In last week’s Gospel, Jesus called Himself the “sheepgate,” the sole legitimate entrance to the sheepfold. In this week’s Gospel, St. Peter calls Jesus the “cornerstone.” He also calls Him a “stone that will make people stumble and a rock that will make them fall” (1 Pt 2:8, quoting Is 8:14).

That doesn’t seem very “accompanying.”

Now, I’m not rejecting the pastoral practice of “accompaniment” as much as I am criticizing the way it is often presented. Modern “accompaniment” is big on the tutti, tutti, tutti, while speaking about the need for conversion sotto voce. One even detects trace elements of Rousseau’s false optimism, because it rarely explicitly articulates the reason why people need to come to the Church: because “I’m not OK, you’re not OK” but we can be OK through conversion. What the Church offers is salvation, but to be saved implies needing to be saved from something… and one wonders whether sometimes some clerics have also succumbed to what popes traditionally warned people against: the loss of the sense of sin.

To his credit, Pope Leo XIV has gently corrected Francis’s tutti, tutti, tutti. In contrast, Peter’s letter keeps these elements in proper tension. Let’s consider the opening verse of Sunday’s lection: “Come to him, a living stone, rejected by human beings…”

I draw attention to three elements:

“Come to him” is an invitation, a “welcome” to “all” who have ears to hear. But, as Jesus observes elsewhere in Scripture, not everyone with the physical capacity to hear is willing to listen.

“A living stone”: Recall that stones are multifunctional. They can provide a solid foundation underfoot. I was recently in Poland and visited the dorm I lived in on the outskirts of town when I was a fellow at the Catholic University of Lublin. I was glad to see the street leading to it is now a handsome, paved road. Back in 1992 it was a dirt road, which meant that in the late fall it was a muddy road. Paving is an improvement. But stones underfoot can also cause one to trip and fall. Indeed, one of the Psalms speaks of angels bearing one up “lest you cast your foot against a stone” (Ps 91:12), a text the devil invokes when he tempts Jesus to jump off the Temple during His temptations. Both providing a solid path and making one trip are properties of stones.

“Rejected by human beings” (the word in Greek is anthrōpōn, “men,” but we can’t have that “sexist” language in the perennially revised New American Bible): In Scripture, the “human” is often contrasted with the “new man” of grace to the former’s deficit. So, by purely human categories, Jesus and His message is rejected. St. Paul picks up the same theme when he discusses the folly of the Cross, which he calls a “scandal” to Jews and a “stumbling block” to Gentiles, in 1 Cor 1:23. The thread in both instances is the same: the Christian message of conversion through change of life according to the Word of Christ is sine qua non to salvation. But that conversion leads through suffering, an inherent part of the Christian message, so that when St. Peter seeks to dissuade Jesus from that path he is branded “Satan” (Mk 8:33).

Sunday’s Second Reading makes the theme explicit later in the lection, where the “cornerstone” is simultaneously the stumbling stone, so that rejection of Jesus’ Word is faithlessness and disobedience — which means one remains in one’s sins.

St. Peter is calling all persons to a better, a non-futile way of life. He offers them the vision of becoming “living stones” in the temple that is the Mystical Body of Christ. He speaks of their calling to be a “royal priesthood, a holy nation, a chosen people.” But those beautiful vocations are predicated on accepting Christ and His Word. It means finding in that Word a living stone from which flows life-giving water, not a stumbling stone upon which to dash one’s foot. It means finding the sheepgate, not jumping the fence — or, perhaps even worse, pretending that there’s no need for a sheepfold that delineates the inside from the outside.

What St. Peter offers us is a theology of “accompaniment” not afflicted by occasional frogs in the throat.