Twenty-fourth
Sunday (Year B)
(Isaiah 50:5-9; James 2:14-18; Mark 8:27-35)
We heard in the
first reading a prophecy of Isaiah concerning the Suffering Servant, the coming
Messiah and leader who would deliver Israel from her bondage to sin. He is called Servant because He would be totally
obedient to the Lord, the God of Israel and totally devoted to His people; He
is 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
divinely-gifted triumphs of military prowess.
Moreover, those sufferings would come His way as part of God’s will for
Him -- not by sheer bad luck or as chance manifestations or results of human
wickedness -- and for that reason, the Suffering Servant would be remarkable by
His constant listening for and to God in order to know His will and walk His
way in total and unfailing obedience:
The Lord GOD opens My ear that I may hear; and I have not rebelled, have
not turned back.
Now, those words of
Isaiah characterize Jesus perfectly; for, having come on earth to do His
Father’s will, throughout His life Jesus’ constant aim was to look for, listen
to, understand, obey, and glorify His Father.
Early on in His
public ministry He said to the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well:
You worship what you do not know, we worship what we know, for salvation is
from the Jews (John 4:22);
and to Jews asking
what work of God they should be doing He replied (John 6:29):
This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent.
Approaching His end
He declared in prayer:
This is eternal life, that they should know You the only true God and the
one whom You sent, Jesus Christ. (John 17:3)
Father, the world does not know You, but I know You and (these My disciples) know that You sent Me. I made known Your name to them and will make it known. (John 17:25-26)
Indeed, His 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. Give glory to Your Son, that the
Son may glorify You. (John 17:1)
And so, in order
exercise and develop that faith of which St. James spoke so urgently in our
second reading, the faith which Our Blessed Lord so exactly defined as bestowing eternal life – ‘that they should know You the only true
God and the one whom You sent, Jesus Christ’ -- we, as true
disciples of Jesus must, always and ever more diligently, seek to hear,
recognize, and respond to, every manifestation of the word of God in our lives
as individual persons and catholic disciples.
Faith is not something we are born with, it is a gift from God that we
make our own by corresponding, with love and humility, to the initiative of the
God Who lovingly chooses to address us through His word proclaimed by Mother
Church, and in the silent, peaceful, depths of our Christian conscience
experiencing life in an alien world.
In the Gospel
reading we were told that:
Jesus and his disciples set out for the villages of Caesarea Philippi.
Along the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” They said in reply, “John the Baptist, others
Elijah, still others one of the prophets.”
And he asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter said to him in
reply, “You are the Christ.”
Peter had, St.
Matthew tells us, already shown himself to be a model for us, in that, having
received and given credence to the Father’s grace in the depths of his heart,
in accordance with those words of Jesus:
I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by
my Father (John 6:65);
he had, upon hearing
the personal call of Jesus by the Sea of Galilee, immediately left his nets
and, along with Andrew his brother, followed after Jesus, thus becoming the
first disciple of the looked-for-Prophet.
And so also, in our
Gospel reading today, being this time uniquely privileged by the Father, and
deeply stirred by Jesus’ question ‘Who do you say that I am?, he proved himself
the perfect example for us by unhesitatingly recognizing and immediately
confessing Jesus as Israel’s long-awaited-Messiah, with the words:
You are the Christ.
And yet, although
there can be no doubting Peter’s loving commitment to Jesus, he had not
learnt thus far to distinguish sufficiently between the Father’s revelation and his own
intense and emotional feelings, for when, on this supremely significant
occasion, Jesus began to speak openly and clearly about His own forthcoming
Passion, Death, and Resurrection, Peter, perhaps mistaking the strength of his
emotions for love-inspired wisdom or a presumption of authority:
Took Jesus aside and began to rebuke Him.
I would 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!
Whatever his reasons or intentions, whatever his love or admiration, he
completely overstepped the boundary between master and disciple and so:
Jesus turned around and, looking at
his disciples, rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan. You are thinking
not as God does, but as human beings do.”
What a
put-down!! However, lest we think that
Jesus’ response was stirred with irritation, annoyance, at Peter’s effrontery,
notice what the St. Mark tells us:
Jesus turned around and looked at His disciples
before publicly speaking those words of rebuke to
Peter.
Up to that moment
what had occurred between Jesus and Peter had taken place in private and it
could have remained like that; Jesus could have rebuked Peter, in turn, just
between the two of them. However, St.
