Homily From the 10th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

“Does God really care?”  That’s one of the first questions that we can begin to ask when things start to get really bad.  It’s easy to recognize your blessings when things are going really well, but when they turn south, we start to wonder where God is.  And if we think of God as an impersonal being, it can easily lead us to that question.  “Does God really care?”

In our first reading today, Jesus is travelling, and he approaches a funeral procession in the city of Nain.  In ancient times, funerals were a lot more public than they are today.  Large crowds would gather and carry the body of the deceased person out to the cemetery outside the city walls.  Funerals are always pretty sad occasions, but especially in the case we have in the Gospel.  This was the funeral of a young man, who was the only son of his mother, who herself was a widow.  Basically, he was all that she had.  She had nothing else left.  And so when they buried him, she would have nothing else left to live for.  She was basically walking to the place where she would give away the last thing meaningful to her life.

And so in the story, Jesus has compassion on her.  That English word compassion is nice, and from it’s Latin roots, it literally means to suffer with, which is what Christ is doing.  But the Greek word that is used in this case means something so much more.  It means that his sorrow was so deep for her that it wells up from his deepest being – the Greek word says from his bowels.  Think about the pit in your stomach as you watch a really sad movie or the last episode in the 6^th season of LOST.  Jesus has sorrow for her.

So he tries to tell her, “Don’t cry,” but it falls on her as empty words.  He is trying to be there for her, to say something comforting, but she doesn’t feel the connection.  After all, she is going to bury her son.  So he decides to go deeper into her sorrow and tells the young man, “Arise.”  And of course, the miracle happens as we hear; he is risen.  But he is not just resurrected and brought back to life, but he is restored as a son, as the Gospel tells us Jesus “gave him to his mother.”  In some ways, I think the miracle focused on here is not so much the miracle of the raising of this young man, but the miracle with the mother.  The miracle is performed for her because Jesus deeply cares about her suffering, and through it, she again finds meaning for her life.

The same is true for us.  When we are suffering, Jesus does speak to us to offer words of comfort and peace.  I mean, he left us 73 books worth of it!  But sometimes, as genuine as those words are, and as loving as they are, they fall on us as empty words.  Christ calls us deeper though.  He calls us to open ourselves to receive his comfort personally.

In a lot of European churches, you’ll find a lot of altars decorated with paintings of the crucifixion, and other scenes from the Lord’s passion and death, and most of the time, they are portrayed with a lot of realism.  His wounds are bleeding, his face is contorted in pain, Mary and the soldiers are waiting there at the foot of the cross.  But sometimes, you’ll look at those paintings and find something that isn’t quite so realistic.  For example, in the background of the scene, instead of showing Jerusalem or Judea or whatever, you’ll find Ravenna or the port of London or something.  And then, mixed in with the soldiers and the disciples, you’ll find someone dressed like he’s at a Renaissance festival or wearing armor from the Middle Ages.  What the heck happened?  It’s actually pretty simple; the family who paid for the painting asked the artist to put them in the scene, painting them into the suffering and death of Jesus.  I guess that would be easy to see as self-promotion or advertizing.  Good thing we don’t have that anymore, or we’d find someone like Ray Vinson painted on the walls here!  In reality though, this has deep and rich symbolism.  Jesus really did suffer with us and for us.  He feels sorrow for us when we suffer, even from the depths of his soul.  We need to know that we never suffer alone, and we can always turn to him in our dark moments to find him right there, linking his cross to ours.  We can paint ourselves into Christ’s sufferings even now – not through artists or artisans, but through prayer and faith.  We can enter into Christ’s sufferings because he entered first into ours, so that we would never suffer alone.

So does God really care about us?  Yes.  God hears us and cares about us.  As the Gospel says, “God has visited his people” here in the Eucharist, the great mystery that we celebrated last weekend for Corpus Christi, and the great mystery that we will celebrate now.  May we open our hearts to his compassion and his grace working to bring us meaning and fulfillment in our lives.

The Holy Apostles: St. John

St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City

The next apostle up on our list is St. John, the brother of last week’s saint, St. James the Greater.  St. John is an Evangelist, literally from Greek a “giver of good news”.  Multiple early Church Fathers support the claim that St. John was the author of the 4^th gospel, the Gospel of John (hence the name?), written before 95 AD.

