September 3, 2023 (22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time)
/“Have We Been Duped?”
by Fr. Dominic DeLay, O.P.
[This is the text composed by the homilist prior to delivering the homily.]
Peter, Petrus, Rock. He’s just been given this name by Jesus because of his profession of faith: You are the Messiah! But immediately the Rock becomes a big obstacle in Jesus’ road to Jerusalem.
We might have sympathy for Peter, who devotedly and discreetly takes Jesus aside and tells him he’ll protect him from suffering and death. But Jesus isn’t having it. It’s a bit like when our fear of suffering and powerlessness leads us to tell someone who is sick or in distress: Don’t worry – you’ll be okay.
If he were honest, Peter might rather echo Jeremiah’s words. As it’s often translated: Lord, you duped me. Jeremiah, an unwilling prophet, had been seduced into the prophetic vocation by God, who has allowed him, as a result of his preaching, to become not only a laughingstock, but also to be imprisoned in actual stocks. Likewise, Peter and the others hadn’t realized what they were getting into. This isn’t what Jesus had promised them! Was it?
Have you ever been duped by someone? Have you been duped by God? You know how when, at an infants’ baptism, parents and godparents are asked if they understand what they’re undertaking? “Yes” is the right answer to give, but they can hardly understand what they’re saying “yes” to, especially if this is their first child. Who knows what God will ask of their child? Or them? Mary and Joseph had no idea what God would ask.
On Thursday evening, we Dominican friars welcomed nine eager novices to our way of life, clothing them with the white habit as they set out on a new road to living out their baptismal vows. We promised them God’s mercy and ours, and boy will they need it by the end of this novice year. They’ll face challenges from without and within that they didn’t count on.
Yesterday, three friars who received the habit a year ago made their simple vows, their first or temporary vowed commitment to our way of life. They may think they’re now beyond being duped, but what surprises will life bring them in the coming years before they consider taking their solemn vows, their final or permanent commitment to our Dominican family?
Fr. John Paul Forté, Fr. Daniel Rolland, and I just celebrated the thirty-second anniversary of our first vows. What were we thinking thirty-two years ago when we said yes to this way of life?! I quickly discovered that my anxious ways had followed me and penetrated our semi-monastic enclosure. As I studied and matured, my bumbling efforts at expressing newfound ideals like feminism put my future as a Dominican in serious jeopardy more than once. In my twenties and thirties, I wondered if celibacy was really for me. In my forties, I was more comfortably beyond the desire to have a wife but felt the loss of not having children. In my forties and fifties, I painfully struggled with that pesky vow of obedience and had a hard time trusting others’ decisions about what my life’s work would be.
And what about you who are living out your baptism through marriage? There’s no doubt that sometimes you’ve felt duped, taken off guard by just how difficult such a relationship can be. You and your spouse become different people, arguments get repetitive, money issues try to divide you, you sometimes don’t know how to help your children, you or your spouse might be unfaithful, sickness and death make themselves known. No matter how long you’ve been married or how long I’ve been a Dominican, we still don’t fully understand what we’ve gotten ourselves into, do we? What’s still to come?
When we make our commitment to the Christian way of life, we know in our heads that consolation can be overwhelmed by the cross, but it’s pretty tough when we experience it. It’s tougher when we realize that taking up our cross isn’t about enduring the usual, natural sufferings of life – what we understandably call our crosses – but rather following right behind Jesus and proclaiming our faith through sacrificial and prophetic actions.
We have many opportunities to take up the cross and follow Jesus. I heard the other day about someone who passed up a promotion and quit because someone more deserving was passed over because of sexism. There are definitely some of you who have decided to give to your church and other charities to the point of really feeling it. You parents make prophetic sacrifices for your children. Some of you have welcomed homeless children or adults or refugees into your family. You proclaim Jesus through service and advocacy. You might have risked entering into dialogue with family, friends, fellow Christians, and others, genuinely seeking to learn why they believe things you think are dangerous to society or the church.
Jesus challenges us in today’s gospel to lose our lives for him. As St. Paul graphically puts it, “Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice.” Often our sacrifices yield rewards. How many times have you heard yourself or others say how much is gained from serving? But this isn’t always the case. It’s in taking up our cross that we discover what Jesus is really offering us: danger, yes, but also real life and love and power. We realize and accept and embrace that his promise to us isn’t to take away our humanity but to lead us right into the middle of it, where we find the peace we’ve finally stopped trying to grasp. When we clothed our new brothers with the habit the other night, our leader said to them, “Welcome to humanity.”
Our humanity is precisely where we meet Jesus. Our fears, anxieties, brokenness, and, yes, our sinfulness, transform from obstacles to pathways when, in quiet prayer, the kind of prayer when we simply stop fighting and watch the tumult, we experience that we are more than these vulnerabilities. We, with God, are the rock, a mountainous rock, and everything else is just weather.
At the novices’ welcome into the Dominican family on Thursday, one of the brothers who hasn’t yet made his final vows told me about how many wonderful things he’s been able to experience as a Dominican, things he hadn’t imagined when he made his first vows. This, by the way, is a young Chinese man who hasn’t seen his bewildered, non-Christian parents in China for four years due to travel restrictions.
I can’t recount all the blessings I’ve experienced as a Dominican, but they include lifelong friendship with my classmates Daniel and John Paul, encounters with so many good and holy people here and elsewhere, and that gift of contemplative prayer that sometimes gives me an experience, when God wants to give it to me, of who God and I really are and who we are for each other. Those of you who are married have experienced blessings you never imagined, such as the surprising depth of joy that comes with the birth of your children, and the birth of your children’s children.
Jeremiah admits to God that, despite his anger at God for duping him, he can’t deny the fire within him that compels him to continue to prophesy no matter the cost. Peter, after faltering in his commitment when Jesus was on the cross and needed him most, takes up his cross with such commitment that he is executed, on an actual cross.
What about us? We live out our baptism in our various ways and encounter challenges and joys beyond what we expected. Our challenges, in their own mysterious way, are themselves joys because they lead us to rely more fully on God. It turns out that we have not only been duped by God. We’ve been double-duped. Just when we think following Jesus means unexpected challenges, we discover, with the eyes of faith, that inside these challenges are joys beyond what we agreed to.
Let’s take up our cross again today and everyday, and follow Jesus into the fullness of life. May our Eucharistic prayer together and our reception of communion, ratified by our amens, be our re-commitment to our baptismal vows. We just might find that as we embrace Jesus in this way, he embraces us with his very life. Let the church say amen!
