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21st Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Is 22:15, 19-23
Second Reading: Rom 33-36
Gospel Reading: Mt 16:13-20

“Who do people say that the son of man is?” Jesus asked his apostles. “Some say John the Baptist,” they answered, “but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”

Now no one could think that Jesus was John, Elijah, or Jeremiah, for Jews did not believe in reincarnation. The apostles, who had studied Scripture as boys, must have understood Jesus to mean the enigmatic figure the prophet Daniel had seen in a vision: “one like a son of man coming on the clouds of Heaven.”

Accordingly, Jesus rephrased his question: “But who do you say that I am?”

Here, “you” is plural, as the Greek shows. We can imagine Jesus looking around at his apostles to see who would answer.

It was Simon. “You are the Christ,” he said, “the Son of the living God.”

Recognizing Simon as the one to whom his Father had revealed his identity, Jesus addressed him alone.

“You are Peter,” he said, “and on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in Heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in Heaven.”

The apostles must have recognized these words as those God had used in appointing Eliakim “master of the household” to King Hezekiah—a phrase translated elsewhere in Scripture as the king’s “delegate,” “deputy,” “vicar,” “vizier,” or “regent”—what we would call his “prime minister.”

“I will place on his shoulder the key of the House of David,” God said. (A key that could unbar a door could be 60 centimetres long, so it had to be carried resting on the shoulder.) “He shall open, and no one shall shut; he shall shut, and no one shall open.”

Speaking as King, Jesus was giving Peter the same office in his kingdom that Shebna had had in the Kingdom of Judah. When he returned to Heaven, Peter would be his deputy, or vicar, on earth.

Moreover, Peter would have successors in that office. Just as Shebna’s authority, symbolized by his robe, sash, and keys, had been handed on to Eliakim, so Peter’s authority, symbolized by the keys, would be handed on to his.

“The gates of Hades,” Jesus said, would not “prevail” against his Church.

“The gates of Hades” is also translated as “the jaws of death” or “the gates of the netherworld.” Like the Hebrew Sheol, Hades meant the realm of the dead, not the realm of the damned.

What would you do if the end of the world was coming? Would fear, uncertainty, or discouragement make you give up? St. Paul says we don’t need to give in to despair: we have a true source of hope. 

In this episode, Fr. Columba Jordan explores St. Paul’s Letters to the Thessalonians and the struggle of an early Christian community facing confusion, despair, and anxiety. In response, St. Paul gives practical solutions which can still work for us today.

What makes a parish or community truly alive? It’s not impressive programs, gifted leaders, large crowds, or even extraordinary spiritual experiences. According to St. Paul, the essential ingredient is love. 

In the second episode of St. Paul’s Letters with Fr. Columba Jordan, Fr. Columba explores how St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians reveals a practical vision for transforming our parishes and communities: rather than waiting for other people to create a more loving Church, the work begins within each of us.

Is it really possible to experience joy even when your circumstances are painful, uncertain, or overwhelming? 

In the third episode of St. Paul’s Letters with Fr. Columba Jordan, Fr. Columba Jordan, CFR, explores St. Paul’s Letter to the Philippians and the surprising freedom that allowed Paul to rejoice while imprisoned and awaiting trial.

Two dozen families came together at Christ the Redeemer Parish in West Vancouver for this year’s Catholic Family Summit, making time to put faith at the heart of family life. 

The event kicked off with a talk by Father Richard Conlin, who introduced his family-friendly R.A.P. Lectio Divina method — Receive, Apply, Pray. Children enjoyed faith-filled and fun activities while parents had time for prayer and Confession. The day concluded with a Eucharistic procession and Mass celebrated by Father Lucio Choi.

Families attending the summit were asked a simple question: How do you keep Christ alive in your home? 

Here are some of their answers:

The Abaquin Family, Precious Blood Parish, Surrey

What a journey it has been for us in finding ways we can have Christ at the centre of our family life with the busyness of four kids under eight!

I remember learning so much from our relationship with Father Nicholas and Father Hien during our time at Our Lady of Mercy Parish. All kids can be unpredictable in their needs, but they both encouraged us to sit close to the front so our children can watch every part of the Mass intently.

Then this year, moving to our new home parish, Precious Blood, I was inspired by our relationship with Father Rich to begin praying the 20-Mystery Rosary daily. Tiffany had a passion to make individual Rosaries for all six of us and pray the Family Rosary a few times each week. The power of our Mother Mary is truly a gift!

I believe it is through our enthusiasm for our spiritual growth as a Christ-centred marriage that both of us see the effects of being models for the children to follow. We notice our son acting out parts of Mass during bath time, and heard our 7-year-old daughter teaching my nephew how to pray the Rosary!