John’s gospel is the same story as the others, obviously, but goes about recounting it in a very different way.  It is a much more reflective, symbolic, and theological approach.  In the eastern Churches, this gives him the name St. John the Theologian.  In some ways, he seems to presuppose things already in the other gospels.  For example, in John’s gospel, Jesus never says the words “This is my body” or “This is my blood.”  Instead, John presupposes that and focuses on the meaning of the Eucharist – service (washing of the feet) and sacrifice (blood flowing from Jesus’ side on the Cross).

Anyway, in his own gospel, John refers to himself as the “beloved disciple”.  He defines himself not by his own achievements, but by his relationship to Jesus.  He is one of the core group of disciples, but had a special place in Jesus’ heart.  We hear that he rested his head on Jesus’ breast at the Last Supper, and that he was the only apostle not to abandon Jesus.  With Peter, he is the first to receive news of the Resurrection and go to the tomb, and we hear that “he saw, and believed.”

One of the greatest priviledges that St. John was entrusted with was the care of Jesus’ mother – “Woman, behold your son.  Behold your mother.”  The tradition is that he cared for her in Jerusalem, and later in Ephesus in present-day Turkey.  In fact, an ancient house in Ephesus is still commemorated as the home of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Coptic Icon of St. John on the island of Patmos

You might recall from last week that it was John, along with his brother James, who had inquired about being seated at Jesus’ side, and that he would indeed drink the cup of suffering.  John wasn’t martyred like his brother, but he experienced suffering in a different way.  He supervised and governed the Church in Asia Minor (Turkey), and when persecutions broke out under the Emperor Domitian, was taken to Rome and boiled in oil!  Or at least they tried, to boil him in oil, but nothing happened!  He walked out of it, and the legend says that all the spectators in the Colosseum who witnessed the miracle were instantly converted.  I suppose I would be too if I just saw some guy walk out of a vat of boiling oil!

St. John was exiled to the island of Patmos, where he wrote the Book of Revelation, before returning to Ephesus, where his earthly life came to an end.  For 900 years, the Basilica of St. John stood over his tomb, until it was destroyed by invading armies.

St. John was indeed the “beloved disciple,” and it is said that his parishioners grew tired of his sermons, because they relentlessly emphasized the need to “love one another.”  But truly, we can see the courage and zeal that comes from a heart that knows God’s love for itself and gives entirely out of love for others.  Do we know that love for ourselves?  How do we live it?  May St. John inspire us and pray for us, so that we too can claim our identity as beloved disciples!

Homily From Corpus Christi

So a funny thing happened the other day.  I was working on this homily, and for some unknown reason, I decided to check my e-mail.  I saw one from Zenit, which is the Vatican news agency, which had a homily written by Pope Francis.  So I’m reading through this homily, when I have the sudden realization that the diocese of Rome celebrates today’s feast, Corpus Christi, on the Thursday following Trinity Sunday – which was last Sunday.  So that means that the homily I was reading was actually for Corpus Christi!  So I did my happy dance and proceeded to copy it down and read it to you today.  Not really, but Pope Francis brought up three words that guided his homily, and those are the three that I will allow myself to be guided by today: discipleship, communion, and sharing.  There, now you have a checklist to follow so you know how soon I’ll be finished.

The first theme is discipleship.  And if we think about the miracle in our Gospel today, maybe we should ask first, who is it that he’s giving this miracle to?   He’s giving it to the multitude, to the thousands who had been following him.  These aren’t like Cardinal fans who packed everything in their cars and drove 4 hours to watch the Cards play the Royals in Kansas City.  These are disciples.  They have given their entire lives over to Jesus – all they had was what they had on them.  They were totally dependent on Christ, all because they wanted to listen to what he had to say.  Today, we are the crowds following Jesus.  We come here to hear his Word and to receive his nourishment at the altar.  And I think the question we can ask ourselves today is “How do I follow Christ?”  What have I given up to follow him.  Obviously part of that answer is your time, which is why you’re here!  But what about when that time isn’t as convenient?  Or what about when it’s not something that we really want to give up?  What is Christ still calling me to give of myself to follow him.  Ok, so now I really will steal from Pope Francis.  He said the other day that “Jesus speaks in silence in the mystery of the Eucharsit, and each time reminds us that following him means coming out of ourselves and making our life not our own, but a gift to him and to others.

