22nd Sunday 2014
Robert VerEecke, S.J.
Have you been to Calvary? The film, that is. If you haven’t been to
“Calvary”, you may heard about it. It begins with a priest hearing the
confession of someone who was horrifically abused by a priest when he was
a child. He carries with him the pain and the shame of this abuse and
betrayal by someone he trusted and now only desires to exact revenge. But
since he was an innocent child when his life was destroyed, he must destroy
the life of an innocent priest to exact justice. Cinematically, the film is at
times breathtaking with its shots of the cliffs and the ocean. Humanly, the
film is also breath-taking. It takes your breath away as you feel suffocated
by the anger and rage, the sheer misery of life in this Irish seaside town.
Although we do not hear the inner dialogue of the innocent priest with God,
you can imagine that it might echo that of Jeremiah: “You duped me and I
let myself be duped.” Father James is a “late comer” to the priesthood. He is
a widower who felt the call to the priesthood after his wife died. Even before
hearing the confession that will lead him to Calvary, he must have asked
God, “Why?”… “Why did you call me to this life”? Like Jeremiah he is the
object of mockery and derision by almost every character that populates his
parish. There is so much anger against the church for its repressive control
over the Irish people for so long that James, this priest who does the work of
the Church, is scorned and demeaned. But he persists in his ministry as he
tries to heal wounds and call people to conversion of heart. In addition to the
daily fare of scorn, derision and distrust, there is the impending Calvary, the
threat of his death at the hand of someone whose voice he must have
recognized. And perhaps he asked himself, or God, “Why me? What did I do
to deserve this?
And what about you? Have you ever said to God: you duped me? How did
I get into this mess? What did I do to deserve this? And what was God’s
response? Do you have an Honest-to God relationship that allows you to
share your deepest frustration, confusion and disappointments with God?
The Gospel speaks of another Calvary, the impending threat of the death of
another innocent, Jesus himself. His prediction of his death, his Calvary, is
rejected by Peter. What a change from last week’s gospel! In last week’s
Gospel, Peter was praised for having the correct answer to the question, who
do you say that I am? He must have been so proud of himself, inflated with a
sense of being chosen. Jesus himself tells him he is divinely inspired: “Flesh
and blood has not revealed this to you but my heavenly Father”. But now,
with his inflated self and know-it-all attitude, he feels confident enough to
rebuke Jesus. And in response he is called “Satan”, “tempter”. Can you
imagine the look on Peter’s face hearing those words? Does crestfallen
describe him? Do the words, “Geez, what did I do to deserve that?”, capture
what he may have been thinking?
Once again, Peter does not really know what he is saying. He does not yet
know the cost of following Jesus. It will take the Cross and the Resurrection
before Peter begins to understand what Jesus is asking from him. And what
is Jesus asking from Peter and from us? Simply an unconditional surrender
to the mystery of life lived with its pain, its struggle, its confusion, and, oh
yes, it’s Joy. It’s what we call Passion.
What Jeremiah, Jesus and James share in common is Passion. It is not just
the passion, i.e., the suffering that each one experiences. It is also a passion
for God and the “word of God”, the “kingdom of God”, the “Mercy of God”.
You hear it in the words of Jeremiah:
I say to myself, I will not mention him,
I will speak in his name no more.
But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart,
imprisoned in my bones;
You see it in Father James and his choice not to run away but to encounter
his accuser face-to-face.
And of course you see it in Jesus on the Cross in the first Calvary.
When I began to think about preaching the Word tonight, I was searching for
the easy way out. It’s been such a beautiful summer and an early labor day
reminds us that everything begins again in earnest. I was hoping that I could
find words that would be as comforting as those cool summer breezes, as
delightful as a dip in the ocean, as light-filled as those long summer days…
but instead I found myself in Calvary.
Huh? What did I just say? I found myself in Calvary. For whoever wishes
to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.