One
year at Notre Dame’s baccalaureate Mass, I ended up being the person tasked
with purifying the vessels. As I was purifying the main, celebrant's chalice, I
noticed whose it was. It was Fr. Sorin’s
chalice, the chalice of the priest who my community’s founder had sent on the
arduous trip across the ocean from France to the mission territory of Indiana to
found a school. It wasn’t the chalice he’d
received at his ordination, but one he’d been given on one of his ordination anniversaries
by a benefactor. The precious metal
alone must have been worth a pretty penny, the craftsmanship and artistry more,
and the history behind it probably made it the most expensive thing I’d ever
held, and certainly the most expensive thing I’d ever swilled water around in
and drunk out of. The most expensive
thing I’d ever held, but not the most valuable: for a little while before I’d
embraced fellow Christians, fellow humans in the sign of peace, and a shortly
after that I’d held the body of my Lord briefly in my hand, before consuming
it. “What could we give in exchange for
our life, or the life of anyone?” Jesus
asks. Nothing, we could give nothing so
valuable as a life. What would he give
for our life? Everything. He would give his clothing, his blood, his
body, his very life, to lead us into eternal life.
But…
back to that chalice: I was moved by the
moment of connection with my long deceased brother in community as I purified
it, but I was also impressed and pleased with my university that this chalice
got used, at least once a year, I guess, and didn’t just sit in a display
cabinet somewhere. I remember being
saddened once when I visited a museum of historically important musical
instruments and discovered that none of them ever got played. And I understand the motivation, I understand
the logic behind wanting to protect them, but instruments were meant to be
played, chalices to prayed with, and humans: we were made to love and serve and
worship our God above all things, and love and serve our neighbor for His sake.
To
give a more prosaic example, I think of the character Lumière in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, the talking
candlestick butler who had not waited on table for all the years the prince had
been transformed into a beast (OK, maybe ‘prosaic’ was the wrong word for this
example…). At one point, he sings: “Life
is so unnerving, for a servant who’s not serving. You’re not whole without a soul to wait upon.” Christ has a banquet prepared for us and
longs to wait on us. But first, he must
lead us to the feast.
And
Peter doesn’t want that. Peter wants to
keep Christ in his display case. He
doesn’t want to risk him getting chipped.
He wants him to be a servant who’s not serving, an instrument never
played for fear of breaking a string. He
wants to preserve the moment of loving approval he’s just experienced, when he
confessed Jesus as Son of God and Messiah and was called blessed and called
rock. He is rock, by God’s gift; but by
his own thinking, he’s stumbling block.
He wants Christ to love what’s good about him, and about each of us, to
praise what we’re right about, what we do well.
But he can’t accept that Christ loves us totally, utterly, loves the
parts of us we’d rather hide, loves the unlovely parts, loves what stands in
the most need of healing: our fears, our insecurities, our pride, our wounds,
our sin-sick soul. He loves our sinners’
hands enough to let those hands drive nails through his holy sinless
hands. He loves us enough to die at our
hands and then return from the dead to show that his love is more powerful than
sin, more powerful than death. And then
he’ll lead us, to follow him, not evading the sin and suffering that infects
our world, but to pass through it, to transcend it, to follow him on the only
path to eternal life.
Even
his insult to Peter contains that invitation.
He calls him Satan and we can’t take the sting out of that insult,
because what Peter suggests is demonic: he suggests that Jesus should love us
less, Jesus should let sin have its sway and shirk suffering, shirk the cross,
let Satan have his kingdom. So, Jesus
calls Peter Satan. But he doesn’t say, “get
away from me, Satan.” He says “get behind me.” Come, follow
me. He tells Peter to stop putting
himself first and insisting on his own ideas about how the Son of God should
love. Jesus will not let Peter put
himself first, because then Peter would be first in the line of fire, and Jesus
loves him too much for that. No, “get behind me,” he says. Put Jesus first, shield yourself behind Jesus
and follow in his footsteps.
To accept
this invitation to not be first is to deny ourselves. And we know the path he will lead us on will
not be easy, because we disciples should expect to fare no different than our
master. And we know we’ll stray from it,
because demonic thinking has infected us, we do let the logic of
self-protection trump the law of love, we do sometimes hear the sting of rebuke
from Jesus, if we listen carefully. But
in that rebuke is invitation. It’s what
St. Paul calls the renewing of our minds, that our whole lives might be
worship, might be self-gift, might be living sacrifice. And in that sacrifice, we’re letting the fire
God planted in our heart burn bright, refusing to be wearied by holding it
in. We’re letting Jesus lead us into
love.
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