Homily Ordinary 22A: The grace of being corrected

 Homily for Ordinary Time – 22^nd Sunday Year A 2026

Introduction

The readings of the last couple of Sundays seem like a tale of two Simon Peters.

·        Just last Sunday, it was the best of times for him. He confessed, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” For this remarkable answer, Jesus praised him, called him blessed, changed his name to Peter, and gave him the keys of the kingdom.

·        But then, almost immediately afterward, in today’s passage, Peter goes from his finest moment to one of his worst. He tries to dissuade the Lord from taking up the Cross; and for this Peter earns the stern rebuke: “Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me.”

What happened to Peter between these two moments? Do we have two different Peters?

No. He is still the same Simon Peter. The same one who, by grace, confessed Christ correctly is now, by his own human reasoning, resisting Christ's mission.

This Simon Peter is you and me: a mixed bag of fidelity and infidelity, capable of confessing Christ one moment and needing to confess our sins the next.

Scripture and Theology

The key distinction between these two situations seems to be if Peter cooperated with God's grace.

·        When he cooperated with it as we heard last Sunday, Jesus told him: “Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father.”

·        But when he relied on his own human reasoning, Jesus told him: “You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”

Peter is not alone in this experience.  In our first reading, we hear the prophet Jeremiah at one of the lowest moments of his vocation. We know that Jeremiah is not an incompetent prophet. On the contrary, he faithfully received God's word and courageously preached it. But now he is exhausted by the cost of that calling.

·        When Jeremiah looks at his ministry, what does he see? “All the day I am an object of laughter; everyone mocks me.”

·        And eventually he says to himself: “I will not mention him, I will speak in his name no more.”

Jeremiah wants to quit the vocation of prophet.  But notice what he does with his struggle: he brings it to God. His complaint is not necessarily infidelity. It is the cry of a faithful man struggling with the cost of fidelity.

Peter, too, struggles with the cost of God's plan. He loves Jesus and wants to protect him. But his love is being guided by human reasoning rather than by God's plan. He cannot yet understand that the Messiah must suffer and die.

Neither man's weakness is the end of his vocation. Peter will stumble badly, even denying Jesus three times. But his weaknesses will not have the last word. He will return to Christ, receive his forgiveness, and allow himself to be transformed.

That lesson may be one reason why the evangelists preserved these embarrassing episodes of Peter in the Gospels. Perhaps they wanted to show us that Christ does not call the perfect; he perfects those he calls.

And there is another important lesson here: leadership makes weakness more visible. As Shakespeare put it poetically, “heavy is the head that wears the crown.”  Jeremiah clearly feels the weight of his prophetic responsibility. And Peter's pre-eminence among the apostles meant that his actions, including the not-so-flattering ones like today's Gospel, were more visible than those of the others. The higher the responsibility, the more visible the man's weaknesses become.

We today might wonder: why does Jesus then not withdraw the keys from Peter?

It is because Jesus knows a better way of dealing with weakness.  He corrects Peter and continues to form him. Correction is not necessarily a rejection of vocation. Often correction is precisely how Christ forms the man he has called.

Christian Life

Brothers and sisters, if Peter, the man entrusted with the keys of the Kingdom, could receive, accept and learn from such a dressing down, so can we.

As disciples, we must acknowledge that we are similarly in need of God's grace to overcome our weaknesses.

·        We do as much every time we begin Mass with the penitential act, confessing that we have sinned in thought and word, in what we have done and in what we have failed to do.

·        And immediately before receiving the Lord in Holy Communion, we again acknowledge our unworthiness: “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.”

And as future ministers of the Church, we must understand that formation is not the process of proving that we are perfect enough to be ordained. It is the process of becoming increasingly available to be transformed by God's grace.

The question is not whether you have weaknesses. The question is whether you are willing to let Christ deal with them.

·        Can you be corrected?

·        Can you admit that you were wrong?

·        Can you apologize?

·        Can you change?

·        Can you receive correction without becoming defensive?

·        Can you surrender your own judgment when, after honest discernment, the Church asks something different of you?

These are important questions for anyone who wants to serve God's people.

A man who thinks he is already the finished product is difficult for God—and for his formators—to form. A man who knows his weaknesses and remains open to correction can become a very useful instrument in God's hands. As a Cajun lady once told me: “If you're green, you can grow; if you're ripe, you can only rot.”

So our takeaway from these readings cannot be: “Jeremiah and Peter had weaknesses. So it is okay for me to remain imperfect.” That would miss the point. Rather, the real takeaway is that we are expected to be teachable.

Although we are not expected to be perfect already—that will happen in heaven—we are expected to strive for excellence and to keep working toward the perfection to which God calls us. The problem is not that we have weaknesses. The problem is when we make peace with them instead of allowing Christ to transform them.

Conclusion

And perhaps this is precisely where the Cross comes in.  Jesus does not simply correct Peter about his own carrying the Cross. He immediately tells all his disciples: “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” Both he and the disciple must carry the cross.

For Peter and some of the apostles, they literally died on a cross.  We may not undergo the same cross, but our cross begins here. It begins with admitting that I am not God. That I do not have all the answers. That I need to be taught, corrected and converted. It means surrendering my own plans to God's plans and allowing him to work through the people he has placed in my life and, especially for us, through those whom the Church has entrusted with our formation and guidance. It means allowing our weakness to become an opportunity for grace.

Like Peter, we do not have to be perfect just yet. But we do have to be teachable and willing to let Christ transform us. And if we are thusly willing to lose our life for Christ here on earth, then, as he promises, we will find it with him in heaven.