Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time

September 3, 2023

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/090323.cfm

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Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, on this first Sunday in September, there is change in the air. Vacations are over. Schools are open. Autumn sale announcements are stuffed into the newspaper. Some of us are even thinking of a pumpkin latte after Sunday Mass.

We feel a change of mood in our Sunday readings too, and the mood is solemn.

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Just last Sunday, Jesus gave the “keys” over to Peter, alerting him that he would soon be driving the boat. But in today’s Gospel, Jesus gets intense about how that transition will occur. And it’s not going to be pretty.

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The angst within today’s scripture readings shouts loudly to us in the passage from Jeremiah foreshadowing the Passion of Christ. Jeremiah wrote during the downfall of Jerusalem to its Babylonian captors. When his and his community’s faith was tested beyond endurance, Jeremiah called his people to fidelity and hope. He gave expression to the deep pain of loss and failure yet holding up an unquenchable trust. The people derided him from their desolation and he let God know how he suffered:

Whenever I speak, I must cry out,
violence and outrage is my message;
the word of the LORD has brought me
derision and reproach all the day.

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;
I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure it.

Jeremiah 20: 8-9

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Jesus is more subtle with his words but they too reveal a heart that is breaking because, in worldly terms, the dream appears to be untenable:

Jesus began to show his disciples
that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly
from the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes,
and be killed and on the third day be raised.

Matthew 16:21

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One might read today’s scriptures and ask why it had to be so hard for Jesus, so hard for the Jeremiah community. Why is it so hard for us to live a peaceful, faithful life in the world? Why doesn’t God just make it all work?

Praying with those questions, I come up with one answer: free will. God created us to choose freely to love and live in God. Programming that love into us would make the love meaningless. We have to choose it. And not everyone does. Those choices contradictory to God’s love create the kind of suffering Jesus and Jeremiah describe.

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Certainly we experience other kinds of anguish in life not controlled by our choices. These are associated with the natural life cycle of birth, growth, diminishment and death. As Christians, we believe that it is within the mystery of these joys and sorrows, lived in the pattern of Christ, that we come fully to a life resurrected in God.

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Poetry from Scripture: Psalm 63:

Seeking the gift of trust, we pray:

O God, you are my God whom I seek;
for you my flesh pines and my soul thirsts
like the earth, parched, lifeless and without water. 

You are my help,
and in the shadow of your wings I shout for joy.
My soul clings fast to you;
your right hand upholds me.

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Music: The Circle of Life – from The Lion King

From the day we arrive on the planet

And blinkin’, step into the sun

There’s more to see than can ever be seen

More to do than can ever be done

Some say, “Eat or be eaten”

Some say, “Live and let live”

But all are agreed as they join the stampede

You should never take more than you give

In the circle of life

It’s the wheel of fortune

It’s the leap of faith

It’s the band of hope

‘Til we find our place

On the path unwinding

In the circle, the circle of life

Some of us fall by the wayside

And some of us soar to the stars

And some of us sail through our troubles

And some have to live with the scars

There’s far too much to take in here

More to find than can ever be found

But the sun rollin’ high

Through the sapphire sky

Keeps great and small on the endless round