Rev. Fr. (Dr.) Osmond Anike

Readings:

First Reading:: Jeremiah 20:7-9 – The word of the Lord has meant insult for me.

Responsorial Psalm:Psalm 62(63):2-6, 8-9 – For you my soul is thirsting, O Lord my God.

Second Reading:Romans 12:1-2 – Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice.

Gospel:Matthew 16:21-27 – ‘Get behind me, Satan!’

A story from Tony de Mello’s The Song of the Bird:

A prophet came to convert the inhabitants of the city. At first people listened to his sermons, but soon they drifted away till there was not a single soul to hear the prophet when he spoke. One day a traveller said to him, “Why do you go on preaching?” The prophet replied: “In the beginning I hoped to change these people. If I still go on shouting it is to keep them from changing me”.

This story can be best used to describe Jeremiah, who has been depicted as “the weeping prophet”. All his efforts to convert the people of Israel appeared to have been fruitless. People simply not only deserted him but were actively plotting to bring him down at all cost. But that was not all; even God appeared to have apparently deserted him. At some point, he even attempted to stop preaching and disregard God’s injunctions. In other words, he attempted to “join them” since he could not “beat them”. But the more he attempted to stop, the more he found himself preaching even more forcefully. There was an inner force within him that kept urging him to go on preaching even when his effort appeared fruitless, and even when the rest of the people were making a joke out of him. He was conscious of a counter force urging him to throw in the towel and be like the rest, but he simply refused to model himself on the behaviour of the world around him, as St. Paul enjoined us in the second reading.

This Jeremiah episode in the first reading should serve as a great lesson for us Christians. Many of us have experienced in one way or the other this interior crisis when we feel the entire world has left us behind because we try to uphold our faith. We feel abandoned because nobody appears to listen to us when we try to preach the gospel to them. Sometimes, we even feel abandoned by God, and we are tempted to throw in the towel and join the bandwagon. But from the experience of Jeremiah, we must learn that there is always a fire burning in our hearts and urging us not to give up. Even if it becomes impossible for us to “beat” them, let us at least strive not to “join” them, not to be “beaten” by them. We should always shout to keep safe and certain, like the prophet in the story above.

In the gospel, after the incident at Caesarea Philippi where Peter confessed Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God, Jesus started telling the apostles the nature of his Christhood as that of a suffering servant rather than a flamboyant king or emperor. This notion of a suffering servant must have flabbergasted the apostles, and especially Peter. It was obvious that Peter, who, a little while ago, confessed Jesus as the Christ, did not grasp the full import of this Christhood and unwittingly wanted to constitute an obstacle towards the realization this Christhood. But Jesus refused to have anything to do with this obstruction. The vocabulary he used to qualify the obstruction was “satan” – “Get behind me, Satan!”

Satan, in this context, does not mean devil as some people tend to interpret it, but rather a “hindrance” or an “adversary”. In fact, in the Bible, the Hebrew noun ‘satan’ mostly does not denote any archetypal “Evil One”. Rather the noun ‘satan’ refers to anyone or anything (including even the Angel of the Lord) that aims to prevent something or someone else from its or his proper or intended course, irrespective of whether that course is good or bad, or whether the opposition is good or bad. Jesus had an intended course – the way of suffering – which he must undertake before realising his mission on earth. But, by suggesting that such way of suffering be avoided, Peter was aiming to prevent Jesus’ intended course, and hence, became ‘satan’. Peter was in no way being referred to as a devil. Jesus who, a short while ago, called Peter “blessed”, and “rock”, and who even handed him the keys of his Kingdom, couldn’t have contradicted himself by referring to the same Peter as “devil”. If this were so, then the implication is that he handed the keys of the Kingdom of God to the devil, which would have been absurd.  What Jesus wanted to achieve by using the word “satan” is to show that despite his exulted position, Peter was only a human being with limitations like other human beings. Peter’s idea of the Lordship and the Kingship of Jesus appears to preclude any kind of suffering. It appears to be a rosy idea of glory devoid of any hardship. This would not be the only time Peter exhibited this kind of attitude of trying to avoid suffering at all cost. In the episode of the Transfiguration, he, together with the Zebedee brothers, were shown a tiny fraction of the Heavenly glory. The spontaneous reaction of Peter was to request from Jesus that they stayed back in the mountain and enjoy the heavenly glory. However, by rejecting both propositions of Peter in both cases, Jesus has taught us that there cannot be Christ without the cross. In fact, a “cross-less” Christ is an illusion, while a “Christ-less” cross is idolatry. Christ and the cross go hand in hand. In the same way, Christianity and suffering equally go hand in hand.

That Christianity and suffering go hand in hand was made obvious in the conditions of discipleship which Jesus listed as a follow-up to his rejection of Peter’s proposal: “If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me”. Most of the times we tend to choose to be oblivious of this aspect of the cross in our practice of Christianity. We would rather prefer to highlight the glorious aspect of Christianity – the miracles, the so-called breakthroughs, etc. And when we find things not going as rosy as we wanted, we try to take matters in our hands by trying to “save ourselves” through various means we call “efforts”. Jesus, however, makes it clear that “anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it”. This can be compared to a drowning person making “effort” to save oneself. The person’s situation gets worse. It is not effort but surrender that will save the person. In our case as Christians, it is not our effort but our surrender to the will of God that will save us.