Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome to the Blessed Sacrament Homilies podcast where our mission is to help everyone recognize and experience the presence of God. We hope you are nourished and encouraged by the Word. Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: The the Lord be with you and with your spirit. Reading from the Holy Gospel according to Matthew.
Glory to you, O Lord.
Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly from the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed and on the third day be raised.
Then Peter took Jesus aside and began to rebuke him.
God forbid, Lord, no such thing shall ever happen to you.
He turned and said to Peter, get behind me, Satan. You are an obstacle to me. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.
Then Jesus said to his disciples, whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me forever. Wishes to save his life will lose it. But whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?
Or what can one give in exchange for his life?
For the Son of man will come with his angels in his Father's glory, and then he will repay all according to his conduct, the Gospel of the Lord.
Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
Earlier in the week, I was toying with the idea of allowing you to throw some answers at me and what I was going to ask you, which thankfully I thought through a little bit, was I wanted you to give me some ideas of what you thought the thing I would get in trouble most in grade school would have been.
And then I realized that's probably not a good question to offer.
But I'll tell you what got me in the most trouble. And it was in every parent conference and written when there were comments on every report card.
He likes to blurt out answers to questions without raising his hand.
I would do that continually. And I think part of it was I got so excited that I had the answer that I said, oh, and nobody else got a chance to answer.
Now, nine out of 10 times that worked out real well for me and it helped build up my ego.
But the 10th time usually ended up being a disaster.
Total humble pie.
Well, that's a little bit of what we just heard in these two gospels, right?
In the first one, Peter blurts out an answer that is 100% correct.
And it was so correct that Jesus even complimented him and said, you only got this from my Father. That's how profound the answer was that you just gave.
Well, I'm sure that Peter got pretty puffed up at that time, said, yeah, look at me. I'm so smart. In front of all these other disciples here, they know who's really the one Jesus likes.
And then just a little bit later, when Jesus talks about the fact that he was willing to suffer and that following him sometimes involves suffering and struggle and rejection, what happened?
Get behind me, Satan.
Well, I never had a teacher say, get behind me, Satan, so I think I was doing all right.
But talk about a total rebuke.
Okay, well, if that's our truth, then what are we supposed to glean from that?
That when we have insights that are profound regarding God and Christ and their love for us, those are good things. But they're gifts from God.
They're a gift that's been poured out into my heart and into my faith. They're not because I'm better than anybody else.
They're grace.
And the second part of it is when we think we have all the answers, when we think we've got it figured out. We know how God acts, what God wants, how best to live. Everybody else is wrong, and we got that.
Get behind me, Satan is what we should hear because we can never limit, not even close, the power of God's love to be revealed to us in ways we can't imagine.
So we can't have it figured out because God's bigger than us.
Way bigger.
Peter gave us a pretty good example of what to do and what not to do.
My guess is most of us at different times in our lives, have made both things happen. We've got the answer right. We've got it horribly wrong.
But just like Peter sheared 100% in Christ's love and mercy, even though he screwed up, so do we.