The Eucharist has so many different names that we use to refer to it.  Obviously one of them is the “Eucharist”, meaning that action of thanksgiving to God.  But there’s also “The Lord’s Supper,” “the Breaking of the Bread,” “the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass,” and in the eastern churches, it is called the “Holy and Divine Liturgy”.  Probably one of the most appropriate names for today is “Holy Communion.”  Think back to the miracle of the feeding of the multitude.  Whenever Jesus performs miracles, he’s doing it to solve a problem or fix something.  A person is possessed, so he exorcises them.  A person is blind, so he heals them.  In this case, the problem isn’t a personal thing, it’s a multitude – they are hungry!  What’s the disciples’ solution?  Dismiss them!  Everyone for himself!  Let them handle it on their own!  How often is that our solution as well, that we cast people aside to let them solve their own problems.  But what is Jesus’ solution?  He tells them to bring what they have, and uses it to provide for all – both their physical hunger and their inner longing for fulfillment.  All of them are satisfied.

That is communion.  Communion isn’t our coming together for one idea or purpose.  With all the storms Friday, there was a lot of damage, but there was also an outpouring of help!  People were helping others out so that things could get back on track, so that traffic could get moving, and so that things would be the way that they were before.  That’s great!  That’s real service!  That’s solidarity!  But it’s not necessarily communion.  Solidarity isn’t communion until you add love in the mix.  Communion isn’t the coming together of people around an idea, it’s coming together around a person, Jesus Christ, who is love.

One of the greatest things the Eucharist can teach us is generosity.  It teaches us to give freely.  Think about the miracle in the Gospel.  When all was said and done, the disciples didn’t send everyone a bill!  The Eucharist is a gift.  It is the gift of the disciples as they pooled what little they had, which was clearly insufficient.  But it is the gift of Christ as well, as he consecrated the bread and fish, as few as they were, to make them sufficient and satisfying to the crowd.  Even today, the Eucharist is our gift, as we present bread and wine and our prayers, but it is Christ’s gift above all, as he consecrates them to give us life, peace, and satisfaction.

The Eucharist is an invitation to give as well.  In our first reading, we have this story of Abraham and Melchizedek.  Tradition has interpreted Melchizedek as a prefigurement of Jesus, as he brings bread and wine.  What is Abraham’s response?  Prior to the reading, he had just conquered an army from Sodom, recovered all his stolen possessions, and rescued his cousin.  He had everything back to what was comfortable for him.  And what did he do?  He gave a tenth of it to this unknown priest!  Not because he liked Melchizedek or because he owed it to him, but out of gratitude and generosity of God.  For me, it’s tough to talk about tithing from the pulpit.  I feel like I’m just asking for money for ourselves so that we can pay our staff, keep the church pretty, and keep the lights on.  It doesn’t seem fair.  It’s dependent on pure generosity.  And in our contemporary culture, we see giving in a commercial way – I give something, and you give me something back.  But the reality is, tithing isn’t filling out your envelopes or dropping in the basket because we owe anything.  It really is about pure generosity, because that’s what communion is.  Pope Francis said, “In the Eucharist, the Lord makes us travel his path – that of service, of sharing, of gift, and what little we have, what little we are, if shared, becomes wealth, because the power of God, which is that of love, descends into our poverty to transform it.

Brothers and sisters, today, the Eucharist calls us to think about discipleship, communion, and generosity.  Let us pray for the grace to give to Christ more freely, to follow Christ more closely, and to live in Christ more deeply.

The Holy Apostles: St. James the Greater

As we move on to the next of our apostles, we focus on St. James the Greater.  He is usually called “the Greater” to distinguish him from the other St. James among the apostles.  He was the son of Zebedee and the brother of St. John, and in fact, they were all together on the seashore when Jesus called James and John to follow him.  St. James was part of the core group of the apostles, along with St. Peter and St. John, and was one of the few chosen to witness the Transfiguration.

The most noteworthy occasion where St. James finds his name in the Gospels (which incidentally we just heard this past week at daily Mass!) was when he had the…ahem… *boldness* to request that he and his brother would stand at Jesus’ left and right in the Kingdom of Heaven.  Jesus asked them, “Can you drink the chalice that I drink?”  Now remember, this is the same chalice that Jesus asked would pass from him at Gethsemane before the Passion – the chalice of suffering.  Confidently, James said he could!  What a great and zealous faith!  And of course, Jesus assured him that he would indeed share in that chalice.

