Sunday 22 (A-2005): Getting real with God
Jer 20: 7-9; Rom 12:1-2; Mt 16:21-27
In the reality of life, there is so much good. It would be wrong to say “all is
woe and pain.”
Yet, people and communities often have great pain to bear, and their efforts
to avoid it (however harmful they may be) deserve all our understanding and compassion.
We are not facing reality if we say all is good or all is bad. Reality is
complex, not simple, and it requires of us the ability and the willingness to live in the tension between the good and the
bad.
For this reason, facing reality is often far from easy. People have many ways
of avoiding it, ranging from addiction to outright insanity. Some simply try to control reality: it must be what we want it
to be or else we reject it.
Our hearts must understand and love those who opt out of reality, but that
same love demands that we help them face up to it and not harm themselves further by the ways they try and avoid it.
For if we will not meet reality as it is, with all its risks, pain and beauty,
then we will never meet God. God lives in reality. He is not subject to our subtle, or blatant, control. A god who would be
the product of our own make-believe would necessarily be a false god, an idol, whether or not we call him Jesus, Trinity or
Lord.
Real belief cannot be make-believe. If we reject reality, whether we do it
freely in sin or are driven to it by deep fears or anxieties, we distance ourselves from God. He will, of course, see why
we do it, but seeing why does not of itself eliminate the distance.
God is real, and to meet him, we must ourselves stand naked and vulnerable
in the midst of reality: our own reality, the reality of the world and the reality of God.
Jeremiah and Paul allowed God to be real in their lives. Jeremiah speaks of
being “duped” or “seduced” by God and, as a result of then preaching God’s unpopular word, becomes
the object of people’s mockery. In other words, his relationship with God really affected his relationships with his
fellow men.
God was real in his life. He tried to avoid God because of the pain this brought
him, but even then he felt him “like fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones. I grow weary holding it in. I
cannot endure it.”
For his part, Paul urges people “to offer [their] bodies as a living
sacrifice” to God and to allow their relationship with God to mean that they “do not conform [themselves] to this
age.”
Perhaps we can paraphrase the words of both these great men: your relationship
with God must really mean something in terms of the choices you make, the priorities you set, the way of thinking you employ,
the relationships you have.
Since God is real and the source of all reality, then all you are and do,
if you want it to be real, must be, and must be done, with reference to God.
To the degree you allow God to seduce you, you will not run away from reality,
but run towards it and so find release from your pain, anger, fears and anxieties. God is greater than our pain. In the end,
the real God delivers us from insanity, from addiction and from every other form of spiritual or psychological illness we
may experience.
From this perspective, Jesus blasts Peter’s make-believe with several
doses of divine realism. Avoiding the Cross may sound right, as Peter implied, but, as Jesus explains, that is unrealistic
if mankind is to be saved from sin and death, sin being the make-believe version of love and death being the make-believe
version of life.
Peter’s notion of Jesus was make-believe since he saw him as a successful
politician, not as the redeemer. But Jesus angrily retorts to Peter: I am not Caesar, but God.
Likewise, Jesus shoots down Peter’s notion of worldly success with the
famous words, “what profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?”
Jesus also makes it clear that judgment will be passed upon us on the basis
of our conduct: if that conduct has been motivated by the reality of God, then we will achieve the fulfillment of our own
reality in heaven. If we have not allowed God to be real in the planning and execution of our lives, we will achieve the fulfillment
of our own make-believe in that ultimate condition of falsehood we call hell.
Pope Benedict XVI last week pleaded with the youth gathered in Cologne
not to follow a “do-it-yourself” religion.
If we keep the Lord locked up in the tabernacle, or in the realm of concepts
and ideology, are we not engaging in a do-it-yourself or make-believe religion? If we separate Christ from the institutional
Church he founded and in which he lives, loves and saves, are we not in a DIY religion?
The Church, by Christ’s own doing, is central to his own divine and
human reality. Christ without the Church is make-believe. The reality is that what the Church teaches in matters of faith
and morality is Christ’s own teaching for he breathes in her, teaches through her and saves in her.
If we do not allow her teaching to be the norm of our conscience and our moral
conduct, we are slipping out of reality into make-believe. In the midst of the Church, the risen Christ stands and offers
us the real possibility of facing reality and of becoming fully real and really fulfilled.
I challenge myself and all of you to ask and to answer these questions:
How real is Jesus Christ for me, in my life?
Why might I be half-hearted and haphazard in my religious commitment to him?
What is the central driving-force in my life: recognition, control, money,
Christ?
What are the aspects of my life which, if I am honest, are only make-believe?
At the hour of death, what would I most wish to have done or not to have done,
and what does that mean for me now?
When I stand before Christ beyond death, how will I explain to him the state
of my life as it is at this moment?
Many more such questions could be asked, but they all seem to come back to
this one: does the way I live prove to me and to others that I really believe in the living and true God?
In the deep and silent sanctuary of our hearts we must answer this question,
for on it depends the meaning of our personal existence, that is, God’s judgment upon who we really are.
We probably have so many questions in our hearts because we never really answer
that one. We need to learn to withdraw from time to time into that inner holy place and kiss and embrace our own reality,
opening it up completely to the reality of God’s loving presence.
As he did Jeremiah, the Lord wishes also to seduce us. As did Paul, so we
must learn to offer even our bodies to Jesus as a living sacrifice, just as Jesus does to us in the Eucharist.
Maybe I can sum up all of this by slightly adapting a colloquialism we all
know, addressing it to myself as well as to you all: it is time to get real with the real God!
Msgr. Peter Magee
Sunday, August 28th,
2005 (feast of St. Augustine of Hippo)
Annunciation Parish, DC –
10.00 am & 1.00 pm
