The liturgy divides a gospel passage into two chunks that should be read together. Last Sunday we heard Peter’s profession in “Christ, the Son of the living God”. Today we hear his inability to recognize the Messiah in a man who announces his passion and his cross. Peter, from a solid stone as a rock, turns into scandal, a stumbling block. If his confession of faith came not from his flesh and blood, and the revelation of the Father had placed in his heart the right words to say, now he returns to thinking “not according to God, but according to men”. He conforms – as Paul writes to the Romans – to the logic of the world, without allowing himself to be transformed, renewing his own way of thinking in order to be able to discern God’s will, that is to say his logic: to reach the fullness of life along the path of the gift of self in love. Believing in Jesus does not simply mean affirming who he is, but accepting his different logic that radically transforms our way of life. The thinking of the cross is a way of death and resurrection: it causes us to die in our usual way of thinking in order to make us be reborn in an “other” way of understanding life and playing it on the stage of the world. It is possible to do this – Jeremiah would say – only if we allow the burning fire of God to dwell in us, in an irrepressible way.

Commentary by Comunità di Dumenza

Translation by f. Mark Hargreaves, Prinknash Abbey