22nd Sunday A
Jeff Bagnall • 1 September 2023
It's not so long ago that we were reading of Elijah wanting to die because of his failure to inspire the people and because of a death-threat against him. Jeremiah was in a worse situation in Judah around the 7th century BC. In that land, regard for Yahweh and the Covenant was almost entirely abandoned, and God urged Jeremiah to preach about the inevitable political demise and eventual national disaster. He had a respite from his work for a short time during the reign of Josiah; for this king tried to reintroduce the recognition of the Law of God as found written in what we now see as the early books of the bible, especially Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy. But this reform soon failed, and idolatry and fertility cults regained popularity.
Despite extreme reluctance, Jeremiah began the work of his calling, which was to bring him general disfavour, occasional imprisonment or confinement and continued unpopularity. There was some upbeat aspects to his message at times, particularly the one about God wanting to set up a new covenant within the hearts of the people. He suffered a tormenting turmoil in his own life; it resulted both from his natural abhorrence of preaching against his own people and from the deep and inescapable inner compulsion to undertake the vocation given him by God – announcing the people's downfall. Doing God’s will is not always an obviously good thing! Our reading
is his outcry at this personal conflict within him.
The second reading follows nicely from the thoughts of the Old Testament situation of Jeremiah. You mustn’t conform to the laxity of morals that there may be in the world of your experience, Paul writes to the Romans; there is a spiritual depth to your being that calls you to commitment to the will of God. It is calling for a sacrifice – surrendering what you might be attracted to. You do this to live in a more elevated way – a way that recognises God’s purpose for human life. The apparent contrast between body and spirit is not the duality of body and soul that many think of, but rather the difference between what I fancy for myself and what God wants to make of me – contrast flesh and spirit. However it is really the difference between God’s will for what He creates to be good and perfect, and the nothingness from which it is raised by Him.
We are at the point in Matthew’s gospel when Peter has just expressed the belief that Jesus is the Messiah expected by the Jews with the anticipation of liberation from Roman dominance and superiority over all the nations. Also Jesus, according only to Matthew’s gospel, has told Peter that he will have a leading role in the new kingdom. It is this that turns out to be the community of Christians that exists at the time of this gospel’s composition. But this wasn’t at all the kind of kingdom and leadership that Peter actually imagined it would be.
In the gospel stories it is at this stage that Jesus begins to speak plainly about the problems that He foresees will come upon Him because of the life He is leading and the message He is preaching – a whole new attitude to religious observance and a view of God as a spiritual liberator full of kindness and forgiveness. This message and belief in it will inevitably bring trouble and difficulty – in the secular aspect of life though not in one’s inner being. It is the contrast between these two areas of life that is the subject of Jesus’ words in our gospel for this day.
Jeff Bagnall was a lecturer for many years at Craiglockhart College teaching RE to many future Catholic Primary teachers.
The first reading repeats the introduction from last week so as to make sense, for there follows a continuation of the previous words spoken to the crowd by Peter. The people have been moved by the accusation of putting Jesus to death, and they want to know what they can do. Peter calls upon them to be baptised. As John the Baptist seems to have preached to his listeners, Peter begins with the need for repentance and the need for baptism. You could feel sorry for the past but this repentance means ‘change your attitude to life.’ Baptism is a washing symbolic of starting with a clean sheet; here it is for starting a new life caught up in the life of the risen Christ. In his life our past is transformed; those baptised will have the forgiveness of past sins. The words translated ‘forgiveness of’ could equally well be translated as ‘release from,’ meaning a freedom from the debilitating affects of past sins. Those baptised will share in the Spirit of Christ, the Holy Spirit of God. God wants people of all kinds to come into this communion with Him.
In Luke’s Acts of the Apostles, today’s first reading is the first sermon from Peter after the resurrection. The literary style is not that of a Galilean Jew, but the content is believable as a very early expression of the initial preaching about Jesus. In this first century account of the beginnings of Christianity, Peter is a key figure in the growth of the early church, together with Paul, the missionary to the Gentiles. It is significant that it is a Jewish audience in Jerusalem that Peter is addressing. Jesus is referred to as the Nazarean and there is uncertainty whether this means a man from Nazareth or one specially dedicated to God, as for example, Samson in the Old Testament, called a Nazirite. The understanding of Christian beliefs develops over time, so Peter speaks about God working through Jesus where we might be clear that Jesus is Himself God; but he does see Jesus as the fulfilment of the hopes of the Old Testament and quotes Psalm 16 verses 8 to 11, which was a song originally about someone faithful to the Lord, maybe king David, being looked after by Him; (it is used for the responsorial psalm this day). In the sermon Peter accuses the Jews of engineering the death of Jesus in an anti-Semitic way; this attitude was decried by the Church most noticeably in the 20th century in the Second Vatican Council initiated by Pope Saint John XXIII, with the words: “Furthermore, in her rejection of every persecution against any person, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel’s spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.” (The Church and non-Christian religions, Nostra Aetate, Oct. 1962). But for us the positive message from Peter’s sermon is that the Spirit of God is now poured out into creation because of the resurrection of Jesus destroying the deadliness of death and the power of evil in our lives. The second reading is part of an address to early Christians, probably Gentile converts. It is about what it means to be a Christian, noting that it is brought about by Christ – the writer uses the word ‘ransomed’, but no words can really capture the mystery of it. The mystery is that the final age has been initiated thanks to the work of God in Christ, through His life and death. The imagery of the sacrificial lamb which is used is derived from the bloody sacrifices of the Jewish Temple which at the time of this letter had been destroyed. And those addressed are living like people in exile and are urged to conduct themselves reverently in this situation; this reflects how the Jews were when they were in exile in Babylon, they had to work at it to keep themselves true to their calling. So, though we are elevated in our being through the work of God in Christ, we are for the time being in this world and must live here in a way becoming of our status.