There are some things which we treat differently because of what they are for.
A chalice is made of metal. Before it is consecrated, it might look like any other fine cup.
But once it has been set apart for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, we do not use it for tea afterwards.
It has been consecrated.
It belongs to God for a sacred purpose.
Something similar lies underneath today’s readings.
Saint Paul says: “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.”
In other words, your life is not meaningless material for you to shape however you please.
You have been made for something.
You have been made for God.
And once we understand that, the Gospel begins to look very different.
Last Sunday Peter confessed: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
Today Jesus tells him what being the Christ will mean.
He must go to Jerusalem. He must suffer. He must be killed.
And He will be raised.
Peter immediately objects. “God forbid, Lord! This shall never happen to you.”
Peter still thinks that suffering automatically means failure.
If Jesus is the Messiah, surely He should triumph.
Surely the good life is the life in which pain is avoided, enemies are defeated, plans succeed and everything turns out comfortably.
Our Lord’s answer is astonishingly severe: “Get behind me, Satan.”
Why so strong?
Because Peter is tempting Christ away from the very purpose for which He has come.
Jesus has not come merely to avoid death.
He has come to conquer sin.
And He will conquer sin by offering Himself.
That is the heart of the Catholic Faith.
The Cross is not simply something terrible which happened to Jesus.
It is sacrifice.
The Son offers Himself lovingly and obediently to the Father for our salvation.
And because we belong to Christ, His pattern becomes ours.
That is why Saint Paul speaks of our lives as a “living sacrifice”.
A sacrifice is something given to God.
That does not mean that God wishes to impoverish us.
Quite the opposite.
The chalice does not become less because it is consecrated.
It becomes more fully what it was made to be.
And the human person does not become less by belonging to God.
We become what we were created to be.
This is why Our Lord says: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”
We can hear “deny himself” and imagine Christianity as a programme for making life miserable.
But Christ does not ask us to deny what is truly good in us.
He asks us to deny whatever prevents us belonging wholly to God.
The false self. The proud self.
The self which insists that every desire must be obeyed simply because it is mine.
Grace does not destroy nature.
Grace heals it, elevates it and brings it towards its proper end.
That is what Jeremiah is discovering in the first reading.
He has tried to stop speaking God’s word because faithfulness has become costly.
He has been mocked.
He has had enough.
So he decides: “I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name.”
Perhaps some of us know that temptation in smaller ways.
It would be easier not to mention the faith.
Easier not to stand out.
Easier not to explain why we believe something.
Easier sometimes simply to let the world set the terms.
But Jeremiah discovers something extraordinary.
God’s word has become “like a burning fire shut up in my bones”.
He cannot silence it without becoming divided against himself.
Because once we have been made for God, peace cannot finally be found by moving away from Him.
And then Our Lord gives us the great question:
“What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?”
That question deserves to be heard slowly.
Imagine the whole world placed on one side of a scale.
Everything beautiful in creation.
Everything people work to possess.
Every human achievement.
Everything that dazzles us for a few years and then passes away.
And on the other side:
one human soul.
Christ says the soul is worth more.
That is one of the most beautiful things Christianity says about us.
The Catholic faith does not tell us that human beings are insignificant.
It tells us that we have an eternal destiny.
The world is not enough for us because we were not made merely for the world.
We were made to know God.
We were made to love Him.
We were made for the Beatific Vision, to see Him face to face and possess Him in a joy which cannot be lost.
And if we want to know how much one soul is worth, we need only look at a crucifix.
What price did God place upon a human soul?
Not silver.
Not gold.
The Precious Blood of His Son.
That is why the Church takes sin seriously.
Not because she thinks badly of human beings.
Because she thinks so highly of them.
We were made for too much to throw ourselves away cheaply.
There is something tragic about exchanging eternal things for temporary ones.
It is like selling an inheritance for pocket change.
That is what sin does.
It offers something immediate and asks us to forget what we are made for.
Christ asks us to look further.
Peter sees Calvary and thinks: disaster.
Christ sees Calvary and knows that Easter lies beyond it.
Jeremiah sees the cost of speaking and thinks silence would bring peace.
But his heart knows that peace without God is not peace.
Saint Paul tells us to offer ourselves to God because the life offered to God is not wasted.
It is consecrated.
And that is perhaps the most beautiful way to hear today’s Gospel.
Christ is not asking us to love suffering.
He is asking us to love Him more than anything suffering can take from us.
He is not asking us to despise the world.
He is asking us to remember that the world is not Heaven.
He is not asking us to destroy ourselves.
He is asking us to give ourselves to the One for whom we were created.
“What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?”
The whole world is not enough.
Because you were made for more than the whole world.
You were made for God.
St. Mary's, St. John Bosco and St. Edward's 