Moving forward, according to tradition, St. James travelled to Spain to preach the Gospel after the Ascension.  He may have been having a pretty tough time doing so (maybe he didn’t pay attention to his Spanish classes, although I guess Spanish didn’t exist yet).  Near present day Zarazoga, he had a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary on a pillar where she encouraged him and assured him that his efforts would not be in vain.  Inspired, James returned to Judea, which speaking of that chalice…

James would drink the chalice of suffering, as he was the first of the apostles to share it and the glory that Christ promised along with it.  The Acts of the Apostles relates that Herod Agrippa, the nephew of the Herod who had questioned Jesus, “killed James, the brother of John, with the sword.” (Acts 12:1-2)

Supposedly, after his martyrdom, his body was claimed by his loving followers and returned to Spain, where he was buried at the site of the great Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.  For over 1000 years, pilgrims have travelled to the cathedral to venerate St. James’ relics via the Way of St. James.  There are several points of origin on this pilgrimage, but the Way of St. James is a minimum of 100 km, and has become one of the greatest Christian pilgrimages.  In fact, the 2010 World Cup winners from Spain dedicated their win to St. James, and several of the players made the Way of St. James in gratitude!

Ultimately, I think the example of St. James invites us to think about how willing we are to drink the chalice of suffering offered to us by Christ.  The Way of St. James can be an analogy for us in that sense.  The journey of discipleship is long and hard, and we have to be sure we prepare ourselves well during this life.  But after the suffering of the journey, we arrive at the fullness of joy at the end of the pilgrimage.  For the Way of St. James, it’s the glorious cathedral and relics; for our pilgrimage of faith, it is the joy of heaven.  Are we willing to drink the chalice of suffering in order to attain the overflowing chalice of joy?

Homily From the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

Yes! THIS is how you do it!

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  One of the first things that parents teach their kids about their faith is how to do the Sign of the Cross.  You see mom grab their hands and dip it in the holy water, and then trace the Sign of the Cross as the kid either whines and refuses to be coerced, or proudly shows what they learned.  The funny thing is that over time, we get a little sloppy with it.  For example, when I was in preschool, I did what my parents called the “Sign of the Circle” where I would simply trace the circle over my body.  Even as adults, we can fly through the Sign of the Cross without thinking about it.  We sometimes act like we’re trying to set a speed record if we’re praying in public over our food.  Or the other good one is that we can make one big word out of it – “FatherSonHolySpert”.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  How many times do we say that without thinking about it?  I think today, of all the days of the year, is the day where we should think about it.  Sometimes it’s easy to think about God as some kind of weird blob of unity.  When we hear the phrase “God is love,” we just think, “Oh, you know, like the idea of love.”  It’s just some sort of huge unintelligible thing that has this Jesus guy to help it out and sends this weird Spirit thing to make sure we do things the right way.  Maybe that’s where the Sign of the Circle comes in.  It’s just…blah…

But today, we don’t celebrate a God that is an ambiguity; today we celebrate a God that is a Trinity – three divine Persons and one divine Godhead.  Christians don’t worship three distinct Gods, but one single being that is threefold, yet remains one.  Jesus teaches us that they are distinct, even as he prays in today’s Gospel.  He speaks about his “Father in heaven,” but he prays that He would send us the “Spirit of truth,” who is the love of the Father and the Son.  One of the most commonly used symbols for the Trinity is the triangle.  For all you mathematically minded people out there, we’ll use an equilateral triangle.  It’s one shape, one triangle, but it has three distinct sides – equal in length, equal in quality, but distinct.  Without one, it’s just an angle, but when they are bound together, it forms a triangle.  In the same way, God is one, but He is three distinct divine persons.  One is not greater than the other, nor one more powerful than the other, but each is essential.  So when we pray the Sign of the Cross, we are invited to think about each of those persons individually.  Not as a circle, and not as one single word foreign to the English language – FatherSonHolySpert – but as three distinct persons in that sign of the Cross.  We mark ourselves with that, mindful of the way that each, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, have brought us to this place and are with us.

