Fully Confessing and Faithfully Following Christ, 24th Sunday (B), September 12, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs, Auriesville, New York
Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
September 12, 2021
Is 50:5-9, Ps 116, James 2:14-18, Mk 8:27-35

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided today’s homily: 

• There’s great confusion today about who Jesus Christ is. Most everyone knows about him. About 2.5 of the 7.8 billion people alive profess themselves to be his followers. Muslims think he was just a prophet, like the other famous prophets in Jewish history. Many of the leading Jews, then and now, deem him a heretic and a blasphemer. The ancient Romans thought he was a revolutionary. The vast majority of people consider him a famous moral teacher, alongside Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, various Hindu gurus, and various figures in own age like Ghandi, Martin Luther King and others. Even among Christians, there are many who, rehearsing the Christological heresies of the first centuries, deny or underemphasize Jesus’ divinity or humanity leading to all types of issues at the level of faith and morals. That’s why what Jesus does for his first followers is so important for each of us today. He surveys first, “Who do people say that I am?” and then he asks each of us, “Who do yousay that I am?” We are the people who say that Christ is more than just a holy and good man, more than an inspiring prophet who announces divine words and ways. We are the people who confess, with Peter, who Jesus really is. This is the faith that brings us together: Jesus is not merely the long-awaited Messiah come to set us free, but the Son of God, who does not only announce the words of God, but is their Author. But our faith in Christ must be more than something we say on our lips. It must be something we confess by the way we live. And that’s what Jesus today is going to help us to do, because many of us make the same mistakes the people of Jesus’ day, even his followers, did.
• In response to the first question, the poll of what other people were saying, the disciples were eager to respond. They informed him that the people were numbering Jesus among the greatest Jewish heroes of all time, like the prophets Elijah and Jeremiah, and, more recently, John the Baptist. But Jesus didn’t stop there. First, because it wasn’t enough to rest on what the surveys said, to rely on what others believed, despite the exalted circles into which people were placing Jesus. Second, because the assessments weren’t true. Jesus was far greater than Elijah, Jeremiah and John. He was greater than Abraham, Moses, David and Solomon. Third,because Jesus didn’t want those with him merely to remain “fans” or “admirers” of him because that would not set them on the path on which he had come into the world to lead them.
• And so he asked the second question, “Who do you say that I am?” At this point, all but one of the disciples remained mute. It was easy to communicate what the crowds were saying, but to put oneself on the line, to make a personal, public confession, required courage and conviction. I’ve always found it somewhat surprising considering, for example, what the apostle Nathaniel or Bartholomew said when he first met Jesus. He said, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God, you are the King of Israel” (Jn 1:49). The latter meant he was the Messiah; the former more than the Messiah. But this time he timidly kept his mouth shut. Simon Peter, however, put out into the deep. God the Father had led him to recognize that Jesus was indeed far greater even than what the others were saying and had the guts to be the first to say it. “You are the Christ!,” he said. Christ, the Greek word for Messiah, communicated that Jesus was the long awaited one foretold by all the prophets. In St. Matthew’s version of the scene, he recalls Peter’s also confessing Jesus, like Nathaniel, to be the very own Son of God. To make that admission was to bring into the foreground a whole series of expectations. The Messiah was to be the one who would bring back the Kingdom of David, who would kick out all foreign powers, who would return Israel to prominence. And as we see in other parts of the Gospel, Jesus’ closest followers were all ambitiously hoping to receive choice positions in Jesus’ messianic administration.
• That’s why, as soon as Peter enunciated Jesus’ true identity, Jesus began to teach them what type of Messiah he would be, how he would inaugurate his kingdom, and how they were share in and announce it. It blew their mind. Rather than uniting the Jews and defeating and expelling the Romans, rather than leading the twelve tribes to triumph, he would instead suffer greatly, be rejected by the chief priests, the scribes and the elders and be killed. He would fulfill the prophecies of the Suffering Servant Songs in Isaiah, which we heard in the first reading, in which he would give his back to those who beat him, his cheeks to those who plucked his beard, his face to those who would buffet him and spit on him. Jesus told them all of this “openly,” St. Mark tells us, so that they would know it clearly. To get a sense of their shock, it would be like someone just won the U.S. Presidential election and in his victory speech, he said that rather than lead his supporters and the country to greatness, he would instead be seized by members of the opposing party and various foreign powers, be humiliated, tortured, and finally hung from the Washington monument.
