Have you ever given any attention to how God thinks and judges? Comparing God to yourself, do you think that he thinks like you? Well for me, there are sometimes when I am inpatient, I can be dismissive, there are times when I rush to judgement, times when I draw the wrong conclusions from what I believe is in front of me. How do you think and judge? All of us are a mixture of light and dark I guess. Reflecting on this I hope that God does not think like I do, where I get things wrong as frequently as I get things right.

Last week in Sunday's gospel we heard how Peter’s inspiration that Jesus is the Christ, literally the anointed one, was 100% correct; a conclusion he reached by his judgement of the words and actions of Jesus, but much more than this, by an inspiration, not from his imagination but from God himself. At this point Jesus renames Simon as “the rock”, and he does more, his new name, Peter, means that Peter is the living human foundation stone of Jesus' church.

And yet this Sunday we see in the very same scene in Matthew, in a few seconds, Peter goes from "hero to zero". He goes from foundation stone to stumbling block. Its not as though he is any different in this week's gospel as he was last week. What is happening, what is going on?

We need to remember that Peter with the disciples are midway through Jesus’ ministry, they have seen and experienced extraordinary things, but Peter, with the other disciples, are still trying to work things out, including the nature of the mission of Jesus. At its most basic, they know that Jesus is set on restoring the kingdom of Israel, but by now they must have been scratching their heads about what this restoration actually meant. Was it a restoration of the kingdom similar to that of the Maccabees where the Jewish Maccabee family in the second century BC defeated the successors to Alexander the Great, the Seleucids, and kicked them out? That was a restoration they knew and understood, as we would have done too. But Jesus was an enigma, they knew they had to be with Him but what did the future actually look like?

Maybe this is why Peter messes up this Sunday. He is right – Jesus is the Christ, but his interpretation of what this “Christ-ness” is like is totally wrong. Christ-ness is not about palaces or politics, Christ-ness has its first stirrings in the soul and heart; it is not the movement of power but a movement of love, love of God and each other. Christ-ness is not the movement of the heart and the soul to acquire and gather to itself, but the movement of the heart and the soul to the giving of itself to the point of emptiness, an emptiness that enables it to be filled with the very life of God, new life, eternal life.

Christ-ness is not about the way of honour, but the way of the cross. Jesus comes to new life, drawing all people to Himself across all of time and across all ages, only by lifted up for us to see Him when He is raised up on the cross. It is only through His cross that He is raised up by the Father at the resurrection. It is only by His cross and resurrection that His disciples, and us too, are set free.

Later Peter and the disciples understand this, more than this they came to understand that sharing the way of the cross with Jesus and its earthly destination (for all bar one their own suffering and death), that they too would share in Jesus' resurrection in glory. This is as true for us as it was for them.

All of us have our own "Via Crucis" – our own way of the cross. Crosses come in many guises, visible and invisible, but Jesus is always with us until the end of the age. Time and again He tells us that He will come again, He is already is really in our churches. His very body, blood soul and divinity are really and truly in the Blessed Sacrament. When times are hard, come to Jesus, visit Him during the sacrifice of the Mass, share your burdens with Him. As He was helped on His way to his cross, He wants to help you with your crosses. He willingly bore the weight of our sins, He desires to lighten our hearts and our souls.

As always, please accept an assurance of my daily prayers for your needs and intentions.

God bless and keep you.

Fr Chris