We have a wonderful mealtime routine starting with prayer and reading one page from Father Rich’s books. During this meal, one cornerstone of our family is to discuss any challenges and obstacles in our family while using Jesus as an example of what we need to do to keep strong as an example of a Catholic family in our words and actions.

Ultimately, the journey of discovery and learning from mistakes continues. Just this week, I have decided to attend Daily Mass around my busy work schedule, and Tiffany has decided the same with her busy homeschool routine.

My wife and I learned none of our efforts have to be perfect, but Jesus will guide us in his perfect way.

God doesn’t see you as a stranger, a servant, or merely a guest. He sees you as family. He rescued you, cares for you, and wants you to know that you truly belong. 

In the first episode of St. Paul’s Letters with Fr. Columba Jordan, Fr. Columba explores this incredible truth, unpacking St. Paul’s writing on our relationship with God, how God’s family has been restored, and how we can accept that gift and live in freedom.

Earlier this summer, the following text came into our family group chat from our eldest: “Nobody freak out, but I’m currently holding Pope St. John Paul II’s vestments.”

As part of her recent internship with the Office of Archives at the Archdiocese of Halifax-Yarmouth, our daughter was helping refresh a museum exhibit, which included cataloging and rearranging artifacts used by Pope John Paul II during his 1984 visit to Halifax. The stop was part of a 12-day tour of Canada and marked the first time a pope had visited our country.

Pope St. John Paul II’s vestments are now considered second-class relics, since they were touched by a saint. The same goes for other things he touched on that visit, including a cushion he kneeled on and the chalice he used at Mass. Not only is getting to handle relics a cool task for a young historian, but it is also a centuries-old tradition held dear by many Catholics. 

The veneration of relics is a curious thing. While not uniquely Catholic, the large number of saints recognized by the Catholic Church lends itself to an exponentially larger number of relics. The Church recognizes the significance of items that were intimately connected to saints. First class relics are body parts of saints or items directly connected to Jesus’s passion. Second class relics are items worn or used by a saint during his or her lifetime, or the instruments of torture or death in the case of martyrs. Third class relics are anything (rosaries, crucifixes, medals, holy cards, etc.,) touched to a relic.

By way of personal knowledge, I happen to know that even one’s family vehicle can become a third-class relic. Last fall, two Jesuits priests from the Martyrs’ Shrine in Midland, Ontario made a visit to our parish with some of the relics of the Canadian Martyrs, including the skull of St. John de Brebeuf. Our parish was one stop of several on their Atlantic Canada tour. When their vehicle broke down before they could continue on to Newfoundland, we leant them our vehicle for the last leg of their journey. In return, we received the privilege of being able to say our car is now a third-class relic. 

But why does the Church give such importance to relics? Is it not rather morbid to hold on to body parts and display them in churches and shrines, sometimes drawing large crowds? Undoubtedly, there are some who treat this tradition like a superstition, but that is not the Church’s intention.

I walked the streets of Jerusalem as a skeptic, unsure what I believed about the city, Jesus, or the biblical stories. I had stopped going to church years before the trip, but when my policy job offered me the chance to accompany state policymakers to Israel to learn about the region’s politics, I felt the stirrings of my childhood and a long-held fascination with the Holy Land. 

My spirituality has guided me since I was a little girl. Raised in a devout Catholic household, our family always sat in front at Mass, even when we arrived late — which was most Sundays. As much as I wanted to slide into a back pew, my parents would march my four siblings and me up to the front. We’d kneel until Mass started, then kneel again after the final song as everyone else filed out of church. 

LISTEN: Holy Land Pilgrimage: On the Path Where Jesus Walked

I attended Catholic schools and have journals of prayers and conversations with God, dating back to when I was about 11. I felt the sorrow of Holy Week and the anticipation of Advent, recognizing the liturgical seasons reflected in my life. I remember tearing up, more than once, when “Here I am, Lord” was sung, sensing that my life journey was divinely guided, including its hardships and challenges. I dedicated my career to helping the disadvantaged, beginning with a job at Catholic Charities. 

As a young adult, I attended multiple Catholic churches, seeking that sense of home I had as a child. But as a single woman, I felt like an outsider, unable to relate to the young families around me or the older couples in the pews. After Mass, I would look around, hoping to make eye contact with some nice soul who would come over and say hello. But the families were busy corralling their children, and the older couples gathered in their little groups. I’d walk out alone, still scanning the crowd for any connection.  

I eventually stopped attending Mass. I didn’t stop believing; I just no longer had a community of people or a dedicated place to share that belief.  