Mark clearly tells us that it was the sight of His disciples that decided Jesus
to bring everything out into the open, it was an issue so supremely important for all
of them, as it is, indeed, for all of us.
Peter was, at that
moment, not able to appreciate that for Jesus, God His Father was in loving
command over, and in total control of, every aspect of His life; and also that,
such was Jesus’ love, every single aspect of His Father’s Person, word, and
will evoked a response of total, like-loving, 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 anxious fear was totally alien to
Jesus.
The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom do I fear? The LORD is my life’s refuge; of whom am I
afraid? When evildoers come at me to
devour my flesh, these, my enemies and foes, themselves stumble and fall.
Though an army encamp against me, my heart does not fear; though war be waged
against me, even then do I trust. (Psalm 27:1-3)
See how vehemently
Jesus rejected Peter’s blind emotionalism: ‘Get behind Me, Satan!’ For Peter, mixed-up and uncomprehending, was
actually carrying on, taking over, where Satan in the desert had temporarily
stopped: trying to persuade Jesus to seek His own human ends, His own self,
rather than follow His Father’s way, do His Father’s divine will.
Then Jesus called
not only His disciples to Himself, but also, we are told, the whole crowd of
ordinary people who were following Him at that time, because the Church He
would build upon Peter, and every single member of it, would have to believe
totally and unswervingly that Jesus, the Head of His Body, the Church, was, had
always been, and to all eternity would be, one -- totally and completely --
with the Father. Notice: not only those
already fully committed to Jesus, not only those seeking to learn more and more
about Him and His Good News, but also those ordinary people who were just
seeing Him and hearing of that Good News for the first time, all had to
appreciate this absolutely fundamental truth about Jesus’ relationship with His
Father and commitment to His plan for our salvation:
I and the Father are one. (John 10:30)
Whoever wishes to come after Me must deny himself, take up his cross, and
follow Me. For whoever wishes to save
his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and that of the
gospel will save it.”
Whoever, that is,
having heard the Father’s call and come to Me, must realize that, as My
disciple, he must follow Me and, in his turn, acknowledge that the Father wills
to be -- by the Spirit -- in total control of his life too, and that he,
consequently, should trustingly follow the Father’s call wherever it might
lead: ‘Whoever wishes to save his
life’ -- fearing, that is, that the Father is not willing or not able to do
so, perhaps, cannot be trusted to do so -- ‘will lose it’.
One of the iconic
pictures celebrating real or imaginary modern advances in social awareness and
personal responsibility is that of a young person looking forwards and upwards
-- that is, to an ideally bright and better future -- with the words ‘I want to
do something worth-while with my life’ on his or her lips. Regretfully, the life in question is almost
always a life offered to such young people by the world, the society, in which
they live, and consequently a life to be judged according to its correspondence
with the world’s common aspirations such as success, popularity, singular
achievement, charismatic ability to attract or to astonish people, talent,
shrewdness, ruthlessness, endurance, fighting-spirit, and so on, and all of
them are to be foisted onto, attached to an individual ego striving to prove
itself in so many and varied aspects and avenues of life before the admiring
gaze of the world around.
For us Christians
and Catholics, however, that is not the life to which we are called:
You are thinking not as God
does, but as human beings do.”
Our life is not ours
to possess; it has not somehow come to ‘down’ to us from nowhere and with no
strings attached, leaving us totally free to do with it, make of it, whatever we will. It has been bought for us by the Blood of
Christ, given as a great treasure to each of us, known and loved uniquely, by
the God Who made us; it is indeed centred on the heavenly Father and the
heavenly home prepared for us; it is to
be lived in the company of Jesus, our Saviour, the Glory of and supreme Model
for our humanity, He Who is the ‘way’ for all our endeavours here on earth; it is imbued and sustained with the power of His Spirit,
our abiding hope and confidence, our strength in trials, our peace through
tribulation, and the deep, deep joy of our fulfilment; and on earth it is to be
lived and celebrated together with all men and women of good will with whom we
aspire to work for the glory of God and the salvation of mankind.
Today Catholics and
Christians generally make great efforts to speak with, respond to, the world
around us; we are so anxious, too anxious at times, to be able to reply to the latest philosophical ideas or
scientific claims, that we tend to discuss on the world’s terms, using the
world’s definitions and assumptions, and so are in great danger of failing to
understand aright with Peter in today’s Gospel.
Jesus’ words to him should never leave our awareness and indeed our
conscience since they are essential for our right apprehension and true
appreciation of the beauty and fullness of God’s gift of life:
You
are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”