Homily for the Twenty-second Sunday of Ordinary Time

September 3, 2023
St. Patrick Cathedral
Fort Worth, Texas

Jeremiah 20:7-9
Psalm 63:2, 3-4, 5-6, 8-9
Romans 12:1-2
Matthew 16:21-27

“My soul is thirsting for you, Oh Lord, my God.” Each human being has an innate desire to know God and to love God, to be known by God, and to be loved by God. Nothing else but God will satisfy that deep desire. This desire is a type of spiritual thirst unique to human beings. This desire is part of God’s design of His creation of us in His image and likeness. God loves us unconditionally. God desires us to belong to Him and for us to love Him in return in the same way that He loves us, without conditions.

All that exists belongs to God. The only thing that God does not have is our love. God gave us along with our free will, the capacity to love Him and other human beings freely. He can only receive our love if we are willing to give it to Him freely. God cannot compel us to love Him because if He were to do so, it would destroy His own creation which is contrary to God’s nature as God. Our temptation because of our tendency to sin is to attempt to satisfy our thirst for God with other lesser goods than God Himself. “My soul is thirsting for you, Oh Lord, my God.”

To show us how to love Him as human beings created in His image and likeness, He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, fully human and Divine, not affected by sin, to show us both human and Divine love. This was to be so momentous that God needed to prepare human beings to receive the gift of His Son by calling the prophets throughout history to call His people to conversion.

The vocation of the prophet is to give voice to God’s desire for His People to belong freely to Him in truth and in love. So, Jeremiah, who has reluctantly accepted this call from God, cannot help but speak the truth of God’s desires for His People, yet it is a truth that God’s people reject. It is a revelation to which God’s people respond indifferently and place as distant to their own desires for a comfortable and complacent lifestyle. The people are indifferent to Jeremiah’s pleas and soon they become annoyed by Jeremiah and then they become hostile. So, it is reasonable when we hear him exclaim in frustration, “You duped me, O Lord, and I let myself be duped; you were too strong for me, and you triumphed. All the day I am an object of laughter; everyone mocks me.”

Despite Jeremiah’s frustration, God has not duped Jeremiah. God spoke honestly and directly to Jeremiah about what his vocation as a prophet would entail and its difficulty. It is impossible for God to lie, to prevaricate, or to flatter. God meant what He said, and He said what He meant. There is no nuance with God.

Last week we heard Saint Peter’s confession of faith in Jesus as the Christ and the Son of God. We heard of Jesus’ giving the keys of binding and loosing to Saint Peter as the first pope. This week, we hear the very next lines of the Gospel in which Peter dares to rebuke Jesus for not conforming to the religious mindset of the age by revealing that He, Jesus, is to suffer and die as the Christ to fulfill His mission given to Him by His Father.

Peter at first divorces love from suffering, “God forbid, Master, that anything like that ever happen to you.” Then Jesus reprimands Peter for his error. Jesus teaches Peter something new, that the Father has wed Divine and human love in the Son’s faithfulness to the cross, a faithfulness that Jesus Christ enables Peter and each of us to embrace, to love, and to live with the thirst for God satisfied within us.

Peter has been given the keys and immediately he makes an error in conforming to the world for which Jesus corrects him. What does Peter’s error and Jesus’ strong rebuke of him convey to us about the Church’s doctrine of papal infallibility? As the late Dominican theologian Father Benedict Ashley once explained, “Infallibility does not mean the popes are personally sinless, nor even that they exercise their office well, nor that they do not make mistakes in their government or in their teaching when this teaching is not intended to be definitive. Some popes have been personally vicious; others have been woefully negligent, imprudent, or mistaken in their official acts; others have made serious mistakes in non-definitive teaching. There is no guarantee that the Holy Spirit will relieve sinful men from all their faults. The Holy Spirit guarantees only that the Church will not essentially fail because of failures by its (human) leadership.”

Likewise, we ought to remember the understanding by the Church of the teaching of Jesus Christ, revealed in Sacred Scripture and Tradition, develops gradually through the Church’s historical experience under the illuminating guidance of the Holy Spirit promised by Jesus Himself. Nothing new can be added to this revelation given to the Church through the Apostles. The Church can grow (and sometimes reverts) in its understanding of that revelation, articulating clearly what is only implicit in Scripture and Tradition. This principle is essential to the Catholic Church as established by Christ.

For example, the Church cannot change Divine or Natural Law. The Church cannot add new Commandments to the Ten given to Moses. The Church cannot add new books of Sacred Scripture. Neither the Church nor the Pope and bishops can declare mortally sinful acts to become virtuous or even sacramental. The Holy Spirit cannot contradict Himself by proposing something opposite of what Christ taught and handed on to the Apostles and their successors, the Pope and the bishops in communion with him, as revealed in Sacred Scripture and Tradition even as the Church gradually develops deeper insight into this Divine Revelation.

This characteristic of the development of doctrine distinguishes the Catholic Church from Eastern Orthodoxy. The Eastern Orthodox churches accept only the teachings of the first seven ecumenical councils as legitimate development of doctrine. This characteristic also distinguishes the Catholic Church from Protestantism. Protestantism accepts only what is explicitly stated in Scripture either with a rigid and literal interpretation or with an interpretation made loosely in conformity with modern philosophy and the cultural values of the current society.

Saint Peter thought that Jesus’ prediction of suffering and the cross was foolish, but despite his error Peter did not give up. Saint Peter followed Jesus to Jerusalem even though he was afraid. Saint Peter followed Jesus in his Passion even though it was there that he had denied him. Saint Peter hurried to the empty tomb even though he had run away from the cross. Our prayer is that we may decide to have the same humble courage not to give up in following Jesus that Saint Peter displayed, even if it brings us persecution and rejection by many as it did to Saint Peter.

As Christ reveals His Passion, Death, and Resurrection to His disciples and to us, we are faced with a decision. We either fully accept Christ or we reject Him. We either are converted through the renewal of our minds by the revealed truth, or we reject it. We cannot negotiate with our sins. We cannot make profane what is meant to be holy. There is no middle ground.

Following Christ crucified means that we must believe that Jesus means what He says when He says, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” The sacrifice of the cross is the only way for us to have our thirst for God satiated.

Our share in His cross means that we make holy what otherwise would remain profane. The word “fanum” is an old English word that means “temple” or “sacred place.” “Profanum” indicates that which is left outside on the threshold of the sacred place, that which is profane. To negotiate to keep part of our life outside of the sacred and away from God is to see that good become not made holy but stolen by the evil one through our sin as we place our will in front of God’s will.

In a few moments, we will offer the gifts of bread and wine along with all our lives in this sacred place of the Lord’s Eternal Sacrifice. Let us not withhold anything from God’s sacred place. Then, we can approach Holy Communion and receive the Lord’s eternally true answer to our prayer “My soul is thirsting for you, Oh Lord, my God.”