A homily for the Twenty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 22, 2021
Jos 24:1-2a, 15-17, 18b, Eph 5:21-32 or 5:2a, 25-32, Jn 6:60-69
As we break open today’s Gospel, we can be tempted to consider The Rock’s reply to Jesus’s question to be rhetorical:
“Master, to whom shall we go?
You have the words of eternal life.
We have come to believe
and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.”
To whom, indeed.
The answer seems to be such a “Well, yeah, of course,” quip that it does seem rhetorical.
But this was a make-or-break situation for Simon Peter and the rest of The Twelve. There was nothing rhetorical about their reply.
All around them, people who supposedly were followers of Christ were ditching him right and left because of what he was preaching. Find dignity in every human being, whether man, woman or child? Love your enemies? Share the wealth?? And what’s this thing about you being some sort of magical loaf of challah?
Whoa.
Too hard to do. Too much to give up. No ROI. The old God or gods — or no gods at all — were much less demanding. And the weird stuff they said wasn’t that weird.
Yeah, let’s renew our membership in that club instead. I even remember the secret handshake.
So The Twelve had to have felt at least some sort of tug from the unbelievers and the disbelievers. The Apostles were just as human as the folks abandoning Jesus. They could have followed the crowd; peer pressure and all that. They too were at a fork in the road, or they would be at some point like this, or maybe they already had been.
Did they abandon Jesus? Did they stick with him out of habit? Did they ponder all their options and pick the best one?
As the poet Robert Frost wrote in 1916
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Simon Peter and the Apostles chose the Way of Jesus, the Law of Love, the trail of God’s true peace that Christ was blazing through the gloomy wilderness of human souls. They probably already knew it was a harder path; they had been traveling with their rabbi and knew what he was preaching. They likely understood it was a road less traveled, at least until the Carpenter from Nazareth showed up.
They — like everyone who is truly, vitally alive — actively and thoughtfully made a choice, acted upon it, and followed through to its conclusion.
For Jesus, the conclusion was Calvary and the Resurrection. For the Apostles, their individual conclusions varied, but their collective conclusion was the spreading of the Good News and, eventually, the creation of what we have come to know as Western Civilization.
Because they believed.
That has made all the difference.
Not too shabby.
Every time we say “Credo” — “I believe” — do we mutter it because it’s the next line in the script, the next prayer in the liturgy?
Or do we proclaim “I believe” from the very core of our being?
Do we say “Yes, I will go out and work in the fields” the way the first son in the parable did, and then go our merry way instead?
Or do we think about what it means to say yes, and be realistic about how we answer?
It’s all about God’s gift of free will to humanity.
It’s all about choice.
It’s about choosing to believe, choosing what to believe and choosing how to believe.
It’s all about pondering, calculating, comparing, analyzing, selecting from all the options, and then committing.
To believe. To fully embrace those beliefs. To act upon those beliefs.
Agreement without action is worthless. (And nodding your head doesn’t count as action.)
Action without commitment is, at best, a disappointment. Halfhearted doesn’t cut it in the grand scheme of things.
Peter and The Twelve stuck around not because they’d grown accustomed to Jesus’s face or because the Christ and his ministry were the latest shiny thing.
Peter and The Twelve committed their time, their actions, their energies and their very lives to Jesus and the Lord’s mission on Earth because they believed from the core of their beings, and they committed themselves to continue that mission.
Now, today, as descendants of The Twelve, each of us is called to commit. Can we do any less?
Christ’s mission on Earth continues. Jesus has the words of eternal life, and there is no one else to whom we can go.
