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
can hardly be said to have been ‘introduced’ by St. Luke, for he says nothing
more than:
Once, when Jesus was praying in solitude ...
But, of course, that is the whole point! Luke did not particularly want to inform us
where Jesus was at that time or what He was doing; above all he desired to draw
our closest attention to the fact of Jesus’ prayer which was most
important for this evangelist who regularly took care to highlight its
divine potential and to outline the sublimely mysterious aura associated with
it. And in that, of course, he was absolutely correct because such
prayer was of 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 and serve God’s redeeming purpose. And it could well have been that the prayer
of Jesus at this very moment chosen 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,
demonstrated by those words of Peter, was -- according to St. Matthew’s
parallel account – openly acknowledged by Jesus when 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 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 the authenticity of His mission.
They had recently 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 captured the attention of Herod Antipas: 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 may have 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, Jesus was indeed the Christ, the
Messiah of God!!
The
disciples having thus been both enlightened and confirmed in their faith in
Him, Jesus was able to proceed immediately -- though not without a vigorous
admonition (He rebuked!) -- and reveal to them what was soon to befall Himself:
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 will mourn for him as one mourns for an
only child, and they will grieve for him as one grieves over a firstborn.
Had the
apostles, however, rightly understood the exact meaning and significance of
what Peter had been inspired to say?
You are the Messiah/Christ of God!
The only
other words that give us exactly 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, Luke (2:26) says of Simeon,
the priest who took the Child in his arms:
It had
been revealed to him that he should not see death before he had seen the
Messiah of the Lord.
‘The
Messiah’, was an expression used when speaking of the hopes of the devout in
Israel who were longing for the coming of God’s salvation, and ‘the Christ’,
‘the Son of God’, are other expressions readily to hand in our New Testament
scriptures; but ‘The Messiah/Christ of God’ and its equivalent, ‘The Lord’s
Messiah/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
recognize and believe in Him as the Christ of God, the Messiah sent by Israel’s
God, and not allow themselves to be led astray by any subsequent endeavours of
Satan to derail His work which must soon, and of necessity, be able to endure,
deepen, grow, and extend through their Apostolic proclamation of His Gospel so
as to become Jesus’ Church for the whole of mankind and for all ages. They had to know Him truly, and
unshakeably believe in Him, not simply as the Christ – subject to whatever
inevitable human misinterpretations -- but as:
The Christ of
God! The Lord’s Messiah!
How truly
wonderful it is that here we can now recognize the 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 God’s 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 bitter opposition and the excesses of
exuberance and depression among their own followers:
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 subsequent
popular misconceptions concerning the Christ, the Saviour, to come:
He said
to ALL, ‘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 wanted to help us recognize the sublime secret of Jesus:
communion with, prayer to, and trust in, His Father. Any manifestation and proof of that
relationship and bond was always an occasion of supreme blessing ... and we,
His present-day disciples, must appreciate that without ourselves being, in
like manner, able to turn confidently to the Father, that without such humble
prayer and filial communion with Him, we cannot come to a personal knowledge of
Jesus our Lord, or be able to truly appreciate, embrace, and further, His will
to save us and all mankind.
Moreover,
as we consider Luke’s account of Jesus’ experience of the Cross, we are
inevitably struck by His compassionate and monumental silence, and are led once
again to a realization that prayer to His Father was the ultimate medium for
Jesus’ self-expression and self-fulfilment, indeed, it was the very root of His
Being during those hours of total torment.
Consequently, our personal conformity to and enduring union with Him
will surely find its due measure of fullness and authenticity only to the
extent in which we are willing to embrace our own sufferings in His way, as His
most faithful Apostle St Paul penetratingly realized, personally embraced, and
inspiringly proclaimed (Phil. 3:8-11):
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.
And here,
dear People of God, we must recognize and respond to the devil’s great
endeavours now being made in these our days to rob us of, or at least, divert
us from Jesus’ truth.
For Our
Blessed Lord, became Man not simply to:
Open to
the house of David and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, a fountain to purify
from sin,
as we
heard in our first reading from the prophet Zechariah, but in order to redeem
the whole of mankind from servitude to sin and death, and He began and defined
His public ministry, as you well know, by calling for repentance from Israel. What
sort of repentance? Repentance for the
forgiveness of sins. What sins? Of that we must be absolutely clear and
unshakeably firm.
At a time
when Israel appeared rotten from top to bottom Elijah was sent to King Ahab and
indeed to Jezebel his bloody and Baal-worshipping consort, with these words:
Because
you have given yourself up to doing what is evil in the Lord’s sight, I
am bringing evil upon you: I will destroy you!
(1 Kings 21: 20s.)
Indeed,
no one gave himself up to the doing of evil in the sight of the Lord as
did Ahab, urged on by his wife Jezebel. (ibid. v.25)
Evil in
Israel was determined according to, and judged by, God’s word. In the Greek and Roman world, evil was
thought of and debated on in accordance with what sinful, though serious,
philosophers thought. In our modern world
evil is thought and spoken of largely in terms determined in accordance with
the chosen policies of self-serving governments and ever present
popular ‘slogan’ ethics (for everything must be popular!) based on
modern rationalist thinking originally trumpeted abroad by the French
Revolution.
Dear
fellow Catholics and Christians, we must remember that our vocation is to
proclaim, and in our words and by our way of life bear witness-to, the saving
Gospel of our God and Lord, Jesus Christ.
That is our supreme calling.
Sanctify
Christ Jesus as Lord in your hearts.
Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a
reason for your hope, but do it with gentleness and reverence. (1 Peter 3:15-16)
And for
that end we should not easily allow ourselves to be called on or provoked into discussions or arguments with people who
do not wish to hear that Good News; nor in speaking calmly with them should we
allow ourselves to be limited to the use of their terminology.
Those
recently murdered in Orlando, for example, were victims of a vile crime, but to
call them ‘innocents’ to be compared with school-children slaughtered elsewhere
is not terminology I as a Catholic priest am willing to accept or discuss. Certain public, ‘governmental’ words, such as
‘racist’ and ‘racism’ are seized upon time and time again and applied to all
sorts of incidents or crimes with seemingly, at times, little motive or
justification other than to stir up public feeling against whatever is being
targeted. What used to be commonly
understood and accepted as semi-jocular expressions (‘an Englishman, an
Irishman, and a Welshman were once talking together in a pub …’ type of thing)
are now labelled as ‘racist’ and consequently said to be deeply offensive and
hurtful-harmful in possibly numberless ways.
Therefore,
we must recognize that today words are very often and most deceitfully used as
weapons – especially by politicians and protagonists, who are specialists in
words! -- and we must be very careful whose words we accept, what hidden
meaning they may not only be carrying but be loaded with, and for what
particular purpose they are being used.
Dear
People of God, words have meanings and we cannot condone or accept the
use of Catholic words and terminology with other than their Catholic and
Christian meaning. For a
Catholic-Christian God’s word, Jesus’ Gospel, and Mother Church’s unfolding and
explanation of Jesus’ teaching, determine definitively what is sin and what is
sinful, what does or can serve a good purpose, and what cannot. ‘Marriage’, for example, ‘husband and wife’,
‘adultery’ are not indeterminate words to be discussed, bandied about and
changed at popular whim. Jesus was and
is God’s Word made flesh and we should treasure those words He Himself used and
which His Church teaches in His Name, with reverence, love, humility, and
commitment, always remembering Jesus’ admonition:
Whoever
wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake
will save it!
Words are
often used to climb the slippery pole of success in the world. They can, however, also be a most humble and courageous
witness to our love of Jesus.
