18th Week in Ordinary Time, Thursday

Reading: Jeremiah 31:31-34; Matthew 16:13-23

God says through the prophet Jeremiah:
“I will place my law within them, 
and write it upon their hearts…. 
No longer will they have need 
to teach their friends and relatives
how to know the LORD.”
While this may not be entirely good news
for those of us who teach theology,
which in its better moments
seeks to help people see how to know the Lord,
it does seem to be good news for humanity as a whole.
It is good news that we will no longer experience God’s law 
as something external to us,
something alien and imposed upon us,
for that means that we will know God, as Augustine put it,
as interior intimo meo: closer to me than I am to myself.
And, as St. John Vianney said, 
“This union of God with a tiny creature is a lovely thing. 
It is a happiness beyond understanding.”

And what Jeremiah proclaims as coming,
our Gospel suggests has already arrived.
For when Peter confesses Jesus to be
“the Christ, the Son of the living God,”
Jesus proclaims, “flesh and blood 
has not revealed this to you, 
but my heavenly Father.”
Peter did not learn how to know the Lord
from friends or relatives 
or those who thought Jesus might be
John the Baptist or Elijah or Jeremiah 
or one of the prophets.
The Father himself revealed Jesus to Peter
within the depths of his heart;
the Spirit, who is the new Law of the Gospel,
was written on Peter’s heart through faith.
The days that are coming
seem to have arrived.

But, of course, Peter’s faith is yet imperfect.
He still thinks not as God does
but as human beings do.
For he cannot accept that Jesus must walk
the path of rejection and suffering and death.
But this is the heart of God’s new covenant,
and to reject it is to become 
not the rock upon which Christ 
would build God’s Church,
but the stone of stumbling,
the obstacle that must be left behind.
What Peter could not accept,
what we so often cannot accept,
is that while God has promised 
to write his Law upon our hearts,
the instrument with which he does this writing
is the cross.

To have faith is to embrace the cross,
the cross upon which Jesus bore our sins,
and the crosses that we are called to take up,
the crosses through which we come, over time,
to be conformed to the one 
who laid down his life in love for us.
God’s promise is 
that “all, from least to greatest, 
shall know…the LORD.”
But to know the Lord is to know his cross.
Therefore, each of us, from least to greatest,
is called to take up our cross
so that God’s law, God’s Spirit,
might be written in our hearts.
And this is happiness beyond understanding.