Getting Ready to Pray                     

Being faithful to God is much more than keeping rules and doing the “holy” things. Being faithful to God has much to do with being faithful to the name God has given to us, the name “creature.” We are invited by today’s readings to our being faithful to our true identities and this involves living with the tensions which come from opposition.

We pray in preparation for celebrating Christ’s faithful journey toward his cross and the self-surrendering act of his death. We walk toward this celebration of the liturgy, or we remember it, as we walk toward our own final surrender to being limited creatures.

We can pray with our own awareness of how easy personal infidelities are. Life has many crosses, but the heaviest is that one of our being grateful and accepting of our God-given, God-blessed selves.

Some Thoughts 

In the First Reading, we hear the beginning of a prayer or conversation that Jeremiah has with God. He admits some good things about himself and how, at times, he would rather not be who he is. In the end of course, Jeremiah did faithfully play his part in God’s work of redemption.

In the Gospel, Jesus is presenting to his friends the real meaning of what it is going to mean to be the Christ and the Son of God. He will have to show up in Jerusalem.

There is a deep reality to Jesus’ being the Christ, and a deeper reality of the disciples’ being followers of the Christ. Jesus invites them to come with him by means of being faithful to their relationship with him. That is what has made them who they are.

His “cross” was more than the wood of Calvary. It was flesh and spirit, the history and destiny of his whole life. He, his very self, was his cross! He was who he had heard he was, the “Beloved of the Father.”

Today we might say, easily, that certain other people are our crosses. We might say that a certain physical disability or personality defect is our cross. But it is more interior than that. What Jesus is offering the disciples and us, is the personal embrace of the totality of our reality: creature, limited, a mind that thinks like a imperfect creature.

Recently I was jogging and twisted my ankle and fell to the pavement. It hurt and I lifted my face and asked silently, “what are you telling me?” A little voice said, “Get up.” So for the past three weeks I have been getting up with a slight hobble. My injured ankle is not my cross: my struggling with my whole humanity is the cross of my life.

We who are followers of Jesus, who proclaim like Peter that Jesus is the Son of God, we are not seduced nor fooled. We believe and struggle with the verticality of our souls and the horizontality of our human creatureliness. The cross is not an event of time, but the time-bound movement toward our own Jerusalem and resurrection.

  “Get up!” the voice said to Jeremiah, to Jesus, to Peter, and to each of us who hobble after the Master. We wait for him to show up and raise us all.

O Lord, how great is the depth of the kindness which
you have shown to those who love you.
(Psalm 31:20)