Jeremiah 31:31-34, Psalm 51:12-15, 18-19, Matthew 16:13-23
Jeremiah 31:31-34
My Beloved, God's timing is always perfect. In God's hour, when the time of the Lord has arrived, our dark night, the night of sin, violence, wickedness, destruction, betrayal, depravity, decadence and death will come to an end. The Covenant forged in the Blood of the Lamb without stain or blemish is the sign of Your infinite and never ending love that became visible when God the Father permitted You to be immolated on the Cross making You the Peerless Victim for our sins asking You to take upon Yourself the guilt that was ours.
We live in desperate and dreadful times my Beloved, the hideous sins being committed and propagated in the name of freedom makes the angels cringe, close their eyes and tremble in shame. We have broken the laws of God in every way and we deserve the wrath of God to come down upon us in righteous justice. But the Father has bound Himself by His New Covenant which is ever before Him and for the sake of His love for us and the terrible price already paid for our iniquity, He will always be our Father God and we His children. Once more, as He has done so often in the turbulent history of mankind, He will lead us out of this darkness of our own making into His marvelous light made visible in You.
The faithful remnant will witness boldly and testify with their blood and their lives if need be what God has accomplished through You for our salvation and perhaps all will turn back to You in sackcloth and ashes and for Your sake the Father will forgive all our wrongdoing and will not longer remember our sins.
Psalm 51:12-15, 18-19
The Father takes no pleasure in our sacrifices because the ultimate Sacrifice has already been made the debt we ow has been paid. What does please Him though is uniting our poverty with His riches, our weakness with His strength, our lack with His fullness made visible and available to us in You. At every celebration of the Eucharist in the enduring Sacrament of Life, Love and Hope we unite our lives with Yours and offer it up to the Father. All we need to bring to the Altar of Sacrifice is our broken hearts and our contrite spirits and He will grans us a pure heart and a steadfast spirit.
Thank You Father! Thank You Jesus! Thank You Holy Spirit!
My Beloved, during the course of our life and our discipleship, we too are led in the way You led Your first disciples and followers. We each have to make our discovery of who You are at our own pace and in our own time. Your disciples had been with You for a while - they had heard You preach, teach and perform amazing miracles, extraordinary signs and wonders which clearly indicated that You were from God so when You pose these two questions to them, "Who do people say I am?" and "Who do you say I am?"
Today when we ask the first question to those who do not know You we too will get all the wrongs answers but we who are grafted into Your Body, who know You and have experienced Your love and have Your life of grace poured upon us through the Sacraments must answer as Peter did from our personal experience of You and from the fullness of our faith.
Peter's reply was inspired by the Holy Spirit and it was clear to You that he was the one Your Father desired to lead the Church You established. Your entrusted him with the keys of the Kingdom, the authority to open and shut and You would honor his decisions made on Your behalf or the good of the whole Church.
Peter being human like the rest of us was open to making grave errors when he relied solely on human intellect and experience bereft of God's wisdom and thus he became an obstacle in the path of God and a tool of Satan. Your stern rebuke to Peter serves as a serious warning to us all when we pridefully think we now it all.
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