Last week, we recalled the incredible profession of Faith made by St. Peter: “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God:” a moment of profound insight and profound belief in the identity of our Lord.  We have another scene today between St. Peter and Our Lord, another poignant moment of interaction between Christ and the leader of his apostles.  Christ has spent a lot of time with his disciples at this point.  He’s taught them a lot about God, about the world, and about themselves.  But now, he’s ready to get to the point, to the real reason he’s here.  And so he begins to introduce the disciples to the idea of his Passion and Death: he wants to begin preparing them for what must come: that he must suffer and he must die. Peter has a very understandable reaction.  “What?!!  How can that possibly be?  How can you be the one we believe you to be, if that’s how this is all going to end?”  The disciples don’t understand yet, and they won’t until it’s all over.  They won’t understand until the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost:  Christ was not the kind of savior they were expecting.  They were expecting and hoping for a strong, powerful leader who would overthrow corrupt human governments, take up his throne, and preside over an era of peace on earth.  They didn’t yet understand that the Messiah was in fact our God, the Eternal Son of the Father robed in the weak flesh of our humanity.  They didn’t yet understand that the Messiah would not sit upon an earthly throne, but would reign from the unlikely throne of the Cross.  That his leadership would be that of a good shepherd, who loves his sheep so much that he would lay down his life for them.  That his throne would be the only throne that could endure forever, even beyond the grave.  And so he is the greatest of kings.  The greatest of saviors.

Ours is a God who loves us so much that he refuses to remain distant, refuses to remain on the throne of his majesty in heaven, uncaring and aloof.  No.  He wants to be close to us.  He wants not only to live among us as one of us, but to share in our most profound joys and our most profound sorrows: and so he spends thirty years in everyday life, doing everyday activities, experiencing the ups and downs of everyday human life.  And he even desires to go through the most painful, frightening, and humbling experience of all, human death.  Even though he was all-powerful and completely exempt from any human corruption and death, he took these things upon himself anyway, so that he could be close to us, suffer with us, and destroy our suffering and death from the inside.  And so, all human suffering, all human pain, even human death itself has been transformed by the mystery of the Lord’s cross.  And so we are never alone.  Even in our darkest moments, God is with us.  He reaches his hand out to us, and he invites us to join our cross to his.  To offer up our own sufferings for our own needs and the many needs of those around us.  Our own crosses that we bear in life, especially the heavy ones, can be filled with meaning: if we unite them to the cross of our Lord.  As St. Paul says, we can offer ourselves as a living sacrifice to God.  And so we are reminded today that the difficulties we encounter in life, are not meaningless.  They can contribute to our growth in holiness; they can be a source of grace for ourselves, our families, and even our enemies and persecutors, whose hearts might just be converted by our witness and by the great grace poured down to earth in answer to our prayers and sacrifices.  And God promises us, that if we unite our crosses to his, that those crosses will never have the last word.  That every cross will eventually, perhaps not until heaven, but eventually will be transformed into a resurrection.

Today Peter is confused because he’s thinking as human beings do, because he can’t see how the Cross, suffering, self-sacrifice, could possibly be good in any way.  We ourselves live in a world which values comfort above all things, and which is confused by the fact that Christians still put a cross, an icon of discomfort and sacrifice, at the center of our lives.  Unlike Peter, we have the benefit of perspective, of knowing the whole story; we have the comfort of the sure knowledge of the Resurrection and Christ’s victory over death; and we have the gift of Holy Spirit working in our hearts and pouring God’s love into our lives through the sacraments.  Faith enables us to see and realize that without sacrifice the soul encounters no true joy and no lasting peace.  The path to holiness passes through the Cross, and if we want to rise with Christ, then we accompany him on his journey through the Cross.  We do this by accepting life’s trials and tribulations with calmness and with serenity.  By making little sacrifices each and every day.  By trying to make life pleasant for others.  By yielding cheerfully to others in matters of personal preference.  Christ reigns as King from a glorious throne: a throne which is more powerful, more enduring, more saving, and more peacemaking than any human throne could ever be.  And his kingdom will last forever.  Let us join ourselves to him in all of our prayers, works, joys and sufferings: so that one day, with him, we may reign forever in Heaven.