Following is the prepared text from Bishop Olmsted’s homily for the 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time.
August 30, 2020
“Do not conform yourselves to this age.”
Great advice from St. Paul today, since conformity with what’s happening around us often sets us at odds with God. But not to go along with the times can be quite difficult. At the present time, for example, great pressure is placed on young people to conform to gender ideology and its assertion that feelings define who you are. So, if someone does not affirm your feelings, it asserts, then they hate you.
St. Peter might have felt this way when Jesus said to him (Mt 16:23), “Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.” Did Jesus say this to Peter because He hated him? Does disagreeing with you mean I hate you? Not at all! Jesus used strong words to correct Peter because Peter was wrong on a matter of great importance. It was out of love that Jesus spoke! When you love someone, you tell him or her the truth, whether it feels good or not. This is why, on another occasion, Jesus told His disciples (Mt 18: 15), “If your brother sins, go and tell him his fault… If he listens to you, you have won over your brother.” This is authentic love in action.
Simon Peter had no idea how difficult it was to free his mind from the false ideas of his age. But he found out quickly because Jesus loved Peter too much to let him remain trapped in what was false. Peter, acting on his feelings, had told Jesus to do what Satan wanted: namely, not to redeem the world, not to save the human race by suffering and dying on the Cross. How did Peter get in such a mess? How could Peter be so wrong? Mushy thinking! By letting his feelings overwhelm his thinking. He replaced truth with sentimentality, losing sight of the connection between suffering and love, between redemption and sacrifice.
How difficult it is to put on the mind and heart of Jesus. Jesus’ rebuke of Peter was swift and ruthless, because that is what love required; moreover, Peter needed Jesus’ words: “You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.” Peter would never forget that lesson.
What Peter had fallen into was what St. Paul warned about in his Letter to the Roman (Rom 12:2), “Do not conform yourselves to this age, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, so that you may judge what is God’s will, what is good, pleasing and perfect.”
Most of us are like Peter; we find it hard to recognize tough truths as authentic love, when our parents or true friends tell us what we need to hear, not just what we want to hear. To help us learn this lesson, the Church gives the Cross a pivotal place in her life and prayer. We see this in the 14 stations of the cross surrounding us in the Church, and when we bless ourselves with the sign of the cross as we begin and conclude our prayer.
No wonder Jesus, after calling Peter the rock on which He would build His Church, then, called him a stumbling block. That is what Peter had become, acting like a misshapen stone that gets in the way of Jesus and His mission, a miserable little block that trips people up and makes them stumble.
Years later, undoubtedly after frequently pondering in prayer Jesus’ words, Peter wrote about rocks and stones in His First Letter. His words show how his love of Jesus and the grace of conversion had transformed his thinking. Listen to what he wrote (2:4ff): “Come to Him, a living stone, rejected by human beings but chosen and precious in the sight of God, and, like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house…”
What does all this have to do with you and me? First, Jesus teaches how easily our feelings get in the way of clear thinking, how often our opinions can be mistaken and our expectations off base, how frequently our decisions can be twisted by popular opinion if they are not informed and shaped by the word of God. How great is our need for the Holy Spirit.
We learn from St. Peter to admit our mistakes, to acknowledge our failings, to confess our sins and be renewed in God’s mercy. Like Peter, we can invite Jesus to turn our lives around. When we confess our sins in the Confessional, Christ removes the stumbling blocks and make us living stones in His Kingdom.
Second, Jesus teaches us the need for fraternal correction, for loving yet courageous honesty with one another, helping one another, as St. Paul wrote, to “judge what is God’s will, what is good, pleasing and perfect” (Rom 12:2).
Thirdly, God’s word today warns us not to confuse what feels good with what is good, not to seek what is comfortable now but will not last to eternal life. The wisdom of God confounds the proud but lifts up the humble. The wisdom of the Cross seems foolish to the world, but it is the power and the wisdom of God. That is why Jesus said, “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” (Mt 16:24).