Now I know what you’re thinking – who really cares?  To our modern, practical, “1+1=2” mind, this all seems too theoretical.  We don’t really care for the theological distinctions.  We might think that nobody really cares what our Sign of the Cross looks like – the important thing is that God loves me.  But it’s important to remember that we didn’t get here on our own.  In ages past, the Church defended these truths with her blood.  In the first part of Church history, our biggest enemy was the Roman Empire, which tried for three hundred years to extinguish the faith with wave after wave of persecution.  But when the persecutions died down, eventually Catholicism became the Empire’s most dominant religion.  And when that happened, our biggest enemy changed.  Isntead of coming from outside the Church, it came from inside – it was called heresy.  That’s a word that we probably don’t think about much today, but it’s something that is incredibly divisive.  The Devil loves this stuff – it’s like his favorite pastime.  We like baseball; he likes perverting our Trinitarian understandings with heresy.  To each his own.  But it was during this time that the first and most important councils of our Church took place.  We had to defend and clarify the most basic tenets of our faith, which even now we profess in the Creed.  The early Church instinctively recognized something that today we rarely even think about: if our idea of God is wrong, then our idea of how to follow God and bring God to others will also be wrong.  And so a whole generation of saints battled heresy to keep the Catholic idea of God pure.

St. Athanasius at the Council of Nicea, literally stomping out heresy
http://st-takla.org

One of those saints was St. Athanasius, the 4^th century bishop of Alexandria in Egypt.  He fought against the Arian heresy, which denied Christ’s divinity, and threatened to tear the Son out of the Trinity.  This heresy tore at the heart of the Church for more than 100 years, and at some points, the majority of the world bought into it.  But St. Athanasius was the anchor that supported the Church and held the faith in place.  He suffered for it.  He was imprisoned, slandered, framed, and even exiled five times.  I mean, how do you get exiled five times.  He probably had a good relationship with U-Haul.  But he had to hide in the desert to escape from being murdered.  And he did all that so that the Sign of the Cross and the words that we profess with it would have the meaning to us that it does today.  He endured all of it to keep intact these “subtle theological distinctions” that the Church reminds us of today.

So why am I telling you this?  So you can all go read St. Athanasius’ sermons or St. Augustine’s treatise De Trinitate?  So that we can understand the Trinity perfectly?  So that we can all learn to do the dang Sign of the Cross right, and heal me of that wound of knowing that the Sign of the Circle was like a childhood heresy?  No.  Ok, maybe a little.  The Trinity is a mystery.  This is not a nice way of saying that we will never understand it.  It’s not something that we are too stupid to comprehend.  A mystery, above all, is an invitation – to participate, and to imitate.  When we see something about it, whether the unity of a diverse parish around a family suffering loss or the defense of the truth, that mystery draws us closer and calls us deeper into itself, so that we can embrace that mystery of the Trinity more fully – and it embrace us.  Thinking or talking about the Trinity isn’t just for theologians or priests.  It is for all of us, so that we can see the ways that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit work in our lives.  So let us pray together with the whole Church – those gathered here today, those in our parish, and all throughout the world as we pray, “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.  Amen.”

The Holy Apostles: St. Andrew

Statue of St. Andrew
St. Peter’s Basilica
Vatican City

So what do we know about St. Andrew?  Umm…I guess he’s patron saint of Scotland, and therefore patron saint of golf?  Hence, we get the famous St. Andrew’s Golf Course.  What else?  Maybe he’s the patron saint of cheap movies?  Hence, the dollar show at St. Andrew’s cinema?

The point is that there’s not much we know about him.  We do know that he was the brother of Simon Peter.  I guess he’s kind of like Shelley Duncan, the brother of former Cardinal outfielder Chris Duncan.  Shelley is a great player in his own right for the Tampa Bay Rays (ok, maybe not a “great” player), but to St. Louisans, he will forever be known as Chris Duncan’s brother and Dave Duncan’s son.

But St. Andrew was actually pretty important among the apostles.  There are two versions of his call.  The first from the Gospel of Matthew, is that he was fishing with his brother Simon Peter when Jesus called them to be fishers of men.  In the Gospel of John, however, he was a disciple of St. John the Baptist, and when St. John pointed out Jesus as the “Lamb of God,” St. Andrew knew that Jesus was worth following.  He asked Jesus, “Rabbi, where are you staying?”  And Jesus responded in that beautiful and teasing invitation, “Come and see.”

What about after the Ascension?  Now we’re getting into some fuzzy area.  Various church historians like Origen and Eusebius of Caesarea tell us that St. Andrew preached his way to north of the Black Sea, through modern-day Russia and Ukraine.  He then went across to Byzantium, modern-day Constantinople/Istanbul, and over to Macedonia and Greece.

