22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Jeremiah 20, 7-9; Psalm 63, R. My soul is thirsting for you, O Lord my God.; Romans 12: 1-2; Gospel – Matthew 16: 21-27

“Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.” This “counter rebuke” of Peter by Jesus is an emphatic reminder to us that core to living out God’s mission for us is the how, beyond the what and the why.

If we recall Jesus’ temptations at the end of his 40 days of prayer and fasting, he commands Satan to get away from him after the third and final temptation.

Here he commands Satan to get behind him. It was both rebuking and giving Peter another chance. Peter’s ways are of this world and humanity, but the way required is God’s way. At the same time, asking Peter to “get behind me” was renewing his chance to follow Jesus.

“Get behind me” and learn to follow me again, Jesus tells Peter. Here he maps out the path of discipleship for Peter and for us.

“Whoever wishes to come after me must deny him/herself, take up his/her cross, and follow me.”

Almost like a preamble, the first step in the process is to desire to be a disciple—“whoever wishes to come after me.” We often seem to take this for granted.

I remember my first weeks in the Jesuit Novitiate in 1983. Each one of us, the primi or first-year novices, were supposed to share our vocation story as part of our getting-to-know-you period.

Listening to my coprimi gave me some “insecurities,” which I jokingly shared with my spiritual director, Fr. Benny Calpotura, S.J. It seemed that all of them were called to be priests from their mother’s womb.

This is why one of Ignatius of Loyola’s gems of wisdom continues to guide me. He wrote that if one wants to join the Society of Jesus, he must be asked if he has holy desires. If he does not, does he have the desire to desire these desires?

It starts with desire

Do you wish to be a disciple? Do you desire to be one? This is our first point for examination, which we quite often assume, overlook. But it all begins with the desire, which sometimes, often, is discovered outside the mother’s womb.

From the desire (the wish), the process of “denying” becomes possible. If we agree with the adage that one cannot give what one does not have, then we can conclude that what precedes the denial of self is self-possession.

Only the self-possessed person can make an offering of self and is capable of self-denial. For this, I again turn to the wisdom of Ignatius.

To be a self-possessed person is to have a “realistic knowledge of self,” as the “Characteristics of Jesuit Education” calls it. It comes from the process of self-awareness and self-acceptance that is embedded in the framework of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius.

The process leads to an attainment of freedom. First, a freedom from that enables one to go to a deeper level of freedom.

A very concrete and contemporary experience of “freedom from” is what many have experienced during this almost six months of the pandemic and the ensuing lockdown, when and where we discovered the essentials of our life.

As Enchong Dee put it in my conversation with him in “Journeys of Hope,” “I realized we have so much, but need only so little.” This is freedom from the inessentials that leads us to a freedom to choose what is essential.

The freedom to choose is the freedom to “take up your cross.”

One scripture commentary points out that Jesus was very specific in telling us would-be followers to “take up your cross,” our cross, and not his, Jesus’, Cross.

Personal journey

But he was quick to add, “and follow me.” Here we have the synthesis of the personal journey that begins with desire, a desire in search of meaning that is larger than oneself. Having discovered this possibility of meaning, one journeys into the realm of the essentials.

It is a personal assessment that leads to choices of what truly are the essentials of our life. And in this Gospel passage it leads us to the core, the most essential—to follow Jesus.

The fruits of this following, Jesus describes as “whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?”

“Or what can one give in exchange for his life? For the Son of Man will come with his angels in his Father’s glory, and then he will repay all according to his conduct.”

This is a promise that may seem eschatological in nature, but it is actually a promise of the quality of life that we can live here and now.

It is a life lived with the quality of eternity—eternity as our horizon—where we know that the final word is not suffering and death, but joy and fullness of life; a life of the Cross, yes, but also a life, the fullness of life in the Resurrection.

This is the how of our life here and now: to live it as a follower of Jesus, and as such it is a life that overcomes the evils and temptations of this world with the good, the good that can come only from a following of Jesus in the way of the Cross and the Resurrection.

—CONTRIBUTED