Lord’s Day Reflection: The heart of the Christian message is Christ crucified

By Fr Edmund Power, OSB

In this year of grace 2024, the twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time falls on 15 September, the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows; yesterday, 14 September, was the Exaltation of the Holy Cross; and today, for the first time in Mark’s gospel, the inevitability of the Cross is proclaimed. This weekend, therefore, we have a blessed moment of concentration on the Paschal Mystery: the Exaltation looks towards the glory of new life; the sorrowing Virgin reminds us of the human cost; Jesus’s declaration to the multitude assures us that on the journey with Him to the fullness of life, the only reliable vehicle is the Cross.

While, in the words of Paul, Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom (1 Cor 1:22), the heart of the Christian message is Christ crucified. Yet even after two thousand years, the proclamation remains ambiguous and uncomfortable. The willing acceptance of suffering and death is possible only if a person has somehow interiorized the Paschal Mystery and therefore believes. Otherwise, it might smack of masochism or fatalism, a pathetic weakness or cowardice, a loss of nerve, an abrogation of human responsibility. Advising people to read their sufferings, or those of the people dear to them, as a manifestation of take up His cross, can create anger, cynicism and scorn. Some mystics have, apparently, sought suffering so as to identify with Christ’s passion. It seems unnecessary, however, because in this “vale of tears” suffering seeks and finds us. How we take it is what spiritually ennobles us.

Action and Passion seem to be opposites; to act and to submit, to be active and to be passive, might also be opposites. But is choosing to submit always cowardly? The challenge behind Jesus’s rebuke of Peter, Get behind me, Satan! For you are not on the side of God but of men, reminds us that the refusal to “re-act”, to match insult with vendetta, injustice with rage and the good fortune of others with envy, is what the side of God is about.

The song of the suffering servant that provides the first reading today is a reminder of the mentality of the side of men and the divine counter-logic that is difficult to grasp; in the words of Paul, a stumbling block … and folly … but to those who are called … Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.