The Martyrdom of St. Andrew
By Bartolomé Esteban Perez Murillo

One common point of agreement is that St. Andrew was crucified in Patras, Greece.  The non-canonical Acts of Andrew tells us that he was tied, not nailed to the cross, and remained there for two days, preaching and converting those who listened to him, until he finally gave up his spirit.  Legends have it that St. Andrew asked to be crucified in a different way than Jesus out of respect, and was tied to an X-shaped cross, which to this day, is called a St. Andrew Cross.  In 1964, in an outreach to our Greek Orthodox brothers and sisters, Pope Paul VI returned the relics of St. Andrew from the Vatican to the Basilica of St. Andrew in Patras, Greece, where we can still see them today.

So back to the original question, what do we know about St. Andrew?  Not much at all.  The Gospels give us little about his holiness.  But he was an apostle, and that is enough.  He was called personally to “come and see”, and then to proclaim the Good News, sharing in Jesus’ life and ultimately, his death.  Holiness today is no different.  It’s a call to be a follower, to “come and see.”  Let’s pray for the intercession of St. Andrew today, that we would respond to that invitation, and then spread that message of hope with our lives.

The Holy Apostles: St. Peter

Statue of St. Peter in St. Peter’s Square, Vatican City

So I feel like we’re at a bit of a crossroads.  I’ve talked us through all the prayers of the Mass, and we’ve just finished looking extensively at the heart of the Mass, the Eucharistic Prayers (I, II, and III).  So I figured the next step would be to talk about the saints, starting with the apostles!  We probably feel we know a lot about them from scripture, but are you aware of the wider traditions associated with them after Jesus?

Who better to start with than Peter, the first pope and Prince of the Apostles?  Originally, he was “Simon”, until Jesus changes his name, which is actually a pretty big deal!  In the Bible, only God has the authority to change names – like Abram to Abraham, Jacob to Israel, and so on.  So Jesus tells Simon, “You are Peter, and upon this rock, I will build my church.”  Jesus is pretty witty, actually, because Petrus (Latin) and Petros (Greek) actually mean “rock”!  As the first pope, Peter really is the rock – the unifier on which Jesus lays the stones of the Church.  He is usually pictured with keys, signifying that binding and loosing power that Jesus with the Church.

Now one of my pet peeves is when people, especially priests, make fun of Peter.  We always joke that he was impulsive and dumb, never seeming to get what Jesus was saying.  And those things are true, I guess.  But St. Peter is an incredibly brave example of faith!  After the Resurrection, he preached in Jerusalem for a long time, and was the first apostle to perform miracles in Jesus’ name.  He then journeyed to some of the major pagan cities of the age including Antioch and Corinth, and then of course, Rome.

We know that St. Peter died in Rome in 64 AD under the Emperor Nero, and we know that he was martyred for his faith, as all the early Fathers of the Church attest.  The legend is that he considered himself unworthy to die in the same manner as Christ, and so he asked to be crucified upside down.  It might be easy to think that Peter’s story is all legend, but excavations under the present day St. Peter’s Basilica on the Vatican Hill have identified his ancient tomb, which was venerated even from the earliest days of the Church.

“Domine Quo Vadis”
By Annibale Carracci

One of the most touching stories of Peter coming from our wider tradition is from the non-canonical Acts of Peter.  It isn’t an official book of the Bible or anything, but it is an interesting and moving story.  In this story, Peter is fleeing crucifixion in Rome, and as he’s on his way out of the city, probably listening to his iPod or something to pass the time, who does he come across but Jesus!  The risen Christ is carrying a large cross and heading the other way towards the city.  And Peter, shocked, asks that famous question, “Quo vadis?”  “Where are you going?”  Jesus smiles and answers, “I am going to Rome to be crucified again.”  At this point, Peter gains the courage to bravely continue his ministry in Rome and is eventually martyred.

Even after the Ascension, Jesus doesn’t just leave us behind.  Like Peter, he has commissioned us to do great things, but also like Peter, we are weak.  Christ assures us that we don’t offer ourselves alone.  We walk with Christ, we offer ourselves with Christ, and we suffer with Christ.  He is with us every step of the way, especially the tough steps.  So take courage from the example of St. Peter, and let’s all strive to build on the firm foundations that he and his successors are for the Church!