We heard in the first reading a prophecy of Isaiah
concerning the Suffering Servant, the Messiah, the coming leader who would
deliver Israel from her bondage to sin. He
is known as the Servant
because He would be totally obedient to the Lord the God of Israel, and totally
devoted to His people. He is better
known as the Suffering Servant
because it would be by His human sufferings -- pictured so graphically for us
by the words of the prophet -- that He would fulfil God’s plans and purposes
for His Chosen People, not by any triumphs of military prowess. Moreover, since those sufferings would come
His way as part of God’s will for Him – not as mere chance manifestations of
human wickedness -therefore the Suffering Servant would be also be
characterized by His constant attention to Israel’s God in order to know His
will and walk His way in total and unfailing obedience:
The Lord GOD has opened My ear and
I was not rebellious, I turned not backwards.
Having come to do His Father’s will, Jesus’ constant aim throughout
His life was to hear, obey, and thus glorify His Father. And this He showed, for example, when -- in
today’s Gospel reading --- He so suddenly chose Peter as the foundation rock for
His future Church because He, Jesus, recognized that it was His Father Who had just
revealed the truth ‘YOU ARE THE CHRIST’ to Peter: “It was not flesh and blood
which revealed this to you but My Father in heaven.” Indeed, Jesus’ final and supreme prayer was
that His own death would serve for the ultimate glorification of His Father:
Jesus lifted up His eyes to
heaven, said, "Father, the hour has come.
Glorify Your Son, that the Son may glorify You.” (John 17:1)
Therefore, in order to show that faith of which St. James
spoke so very simply in our second reading we must always, as disciples of Jesus,
seek to hear, and respond to, God. As you
well know, faith is not something we are born with, it is our God-gifted,
truth-full, response to the earthly witness of His beloved, only-begotten-Son-made-flesh,
lovingly sent to convict the sinfulness of men’s mind and convert
the weakness of their heart and will, to the beauty and strength of the
Father’s true children, adopted in Jesus and empowered by the Spirit.
In the Gospel reading we were told that:
Jesus went on with His disciples to
the villages of Caesarea Philippi. And on the way He asked His disciples, “Who
do people say that I am?” And they told
Him, “John the Baptist, and others say Elijah; and others, one of the
prophets.” And He asked them, “But who
do you say that I am?”
Even Peter himself, as the first of those totally-committed
disciples of Jesus uniquely called ‘fishers of men’, had -- like all of us --
originally needed to respond to the Father, as Jesus Himself tells us:
No one can come to Me unless it
is granted him by My Father (John
6:65);
and now he became the first to publicly recognize and
confess Jesus as the Messiah, with those typically Petrine, decisive and
uncompromising, words: YOU ARE THE CHRIST.
Peter was totally committed to Jesus -- indeed, he loved Jesus more than any and
all of the other disciples – and that loving and total commitment to Jesus was alarmed
beyond measure when Jesus began to teach His disciples about His own forthcoming
Passion, Death, and Resurrection. Those words
raised a question in Peter that he had never before needed to resolve: how to
distinguish between the proper, true expression, of His love, and those intensely emotional feelings evoked
by Jesus’ words, feelings of an intensity he had never experienced before. Peter needed to somehow express HIS TOTAL
LOVE, as a disciple, and that was something he had never done before. Consequently, not knowing what to do, not
knowing how to do what he aught to do, Peter acted decisively as usual:
Peter
took (Jesus) aside and began to rebuke Him.
I would much rather have said that he went aside to join
Jesus, but in fact the gospel says that he took
Jesus aside and began to rebuke
Him! Peter was, as I have just remarked,
decisive by nature; but, on this occasion, his loving fears concerning Jesus’
safety and honour led him to completely overstep the boundary between disciple
and master, servant and Lord, with the result that:
(Jesus) turning and seeing His disciples, rebuked Peter and
said, “Get behind Me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of
God, but on the things of man.”
What a put-down!! However,
notice what St. Mark tells us: Jesus
turned around and looked at His disciples.
Jesus words were not words of anger, they were measured words deliberately
chosen to guide and protect His other disciples – who both admired Peter and were
accustomed to follow him with full confidence -- by correcting Peter’s presumptuous
impetuosity. For Jesus, God His Father was in loving command over, and total
control of, every aspect of His life; and every detail of His Father’s plan would
evoke a response of absolute commitment from Jesus: there was nothing that God
could ask of His Son that His Son would not embrace, even to the extent of His
Passion and Death on the Cross. Peter’s
present anxious fear for Jesus’ well-being was altogether alien to Jesus.
The LORD is my light and my
salvation; whom shall I fear? The LORD
is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? When evildoers assail me to eat up my flesh,
my adversaries and foes, it is they who stumble and fall. Though an army encamp
against me, my heart shall not fear; though war arise against me, yet will I be
confident. (Psalm 27:1-3)
And so we see how, in order to guide His disciples -- Peter
above all – into total trust in His Father’s overseeing wisdom and love, Jesus rejected
Peter’s blind emotionalism with those heart-felt and shockingly pertinent words:
‘Get behind Me, Satan!’ For Peter – being
overly subject to his predisposition to decisive action -- was actually
carrying on where Satan in the desert had temporarily stopped: trying to
persuade Jesus to seek His own ends, His own self, rather than follow His
Father’s way, do His Father’s will.
Notice also: not only those already fully committed to Jesus,
not only those seeking to learn more and more about Him and His Good News, but even
those ordinary people who were just seeing Him and hearing of His Gospel
message for the first time, ALL of them had to appreciate this absolutely
fundamental truth concerning Jesus’ crucial oneness with God His Father in
His Father’s plan for mankind’s salvation, and in the Gift of their most Holy
Spirit, bond of Love, and source, for men, of all truth and might:
if anyone would come after Me let
him deny himself and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever would save his life will lose
it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it.”
One of the iconic pictures of modern advances in social
awareness and personal fulfilment is
that of a young person looking forwards and upwards -- that is, to an ideally
bright and better future -- with words like ‘I want to do something worthwhile
with my life’ on his or her lips. In
reality, however, the life offered to such young people is almost always a life
in accordance with the aspirations of the pagan society in which they live, aspirations
such as success, popularity, charism, talent, all leading to plenty and
pleasure; aspirations such as singular achievement, endurance, fighting-spirit
and indeed ruthlessness, all manifestations
of the individual ego striving to prove itself in the multiple and varied
aspects of life in the jungle of modern society.
For us Christians and Catholics, however, that is not the life to which we are called. The life offered to us cannot be achieved by us, for us; it is a life centred on God, on His will for mankind’s greater good on earth, and for the heavenly home awaiting each and every ultimately true son and daughter of His. It is a life to be lived with Jesus Who is the ‘Way, the Truth, and the Life’; a life to be realised in the power of His most Holy Spirit with which we have been gifted. It is a life to be gratefully embraced and lived to its fulfilment in the company of all the angels and saints for the ecstatic praise and glory of Him Who is the most loving Father of us all: INFINITELY WISE, TOTALLY BEAUTIFUL, ALL HOLY AND TRUE, THE ALMIGHTY, YET … INCONCEIVABLY … HUMBLE AND GOOD.
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