• But Peter, emboldened by his previous affirmation and obviously desiring not only to be the principal advisor of the Messiah but bodyguard, took Jesus aside and “began to rebuke him.” “God forbid anything like this should happen to you!,” he said, according to St. Matthew’s eyewitness account. He couldn’t fathom that a Messiah would be rejected and killed rather than conquer. It was totally incompatible with Jewish Messianic expectations for the long-awaited one to suffer in this way. But Jesus wanted to help him and all of the apostles recognize that, yes, he was the Messiah, but his kingdom and the liberation he was bringing were different than what they were expecting. He tells Peter not “Get away from me!” but “Get behind me!” Jesus wasn’t ridding himself of Peter, but he was pointing out what Peter had been trying to do, lead the Lord rather than follow the Lord. To tell him to get behind him was to make him a disciple rather than a roadblock. He also told him the reason why he was behaving like an obstacle: “You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.” Peter was seeing only with human eyes, from human political hopes, rather than with the eyes of faith, the eyes that God seeks to give us. Peter at first saw what the crowds didn’t, that Jesus wasn’t just one of the prophets of old, but rather the Messiah. But Jesus was helping him to see the type of Messiah he really is, rather than just Peter imagined he would be, so that Peter — and all the others — would be able to confess him in far greater depth.
• So he called them all together and said that not only would he suffer, but if we sought to remain with him, we must suffer too. “Whoever wishes to come after me,” he said, whoever wants to share in his kingdom and reign with him, “must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me.” As if that is not challenging enough, he adds: “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.” To use the analogy given before, Jesus was saying that anyone who wanted to support him would have to say no to worldly ambitions, pick up his own noose, and follow him to the Washington monument.
• Let’s bring the conversation around. Jesus asks each of us, individually and constantly, what he asked his first followers. “Who do you so that I am?” It’s not enough for us to rest on what others say, on what the Catechism teaches, about what the Doctors of the Church, or the Pope, or the Bishops, or our parents, grandparents and godparents have said. All of that is helpful, but it’s not sufficient: we all must make a consequential admission, to state clearly who Jesus is and to conform our life to that truth, getting behind him, thinking as God does, denying ourselves, picking our own cross daily and following him. It’s obvious that this is a very challenge reality, because, just like at Peter’s time, these commands go against worldly ways. Rather than affirming ourselves, Christ calls us to deny ourselves. Rather than fleeing from suffering, Christ tells us to seize the Cross and die out of love for God and others. Rather than doing our own thing, he tells us to follow him. Rather than seeking to save our life by our own wits, he tells us that the only way to save it is to lose it in loving service of God and others, perhaps even to the point of death.
• This is what St. James points to in today’s second reading when he distinguishes between living faith in Jesus and dead faith with no power to save. “Faith by itself, if it has no works,” the apostle tells us, “is dead.” If faith remains simply a thing of the head and doesn’t affect the heart, the hands, the feet, our choices, then it is powerless. If faith is alive, then it produces works of faith, it leads to works of love (see Gal 5:6; 1 Cor 13:2). That’s why he gets very practical, to help us to determine if our faith is alive. “If a brother or sister,” he states, “is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?” It’s not enough, he’s saying, that we be “concerned” for others, that we sympathize with those in difficult situations. We must act on that concern and sympathy by doing what we can to help those in need. To have living faith we need to do more than know and approve of Jesus’ statement, “Love one another as I have loved you,” but to put that Christ-like love into practice. There are people around us who do not have proper clothing, who lack daily food. There are many more people who are not “clothed in Christ” (Gal 3:27), who are “spiritually poor” as Mother Teresa said, who are malnourished and starving for the word of God. The question for us is: What are we trying to do about it? Our faith, if it is alive, must translate into the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.
