Who is Jesus for you personally? How has your knowledge of Him grown? Do you have a relationship with Him? Is it cold? Lukewarm? Or are you on fire for Him? Is He an important part of your life? Or the most important? If you have a deep ever growing relationship with our Lord Jesus Christ;then you will begin to understand and appreciate the covenantal relationship that the Lord our God offers and keeps. Jesus is the new and everlasting sign of this covenant.
So that as we look upon the cross in which He hung, we can see, feel and experience the immense love of God, who sacrificed Himself to liberate the world from all sin. Today and everyday we are invited to carry our cross and follow Him. By shunning it and refusing to take it up is in essence shying away from the love of God. Whose yoke is easy and burden light and leads us to everlasting light. Amen alleluia!
First reading
Genesis 9:1-13 †
The sign of the Covenant
God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, ‘Be fruitful, multiply and fill the earth. Be the terror and the dread of all the wild beasts and all the birds of heaven, of everything that crawls on the ground and all the fish of the sea; they are handed over to you. Every living and crawling thing shall provide food for you, no less than the foliage of plants. I give you everything, with this exception: you must not eat flesh with life, that is to say blood, in it. I will demand an account of your life-blood. I will demand an account from every beast and from man. I will demand an account of every man’s life from his fellow men.
‘He who sheds man’s blood
shall have his blood shed by man,
for in the image of God
man was made.
‘As for you, be fruitful, multiply, teem over the earth and be lord of it.’
God spoke to Noah and his sons, ‘See, I establish my Covenant with you, and with your descendants after you; also with every living creature to be found with you, birds, cattle and every wild beast with you: everything that came out of the ark, everything that lives on the earth. I establish my Covenant with you: no thing of flesh shall be swept away again by the waters of the flood. There shall be no flood to destroy the earth again.’
God said, ‘Here is the sign of the Covenant I make between myself and you and every living creature with you for all generations: I set my bow in the clouds and it shall be a sign of the Covenant between me and the earth.’
Gospel
Mark 8:27-33
The way you think is not God’s way, but man’s
Jesus and his disciples left for the villages round Caesarea Philippi. On the way he put this question to his disciples, ‘Who do people say I am?’ And they told him. ‘John the Baptist,’ they said ‘others Elijah; others again, one of the prophets.’ ‘But you,’ he asked ‘who do you say I am?’ Peter spoke up and said to him, ‘You are the Christ.’ And he gave them strict orders not to tell anyone about him.
And he began to teach them that the Son of Man was destined to suffer grievously, to be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and to be put to death, and after three days to rise again; and he said all this quite openly. Then, taking him aside, Peter started to remonstrate with him. But, turning and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said to him, ‘Get behind me, Satan! Because the way you think is not God’s way but man’s.’
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