I carried this history to Israel, along with questions about what was being asked of me at that moment. The trip took place not long after I had recovered from stage four cancer, and I was struggling to go back to normal life. My illness and recovery awakened something in me, a faith I couldn’t articulate, and I wasn’t sure what it meant for my career or life as a whole. But I resisted the temptation to turn the trip into a spiritual pilgrimage.

The words “parenting” and “relaxing” never fit together naturally for me as a father. And with all of the pressures weighing on me right now — debt, bills, and rising prices — they had drifted even further apart. They went from being quarrelsome siblings to two completely different people living on opposite sides of the world. This disconnect had always seemed natural to me, though, especially when I reflected on what Scripture had to say about laziness and sloth. 

But I had made an all-too-common mistake. I had been focused on just one aspect of what I read, while ignoring something equally as important: Giving glory to God through relaxing. 

RELATED: Dr. Saundra Dalton Smith on ‘Sacred Rest’ 

The example of St. Joseph

My idea of being a good father, and husband, entailed being a good provider. Any minute I took away from working, I felt like I was falling behind in these roles. This inability to relax got to the point where it would even interfere with me spending time with my family. I would be there physically, but mentally I was nowhere to be seen. My wife and daughter could see it, too — as quickly as the joy of seeing me there would wash over them, their smiles would turn serious. 

I would beat myself up about it, but to me it was just a natural sacrifice I had to make. I never imagined St. Joseph — a saint I always looked up to — relaxing. And if he, as a righteous man, didn’t relax, then certainly honoring God could never be associated with taking some down time. St. Paul’s succinct words, that “if anyone was unwilling to work, neither should that one eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10), only solidified my distorted view. 

RELATED: Turning to St. Joseph as a Rookie Father

Relaxation versus laziness

But I was wrong. Because there’s relaxing, and then there’s being lazy. Growing up, I never took the time to understand the difference between the two. To me, even when I was relaxing, I felt like, at the core, I was still embracing laziness — a sin abhorrent to God (Proverbs 18:9). But there is a difference when it comes to honoring our heavenly father. 

The fourth commandment tells us to keep holy the Sabbath. I understood the work and relaxation part, but what did the key word “holy” actually mean? The dictionary defines it as “exalted or worthy of complete devotion,” and herein lies the answer: God gave us the gift of relaxation to rejuvenate us, so we can give complete devotion to him through praying, giving thanks, and appreciating what he has given us. 

I did not listen to the voice of my teachers.
— Proverbs 5:13

There is a powerful story of a renowned violinist who delivers an outstanding performance. It is met with a rousing standing ovation, and yet the musician weeps amidst the applause. His colleagues rush to his side, concerned. ‘Don’t weep,’ they tell him. ‘Everyone is standing.’ The violinist shakes his head. ‘Not everyone. He’s not,’ and he points to a person in the crowd. ‘But it’s just one man,’ they protest. ‘Yes,’ the musician answers, ‘but he’s my teacher.’

We live in an age where adulation comes cheap. Where success is measured by thousands of ‘likes’ received in response to asinine social media posts, often depicting cruelty and vulgarity. Where sycophants will praise the glory not just of corrupt individuals, but those who are conspicuously abhorrent and self-interested. Where the word of God is manipulated to celebrate perverted self-interest or partisan causes, ignoring the grace and generosity of actual Biblical teachings.

No wonder young people today claim to feel more disillusioned than ever; lonelier than they have ever been; more disconnected despite our ultra-connected world. It is equally not surprising to hear that teachers struggle to maintain the attention of their charges, or to motivate and inspire action. Our attention-seeking devices are calibrated to feed us content that we desire in order to keep us scrolling, requiring little to no effort on our part, making a classroom that is devoid of algorithms, seem static and uneventful.

I have had the honour of teaching thousands of students over the past several decades, in all sorts of different circumstances: hundreds upon hundreds of students in giant lecture halls while broadcasting to satellite campuses; small 10-15 student PhD workshops; in-country volunteering experiences; even a three-night gig at the Sydney Opera House where my students were provided special seating. Despite the range of experiences, from audiences of 10,000 down to three or four, what has been a constant in my career is student engagement. Where I have been fortunate to hear positively from my students it has always been in the context of how I connected with them; how I molded subject matter in such a way that it spoke to the questions they were asking—big and small. What people told me they valued most was being seen and heard.

Although I have taught in both secular and faith-based post-secondary institutions, I have always applied the values of Catholic Social Teaching to how I approached my vocation. Even though it has a thousand year-old legacy, CST is surprisingly straight-forward. Simplistic even. Value the dignity of the human person. We are all created in God’s image.