Homily for 24th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
24th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Mark 8: 27-35

St. Theresa, Bronx
Sept. 11, 1988

“Jesus … asked his disciples, ‘Who do people say that I am?’” (Mark 8: 27).

Who is Jesus?  The question comes up repeatedly in Mark’s Gospel.  In fact, his Gospel is designed as an answer to just that question.  Its 1st verse announces “the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” builds to this scene at Caesarea Philippi, and climaxes with the centurion’s confession on Calvary:  “Truly this man was the Son of God” (15:39).

Peter confesses that Jesus is the Messiah

--unidentified stained glass (Wikipedia)

The Caesarea Philippi scene is a recognition scene—but a scene of recognition without understanding.  It’s not until we come to Calvary that recognition and understanding are reached.  Who is Jesus?  Seeing him dead on the cross, the centurion not only confesses, as Peter does today, but understands, as Peter plainly does not.

Generation after generation continues to ask who Jesus is.  That’s the core of the current film The Last Temptation of Christ.  It was the question Time posed in its cover story on the movie last month.  It’s such a fundamental question, because the answer needs regular reaffirmation, like the love between spouses.  You can’t say it just once and be done with it.

Who is Jesus?  The Gospel (as well as Kazantzakis’s novel and Scorsese’s film) answer that Jesus is the Christ, the anointed one of God come to save us and to inaugurate the reign of God, the messiah.

No sooner does Peter say this, presumably for all of Jesus’ disciples, than Jesus begins to teach that he must suffer and die.  Again Peter seems to speak for everyone, arguing and protesting.  How can God’s anointed one have that kind of a future?

Peter doesn’t understand.  The other disciples don’t understand.  I wonder whether you and I really understand.  If Christ must suffer, be rejected, and die, where does that leave us, his followers?  He tells us where it leaves us:  “If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow in my steps” (8:34).

You don’t want to do that.  I don’t want to do that.  Peter didn’t want to do that.  So Peter protested, and Jesus publicly rebuked him:  “Get behind me, Satan!  You’re not on God’s side but on man’s” (8:33).

As our experience has taught us over and over, suffering, rejection, and death are part of being human.  Saints and sinners alike suffer, are rejected by others, die.  Misunderstandings, differences of opinion, accidents, disease, financial miscalculations, and rush-hour traffic affect us all.  Some of our suffering comes from the natural world; some of it others inflict upon us, or we upon others; and some of it we inflict upon ourselves.

If human beings must suffer and die, doesn’t it make sense that our messiah, the one who leads us toward God’s heavenly kingdom, should identify with our condition, and should know not only human joy but also human pain?  I think it does.  I think we can believe a messiah, a Christ, who has suffered, who has died.  This man is real.  This man know us, our struggles, our hurts, our temptations, our joys.  This man’s sufferings and death give meaning to the death we must eventually experience.  In his rejection, suffering, and death, Jesus kept faith with God his Father and opened the way to the promised land, to eternal life.  In our own suffering and deaths, we can keep faith with God thru the power and example of Jesus Christ; we can share in his messiahship, offering faith, hope, and love to a world hungry for salvation.

Who is Jesus?  Peter evidently thought it was possible to be the messiah without being human, or thought humans could live in this present life without pain.  We know that Jesus had to struggle with that temptation too.  We recall his temptations to power and fame and wealth in the desert before he began his public ministry.  Today we hear Peter tempt him. We see him sweating with fear in the Garden of Olives, praying his Father take away the cup of suffering that lies ahead.  We listen to passers-by at Calvary, as St. Matthew describes the scene, mocking Jesus:  “If you’re the Son of God, come down from the cross.  He saved others; he can’t save himself.  He is the King of Israel; let him come down now from the cross, and we’ll believe him” (Matt 27:40,42).  The last temptation of Christ, as imagined by Kazantzakis, is really the same as the one Peter offers today:  to flee from pain and rejection, to try to be a man without having to face suffering and death, to run from the role of messiah.

Jesus saw all these as temptations, embraced his humanity, embraced his Father’s will, and embraced the cross when misguided men forced it on him.  Then his identity was plain even to the pagan soldier:  “Truly this man was the Son of God.”  Jesus encourages us to follow him, not just to Calvary, but thru Calvary to resurrection and life.

The Martyrdom of St. Peter (Lionello Spada)