Teaching Tough Truths

September 12, 2021

Following is the prepared text from Bishop Olmsted’s homily for the 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time and the Installation of Fr. Chad King as pastor of St. Gabriel the Archangel Parish.

“Jesus began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected… be killed, and rise after three days. He spoke this openly.”  Mk 8:29f

This teaching of Jesus was contrary to Peter’s expectations and to what he wanted for Jesus. Peter loved Jesus. He had gladly left everything to follow Him. He was thrilled to know that Jesus was the Messiah, but he had grandiose expectations of what the Messiah would be. Suffering, rejection and being killed did not fit into them. So, Peter “took Jesus aside and began to rebuke Him.” He tried to change Jesus’ teaching — for what he thought were the best of motives; namely, to save Jesus from suffering, to protect Him from rejection and death on a cross.

Peter knew that Jesus is the Messiah, but he did not know what that meant. His notion of a messiah needed to be corrected, emptied of earthly triumphalism.  So, Jesus rebuked Peter at once in the strongest terms: “Get behind me, Satan. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.” It was satanic to try to impede Jesus from doing the will of the Father, from overthrowing the power of evil through His suffering and death on the cross. By His Holy Cross, Christ redeemed the world.

Knowing that the other disciples shared Peter’s mistaken thinking and worldly dreams, Jesus summoned them also and taught something even more startling, “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 and that of the Gospel will save it.”

The rite of Installation of a Pastor describes his identity and mission in this way: he is to be “a loving father, a gentle shepherd, and a wise teacher… [who] leads the people to Christ.”

Jesus was being a loving father for Peter and the rest of the Twelve when He taught them the cost of discipleship, the cost of making a personal decision to follow Him, each one ready to deny himself, to abandon himself without reserve and with boundless confidence to Jesus.

A pastor’s first duty is to help people understand that God created them to be loved by Him; as Jesus said (Jn 3:16), “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him might not perish but might have eternal life.” That’s the mystery of the Cross – a profound mystery of the self-giving love of God. By His Cross, Jesus teaches us that love rises far above earthly thoughts, denies oneself for the love of God and those God gives us to love.

Like a loving father and a wise teacher, a good pastor knows that false expectations easily lead to bitterness, even to despair. It is a great disservice to others to tell them only what they want to hear and not what they need to hear. Christ refused to do that. As soon as He saw Peter’s false notions of the Messiah, He corrected him at once, strongly and clearly. He did so out of love.

A good pastor expects to share in the Cross and Resurrection of Christ and he leads his people to expect the same. This is what is happening in every celebration of the Eucharist – the pastor and his people are caught up in the eternal mystery of Jesus’ death and Resurrection.  Together, they come to see in a deeper way Jesus’ teaching, “Unless you eat my Body and drink my Blood”, that is, unless you share in my sacrificial death and Resurrection, “you cannot have life in you.” To partake in the Eucharist is to enter more deeply into the Mystery of Jesus’ Cross. It is to be one with Christ in His dying and His rising to new life.

The Cross seems like craziness to many in a world that lusts for comfort and pleasure, and that fails to see the meaning and value of suffering. But listen again to how St. Paul describes his pastoral duties (1 Cor 1:24), “We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called… Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

The Cross is central to the life of Christ and His followers because it is, as Pope Benedict XVI writes (DCE, #12), “love in its most radical form.”  By this wondrous love of Jesus on the Cross, He redeemed every human person; He took our sins upon Himself, nailed them to the Cross, and gave us in return the gifts of forgiveness and freedom. “Dying He destroyed our death. Rising He restored our life.”

The Church proclaims this great mystery of faith in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. And a faithful pastor, because he loves his people, teaches them this same mystery of faith.

It is helpful to recall that, even though Peter tried to correct Jesus when He said that the Messiah had to suffer and die, on a later occasion, he acted with renewed faith (6:16-69). When Jesus said, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you do not have life within you,” many disciples said, “This saying is hard. Who can accept it;” and from that day forward, most of them went away, refusing to follow Him anymore. However, this time, Peter said “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.”

Peter may not have fully understood this teaching of Jesus, but with faith he affirmed that, apart from Jesus, nothing made sense. Jesus on the Cross is “the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

In season and out of season, a Pastor teaches his people the wisdom of Jesus: “There is no greater love than this: to lay down your life for your friends.”