Have you ever given any attention to how God thinks and judges? Comparing God to yourself, do you think that he thinks like you? Well for me, there are sometimes when I am inpatient, I can be dismissive, there are times when I rush to judgement, times when I draw the wrong conclusions from what I believe is in front of me. How do you think and judge? All of us are a mixture of light and dark I guess. Reflecting on this I hope that God does not think like I do, where I get things wrong as frequently as I get things right. Last week in Sunday's gospel we heard how Peter’s inspiration that Jesus is the Christ, literally the anointed one, was 100% correct; a conclusion he reached by his judgement of the words and actions of Jesus, but much more than this, by an inspiration, not from his imagination but from God himself. At this point Jesus renames Simon as “the rock”, and he does more, his new name, Peter, means that Peter is the living human foundation stone of Jesus' church. And yet this Sunday we see in the very same scene in Matthew, in a few seconds, Peter goes from "hero to zero". He goes from foundation stone to stumbling block. Its not as though he is any different in this week's gospel as he was last week. What is happening, what is going on? We need to remember that Peter with the disciples are midway through Jesus’ ministry, they have seen and experienced extraordinary things, but Peter, with the other disciples, are still trying to work things out, including the nature of the mission of Jesus. At its most basic, they know that Jesus is set on restoring the kingdom of Israel, but by now they must have been scratching their heads about what this restoration actually meant. Was it a restoration of the kingdom similar to that of the Maccabees where the Jewish Maccabee family in the second century BC defeated the successors to Alexander the Great, the Seleucids, and kicked them out? That was a restoration they knew and understood, as we would have done too. But Jesus was an enigma, they knew they had to be with Him but what did the future actually look like? Maybe this is why Peter messes up this Sunday. He is right – Jesus is the Christ, but his interpretation of what this “Christ-ness” is like is totally wrong. Christ-ness is not about palaces or politics, Christ-ness has its first stirrings in the soul and heart; it is not the movement of power but a movement of love, love of God and each other. Christ-ness is not the movement of the heart and the soul to acquire and gather to itself, but the movement of the heart and the soul to the giving of itself to the point of emptiness, an emptiness that enables it to be filled with the very life of God, new life, eternal life. Christ-ness is not about the way of honour, but the way of the cross. Jesus comes to new life, drawing all people to Himself across all of time and across all ages, only by lifted up for us to see Him when He is raised up on the cross. It is only through His cross that He is raised up by the Father at the resurrection. It is only by His cross and resurrection that His disciples, and us too, are set free. Later Peter and the disciples understand this, more than this they came to understand that sharing the way of the cross with Jesus and its earthly destination (for all bar one their own suffering and death), that they too would share in Jesus' resurrection in glory. This is as true for us as it was for them. All of us have our own "Via Crucis" – our own way of the cross. Crosses come in many guises, visible and invisible, but Jesus is always with us until the end of the age. Time and again He tells us that He will come again, He is already is really in our churches. His very body, blood soul and divinity are really and truly in the Blessed Sacrament. When times are hard, come to Jesus, visit Him during the sacrifice of the Mass, share your burdens with Him. As He was helped on His way to his cross, He wants to help you with your crosses. He willingly bore the weight of our sins, He desires to lighten our hearts and our souls. As always, please accept an assurance of my daily prayers for your needs and intentions. God bless and keep you. Fr Chris

This Sunday in the gospel Jesus asks "Who do people say the Son of Man is?". Who do you say He is? What do you understand by the term “Son of Man”. At one level the answer is obvious. After all we have the whole story encapsulated in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, His ascension into heaven, and the decent of the Holy Spirit – something called the pascal mystery. But who is Jesus to you? My parents were country people with a faith rooted in a culture reaching back probably before St Patrick recognisably brought the Christian faith to Ireland. Jesus was part of the cycle of life, just as much as the crops they grew, the produce they harvested, the very air they breathed. Everything was imbued with the grace of God. The shadow side was a deep-seated superstition of what was perceived to be the primitive forces of nature. But, either way, Jesus and the intercession of Mary and Joseph overcame everything. So for me, for a long time, I guess that the Son of Man was literally a cardboard figure, an image of the Sacred Heart dedicated when I was two and a bit years old, which I still have and honour. As with those images, His eyes followed me round the house everywhere, but who was He? What did I need from Him? What did He want to offer me? Either way I followed my own path, at least what I thought was “my path”. It was not that I did not believe, I just went what I believed to be my own way. The question of who is the Son of Man was pushed into the background; but even in those days, wherever I was, somehow, I needed to know where the Catholic church was, though I seldom went in. Eventually, one Sunday morning, for no apparent reason, I decided to go to the local Catholic church. After the Mass I had a chat with the priest who had a knack for spotting new faces. He did not judge me but invited me to come along for a few weeks and see how I got on. Which I did, and here I am now, by the grace of God a priest in His Church. That same priest helped me to put my vestments on at my priestly ordination. Why do I tell you this? Because I suspect that we all have our own story about who the Son of Man is for us. For me the Son of Man is not the Jesus sitting on the pearly grey clouds of heaven of my childhood prayer cards. Jesus alive and He is God; He is in the glory of the Father with the Holy Spirit, but He is still as human now as He was at His incarnation. Jesus is Lord, but Jesus, the Son of Man, is also our brother and through Him we truly are the sons and daughters of God. We see the face of Jesus reflected in each other if only we care to look. Whoever is one with Jesus is one with the Father through the Holy Spirit. Isn’t it beautiful that we share in the son/daughtership of Jesus, where His Father is also Our Father? Think about it; extraordinary, isn’t it? To make this oneness with Jesus complete we also have to be one with each other through the Holy Catholic Church, in its rites and forms, which contain the fullness of the word of scripture; the traditions reaching back to the earliest times; and the teaching that flows from both of these through our successive Holy Fathers. This is not easy; there will be times when our spiritual oneness with each other, and within our community of the church, will set us against “oneness” with the world. There will be times when we feel at odds even with ourselves in terms of what we may say or feel about ourselves; the world; and the teaching of our church. There will be times when perspectives within and outwith the Church will differ. But truth does not depend on emotion. Our church, your church, through the teaching authority of our Holy Father, is not founded on the shifting sands of feelings and intuition but on the guidance and inspiration of the Holy Spirit. We see this in Sunday's Gospel, where Peter, though he often proves to be deeply fallible, is 100% correct about Christ is. He goes beyond the concept of the Son of Man to say to Jesus you “are the Son of the living God”. Not a phantom God, but a living God, as alive as you and me. Living, alive, vibrant, full of life, full of love - eternal love. My prayer for you all today, and always, is that you stay close to Jesus in the life of his Catholic church and that you will experience the living God in your hearts and souls; now and always. As always, please accept an assurance of my daily prayers for your needs and intentions. God bless and keep you. Fr Chris