22nd Sunday of Ordinary Time

Today's readings contain three points that are central to an understanding of Christianity. The first point is this: our religion must challenge us before it consoles us. This was the whole burden of Jeremiah's mission. It challenges us because it demands that we face up to the truth about ourselves and our world. If we avoid reality, we will not have lived in any meaningful sense. If our sins are to be forgiven, they must first be acknowledged. This is especially difficult in a society where many now believe that moral judgment is simply a matter of personal opinion. What a person judges to be right is reduced to what feels good for me. The world exists to serve me, not I to serve it.

Conversely, if our talents are to be employed at the services of the community, they must first be recognised and acknowledged. Talent is as much part of the human reality as sin. Unless we acknowledge that, we are only dealing with half the story. We are not taking on the full breadth of Catholicism. The late Cardinal Hume stated more than once that 20th century Catholicism tended to be obsessive. It tended to become obsessed with one particular law or doctrine to the exclusion of all else. If our Catholicism is to be apostolic, comprehensive and authentic, he wrote, five vital questions must be examined every day in our homes and schools:

Whether there is life after death;
Whether life has a purpose and meaning; are we part of a greater jigsaw, or are we all disconnected pieces.
Whether there is anything beyond what my senses can discover and know; what you see is what you get; is that all there is to it?
Why we are so often disappointed in the pursuit of happiness; and
Whether the experience of loving another person can point to the love of God. Or, to put it another way, how true is the central Christian claim that we come to God through other people.

The second point of today's readings is: God's ways are not our ways. Human understanding will never grasp the ways of God. This is made obvious in the attitude of Peter. He had walked with Jesus for three years. Jesus had appointed him head of the band. Yet Peter fails entirely to understand even the rudiments of the project. Put in another way, if the Church were merely a human organisation, it would have gone to the wall in the early days. The invisible presence of Jesus sustains it.

The third point of today's readings is the centrality of the cross, the mystery of the cross, in the life of the Christian. Jesus invites to take up our cross daily. This is one aspect of the place of the cross in the lives of men and women. We are invited by Jesus to accept the cross. But in asking us to accept the cross, to take up the cross daily, he is merely asking us to embrace reality. Because mysterious tragedy is woven into life. Again, if we are to live fully, that reality too must be taken on. Independently almost of all religious systems of belief, the cross will form part of every human being's life. This is the inevitable cross, the unavoidable cross, the cross of human experience. Whether we like it or not, whether we believe in anything or not, the cross intrudes in some form or other at some time or other, into all our lives. It intrudes in its most naked fashion in the form of broken relationships, broken marriages, betrayals or perceived betrayals, chronic illness and death itself. Those of you who have been through one or other of these tunnels will never need to have the theology or theory of the cross explained to you. The cross is not the imposition of a macabre religion or the plaything of some sadistic god. The cross represents an attempt to make sense of the illogical and the tragic elements in human experience. The cross is the sign that our God has been there before us, that he too has been through that particular tunnel. The cross then is not simply about human suffering; it is about God's companionship with us in our sufferings and disappointments. The Christian cross is a sign of hope, not a cry of fatalism.