A homily for the 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Earlier this week, we commemorated 9/11. That brought to mind a letter I had received from a woman I knew, Charlotte, who worked in one of the twin Towers. She’d gotten to work that day and thought, I’ve never had coffee with my niece or my nephew who work in the other tower. So she called them and said, you know, we’ve never had coffee. Let’s meet for coffee. They said, great idea. So they all met in the plaza between the two towers, just as the first plane hit. And they ran. And in the letter, she is talking about, like, survivor’s guilt. Why did she survive? Her niece and nephew survived when so many died. So I thought a while and wrote, you know, we, none of us survive forever.
Life is not about living immortality here. We have purpose. We have agenda. God has agenda for us. And I think when we don’t have that done, God extends or God takes care of us. There were a lot of people who surprisingly didn’t die that day for varieties of reasons, weren’t in the office that day.
And I kind of think maybe we do have purpose. And so that’s what I wrote back and said, you had purpose. You will die one day, but not that day, because you have still a mission to complete. In today’s gospel, Jesus is talking about mission. He asks the disciples, who do they say that I am? And Peter says, well, you are the Christ.
That’s his mission. And then he says, Peter, you are rock. But then Peter says, no, no, no, no, no. But I don’t want that to be your mission. I don’t want you to die. And so he says the famous line, get behind me, Satan. It’s not Satan, the devil. It’s a word that just means adversary or opponent in this case.
Get behind me, opponent. You don’t see the bigger picture. So I think that’s the call of today’s gospel to see the bigger picture, to see what does God want you? What does God want me? What does God want us to do? And that’s our mission. Now I have your homework for you. Google this. Cardinal Newman, wrote a prayer, great prayer called “Mission of My Life”.
Look that prayer up. it’ll say a lot.
