this must not happen.
Christ sees something worse than suffering.
Disobedience to the Father.
That is why He answers Peter so sharply.
“You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.”
There is the whole crisis in one sentence.
The things of God. The things of man.
And Jeremiah stands between them in the First Reading.
Jeremiah has discovered that speaking for God is costly.
The word of God has made him seem stupid.
It has brought opposition rather than applause.
So he decides to stop.
“I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name.”
A perfectly sensible decision.
But as is often the case with perfectly sensible decisions against God, it backfires.
For then the word becomes “a burning fire shut up in my bones.”
Jeremiah cannot make peace with silence.
Once God has seized you, ordinary respectability becomes difficult.
The prophet would be much happier if truth were less troublesome.
But truth refuses to behave. It burns.
This is why the saints so often appear unreasonable to the world.
A martyr could save their life with one pinch of incense. They refused, because they knew that saving the body at the cost of the soul is no salvation at all.
A Catholic could save much trouble with one convenient compromise.
A Christian could make life considerably easier by allowing the age to edit the Creed and soften the Commandments.
But then Christianity would become very easy indeed.
And completely useless.
Christ does not say: “If anyone would come after me, let him express himself.”
He says: “Let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”
Self-denial sounds grim only if the self is already perfect.
Ours is not.
There are things within us which ought to be denied.
Pride.
Lust.
Vanity.
Resentment.
Cowardice.
The appetite to be praised.
The determination always to have the last word.
The assumption that our desires acquire moral authority merely because they are ours.
The Cross is not the destruction of the human person.
It is the death of everything which prevents the human person becoming what God intended.
And then comes one of Christ’s great paradoxes:
“Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”
The miser clutches and becomes poor.
The sensualist seeks pleasure and becomes bored.
The proud man spends his life enlarging himself and becomes very small.
The saint gives himself away and becomes fully alive.
Christianity is full of such reversals because reality itself is full of them.
The seed must fall into the earth.
The grain must be broken to become bread.
The instrument of Roman disgrace, the cross, becomes the throne of the King.
And finally Our Lord asks:
“What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?”
We have heard the sentence so often that we have perhaps ceased to notice its extravagance.
Christ places the entire world on one side of the scale.
Every empire. Every pleasure. Every fortune. Every human honour.
Everything that people have killed to possess.
And on the other side: one immortal soul. The soul outweighs the world.
Because the world will pass away. The soul will stand before God.
Peter had to learn that lesson. Jeremiah had to learn it.
Every saint has had to learn it.
And so must we.
St. Mary's, St. John Bosco and St. Edward's 