22nd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Jer 20:7-9
Second Reading: Rom 12:1-2
Gospel Reading: Mt 16:21-27
Baptized humans live two different kinds of life in two different worlds. The first is our natural life, which God gives us through our parents. It begins with our conception and is nourished by food. The world in which we live it consists of what we can see, hear, touch, smell, and taste.
The other is our supernatural life, God’s life, which he gives us through his Church. It begins with our Baptism, which the Church calls our re-birth, and is nourished by the Holy Eucharist. The world in which we live it cannot be perceived by our senses: we live it largely by faith and trust.
“Faith is confident assurance concerning what we hope for, and conviction about things we do not see,” says the Letter to the Hebrews.
From this Sunday’s Readings, it seems that there has always been conflict between the two kinds of life.
Jesus reproaches Peter for “thinking not as God does, but as humans do,” even though Peter has just recognized Jesus as “the Son of the living God.”
Jeremiah says that for him, “the word of the Lord” has become “a reproach and a derision,” making him “a laughingstock all day long.”
It is a conflict that we have to recognize. We must “reacquire the consciousness of belonging to a minority” that is opposed to the spirit of the world, said Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, in The Ratzinger Report. We must “find again the courage of nonconformism, the capacity to oppose many of the trends of the surrounding culture.”
That courage is something we have to teach our children, for Catholicism is not simply an “add-on” to our natural human life.
“Do not be conformed to this world,” St. Paul urges, “but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.”
In explaining the title of his book The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis says the following.
“The English poet William Blake wrote The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. If I have written of their divorce, this is not because I think myself a fit antagonist for so great a genius, nor even because I feel at all sure of what he meant.
“But in some sense or other the attempt to make that marriage is perennial. The attempt is based on the belief that reality never presents us with an absolutely unavoidable “either-or”; that, granted skill and patience and (above all) time enough, some way of embracing both alternatives can always be found; that mere development or adjustment or refinement will somehow turn evil into good without our being called on for a final and total rejection of anything we should like to retain.
“This belief I take to be a disastrous error. You cannot take all luggage with you on all journeys; on one journey even your right hand and your right eye may be among the things you have to leave behind.
“We are living not in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre; but rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again—and at each fork we must make a decision.”
“I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. [Wrong arithmetic] can be put right, but only by going back until we find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot “develop” into good. Time does not heal it.”
“If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we shall not see Heaven; if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.”
Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English, with new insights. The whole course is available in written form and, one session per week, in YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Father is also teaching the course in person: on Sundays, starting August 30, at 2:00 pm in the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 St John Paul II Way, Vancouver (33rd and Willow); and on Mondays, starting August 31, at 10:00 am in St. Anthony’s Church hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver. Next week’s talk is an introduction. No pre-registration is necessary.
