12th.
Sunday of Year (C)
(Zechariah
12:10-11; 13:1; Galatians 3:26-29; Luke 9:18-24)
The events mentioned in
today’s Gospel reading are but vaguely introduced by St. Luke who simply says:
Once, when Jesus was praying ...
What could possibly be more
vague than that if one is looking for some locality in which to situate and
better understand the subsequent events!
But that is the point, Luke does not particularly want to inform us
where Jesus was at that time; he wishes above all to draw our attention to the
fact of Jesus’ prayer which is most important for Luke who regularly takes
care to highlight its divine potential and to outline the sublimely mysterious
aura associated with it. And in that he was absolutely correct because such
prayer was the very essence of Jesus’ life and mission here on earth:
My
doctrine is not Mine but His who sent Me.
I speak to the world those things which I heard from Him....... The Father has not left Me alone, for I
always do those things that please Him. (John
7:16; 8:26, 29)
In our first reading taken
from the prophet Zechariah the Lord God said:
I will
pour out on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of
grace and petition;
and that prophecy received
its ultimate fulfilment with the coming of God’s Son on earth -- born of Mary of the
house of David -- to live among God’s People, to serve God’s redeeming
purpose. And it could well have been
that the prayer of Jesus at this very moment picked out by St. Luke was indeed prayer
for a spirit of grace and petition to be given God’s
People and, most especially, to be bestowed on the twelve Apostles with Him on this occasion;
for, turning to them He said:
‘Who
do the crowds say that I am?’ They said
in reply, ‘John the Baptist; others Elijah; still others, One of the ancient
prophets has arisen.’ He said to them,
‘But who do you say that I am?’ Peter
said in reply, ‘The Christ of God.’
The divine potential and
power of Jesus’ prayer, having been thereby demonstrated by those words of
Peter, was openly acknowledged and proclaimed by Jesus when -- according to St.
Matthew’s account – He said that Peter’s answer was indeed a most gracious gift
from His Father:
Blessed
are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh
and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father in heaven. (Matthew
16:17)
Knowing, or rather, believing now that Jesus was the Christ
of God, Peter and the disciples were
feeling a confidence and trust similar to that of which St. Paul speaks in his
letter to the Romans (8:31):
If God is for us, who
can be against us?
For, as it would seem from scholars’ endeavours to
‘calibrate’ Jesus’ life on earth, the
Twelve disciples had recently witnessed and experienced most wonderful
manifestations of their Lord’s power and of the authenticity of His
mission. They themselves had been sent
out by Him to proclaim the kingdom of God
with power and authority over all
demons and to cure diseases; and the success of their mission had set all the
people talking about Jesus, and had even drawn Herod Antipas’ attention: Who is this about whom I hear such things? Indeed, so interested or concerned had Herod become that he even tried to
meet Jesus. The Apostles, again, had
recently seen Jesus multiply bread (5 loaves and 2 fish) to feed more than
5,000 persons; He had walked on water before their very eyes and had performed miraculous healings for many individuals;
and then, they had witnessed yet another miraculous feeding of a multitude,
this time some 4,000 people being nourished and sustained at His bidding. Peter’s words confessing Jesus as the Christ
of God expressed the exuberant feelings of all of the Apostles, He was the
Christ, the Messiah!
The disciples having thus been both enlightened and
confirmed in their faith in Him, Jesus was next able to proceed immediately --
but not without a vigorous admonition (He rebuked!) -- to tell them what was
soon to happen to Him:
He rebuked them and directed them
not to tell this to anyone. He said,
“The Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief
priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised.”
Once again, with such words, He mysteriously fulfilled what
the prophet had foretold:
They shall mourn for him as one mourns for an only son, and they shall
grieve over him as one grieves over a first-born.
Had the apostles, however, rightly understood the exact
meaning and significance of what Peter had been inspired to say?
You
are the Christ of God!
The only other words that give us the same meaning are also
to be found in St. Luke, in his account of the presentation of the Infant Jesus
in the Temple by Mary. There St. Luke
(2:26) says of Simeon, the priest who took the Child in his arms:
It had been revealed to him that
he would not see death before he had seen the LORD’S CHRIST.
The Christ, the Messiah, were expressions frequently used when
speaking of the hopes of the devout in Jewish society who were longing for the
advent of God’s salvation; ‘the Christ’, ‘the Son of God’, are other
expressions readily to hand in our New Testament scriptures; but the
expressions, ‘The Christ of God’ and its equivalent, ‘The Lord’s Christ’, stand
alone and as one in their perfect clarity.
Jesus, Who at the inauguration of His Public Ministry had had to rebuff
the Devil’s temptations on this issue, was most desirous now that His apostles
should be able to recognize and believe in Him as the Christ of God, the Saviour
sent by God, and not allow themselves to be led astray by any subsequent endeavours
of Satan to derail His work that would continue through their proclamation of
His Gospel. They had to know Him truly,
and unshakeably believe in Him, not simply as the Christ – subject to human misinterpretation -- but
as:
The
Christ of God! The Lord’s Christ!
How truly wonderful it is that here we can recognize the most
beautiful harmony evidenced by Jesus’ ardent prayer for a spirit of grace and petition on behalf of His apostles, by His
Father’s words of inspiration bestowed on Peter, and by the promise of the Holy
Spirit given to Simeon of old!!
That the apostles might be enabled and prepared to proclaim,
not the Messiah of popular expectation, but the Christ of salvation, Jesus
sought to impress upon their minds and fix in their memories – He
rebuked them – the truth and the
hope they would have to demonstrate and promote in the face of excesses of both
exuberance and depression:
The Son of Man must suffer
greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be
killed and on the third day be raised.
Then, to show clearly that He was warning against, and
warding off, all popular conceptions of the Christ, the Saviour, to come:
He said to ALL (those
around), ‘If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself and take up
his cross daily and follow Me. For
whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My
sake will save it.’
People of God, St. Luke wants to help us recognize the sublime
secret of Jesus … communion with, prayer to and trust in, His Father is always an
occasion of supreme blessing ... and we, His present-day disciples, must
appreciate that without in like manner ourselves turning confidently to the
Father, without such prayer and communion with Him, we can never come to a
personal knowledge of Jesus our Lord, nor ever be able to truly embrace and further
His will to save us and all mankind. And, as we consider Jesus’ experience on the
Cross and are struck by His great silence, we are led to a realization that
prayer to His Father was the ultimate medium for Jesus’ self-expression and self-fulfilment,
and that it was the root of His Being during those hours of total torment. Consequently, our personal conformity to and
enduring union with Him can surely find its due measure of fullness and authenticity
only to the extent in which we are willing to embrace our own measure of sufferings
in His way:
I consider everything as a loss because of the
supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. … knowing Him …. and sharing
His sufferings by being conformed to His death, if somehow I may
attain the resurrection from the dead.
(Philippians 3:8-11)
