The Way of Love
Twenty-Second Sunday of the Year. Fr Nicholas Crowe preaches on the challenge of the Christian life when the excitement wears off.
Last Sunday, in chapter 16 of Matthew’s Gospel, we heard St Peter make his great profession of faith. When Jesus asked, ‘But who do you say that I am?’, Peter replied, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.’
Peter’s profession marks a turning point in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke). Jesus now turns from Galilee towards Jerusalem and the Cross. As the disciples walk with him, their physical journey traces a spiritual transformation whose goal is anticipated in the next chapter of Matthew’s Gospel (chapter 17), when Peter, James and John see Christ radiant with divine glory at the Transfiguration. Indeed, in the exhilaration of Peter’s profession, perhaps the disciples imagined that the road ahead with Christ would be one glorious march straight into the Kingdom of God, and who can blame them? There are moments, especially in the first flush of conversion, when the Christian life seems full of light. God feels wonderfully close in prayer. New friendships and a new community fill us with joy. We glimpse how our gifts, our history and even our weaknesses might find a place within God’s providence and serve the building up of his Kingdom. At such moments, the path before us can seem to lead directly towards the glory of the Transfiguration.
Yet sooner or later, those who follow Christ encounter the Cross. This can be deeply unsettling and even distressing. We have received grace from God. We have tried to respond generously. We have offered God our lives—or at least begun to do so—as a living sacrifice as St Paul puts it in our second reading. Yet the result is not always – at first – peace, affirmation and success. Sometimes faithfulness brings disappointment. Sometimes love leaves us wounded. Sometimes the vocation that once appeared radiant becomes costly and difficult.
The intimate prayer of the prophet Jeremiah in our first reading articulates well this painful experience. Jeremiah has allowed himself to be drawn into God’s friendship and service. He has received the Word of the Lord and made it his own. But that Word has not brought him admiration or success but suffering. His preaching has become a source of reproach and derision. Jeremiah feels deceived by God. This was not what he expected nor wanted when he said ‘yes’ to God’s call. But he cannot turn back. To speak God’s Word causes him pain, yet to abandon God’s Word is impossible. The Word is now part of who he is. The fire of God’s love is burning within him, shut up in his bones. Jeremiah has become Christlike, and so as he shares in the burning fire of God’s love so he also begins to share Christ’s suffering for love.
This is the lesson that Peter, exhilarated in those precious first moments of conversion, still has to learn. Yes, he has recognised Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God. He has glimpsed something of our Lord’s glory. Soon he will climb the mountain with Jesus and see that glory shining through Christ’s humanity at the Transfiguration. Yet between Peter’s confession of faith (Matthew 16:16) and the glory of the mountaintop (Matthew 17:1-8) comes this terrible revelation in our Gospel reading this Sunday, which is also from Matthew 16. We read that:
Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed, and on the third day be raised (Matthew 16: 21).
Peter is horrified. He remonstrates with our Lord:
Far be it from you Lord! This shall never happen to you.
Peter wants the glory of Christ without the suffering of the Cross. He loves Jesus and does not want him to suffer. More than that, Peter does not want to suffer! His reaction is of course entirely understandable but nevertheless he is rebuked:
Get behind me Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.
Peter must get behind Jesus and allow Jesus to lead. Jesus does not embrace the Cross because suffering is good in itself. He embraces the Cross because it is what love demands. Our Lord loves his Father and he loves us. He will not abandon humanity to sin and death. The world needs the love of Jesus, but in a world damaged by sin, true and transformative love will always be resisted because it demands that we change and repent. We grow hard and stale in our sins, conversion becomes painful as sinful habits and ways of seeing the world take deep root, true and transformative love will always involve a cross.
We should not be surprised, then, when the Christian life costs us something. As part of our journey of discipleship, there may well be days when we share something of Jeremiah’s disappointment. We may share Peter’s horror when Christ shows us where love is leading. At such moments we may wonder whether we have taken a wrong turn. Yet the presence of the Cross does not necessarily mean that we have wandered away from our vocation. Sometimes the Cross is present precisely because we are learning to love. Christ’s love has begun to burn within us, and so we begin to share his Passion. The way to the glory of the Transfiguration is the way of self-sacrificial love.
Christ does not promise us that this way will be easy. He promises something better: that whoever loses his life for Christ’s sake will find it. We are not promised that the way of love will be painless, but we are promised that it will be worth it. For the path of self-gift is the path along which Christ leads us into life, into glory and into the perfect joy of God’s Kingdom.
Readings: Jeremiah 20:7-9 | Romans 12:1-2 | Matthew 16:21-27