• We live in a self-affirming age and Jesus calls us to self-denial so that we might have self-mastery and be capable of self-gift. We live in a hedonistic age that is addicted to pleasure and phobic about pain and Jesus calls us to take up or seize (rather than just reluctantly accept) the Cross, the instrument on which we will die to ourselves, so that he in turn may live. Then he calls us to follow him as he gives his life for others’ salvation, as he washes other people’s feet, as he calls us to love others as he has loved us first. He asks us, “Who do you say that I am?,” and then reminds us, “I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you gave me welcome, naked and you gave me clothing, ill and you gave me comfort, in prison and you visited me.” To confess Jesus is, therefore, something we do not just with our lips, but with our lives, as we choose to have among ourselves the same attitude Jesus did, who, as St. Paul reminds us, “though he was in the form of God, … emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, [and]  humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.” The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council stressed this when they said, “Christ fully reveals man to himself and makes his supreme calling clear,” and indicated that we are called to follow him on the path of cruciform self-giving love: “Man cannot find himself except in the unselfish gift of himself to others” (Gaudium et Spes, 22, 24). We must “lose” ourselves to gain life. We must die to ourselves and allow God to raise us from the dead. We must unselfishly give ourselves for others. This is Christianity. This is the Gospel.
• As we mark the 20^th anniversary of the diabolical terrorist attacks of 9/11 and pray for all those who died and their families who continue to mourn their loved ones’ absence, we also recall with admiration and gratitude all those who gave their lives trying to save others, the heroic first responders, the valiant passengers on United 93, the multitudes who lined up to give blood, the boat owners who formed a flotilla to rescue people from lower Manhattan, the soldiers who went to Afghanistan in the hunt for the terrorists and to attack their capacity to recapitulate these horrors and so many others. For me, living in New York, whenever I visit the 9/11 Museum, what always arrests me is the Ground Zero Cross, discovered in the ruins of 6 World Trade Center, rescued, moved, and blessed by Fr. Brian Jordan, OFM, and underneath the arms of which Father Jordan celebrated Mass for first responders, construction workers, family members of the victims, troops heading overseas and others. The Ground Zero Cross is far more than two pieces of perpendicular steel. Like Jesus’ cross on Calvary, it’s more than a reminder of an enormous pain and suffering, but of hope, how God always seeks to bring good out of evil, through suffering heroically and faithfully embraced. As Pope Francis declared from within the 9/11 Museum in 2015: “This place of death became a place of life too, a place of saved lives, a hymn to the triumph of life over the prophets of destruction and death, to goodness over evil, to reconciliation and unity over hatred and division.” The heroism in response to terrorism, the good in response to evil, life in response to death, is the path on which Jesus calls us all, when we confess who really is and confess who we really are, who are so awesomely privileged to be called Christians or little Christs.
• Every Mass we’re given the opportunity to confess who Christ is when the proclaims “The Gospel of the Lord” and “The Body of Christ.” We’re supposed to listen to Jesus’ words just like the apostles tried in Caesarea Philippi and elsewhere. We’re called to receive him with the faith of Mary at the Annunciation and St. John at the Last Supper. We’re called to be transformed by both the Word of God and the Word made Flesh to put this faith into action. That’s something that Pope Francis called us all to do this morning in Budapest, Hungary, at the end of the international Eucharistic Congress. He told us that we must all pass from admiring Jesus to imitating him, to proclaiming who he in prayer to proclaiming who he is among all we meet. “The Eucharist,” he says, “is before us to remind us who God is. Jesus shows himself to us as broken Bread, as love Crucified and given. We can add a lot of ceremony, but the Lord remains there, in the simplicity of a Bread that lets itself be broken, distributed and eaten. He is there. To save us he becomes a servant. To give us life, he dies. And whoever opens himself to this announcement of Jesus opens himself to the second passage,” which is to make a Eucharistic self-gift, to imitate Jesus’ outpouring on Calvary, to stop thinking as human beings do but as Jesus does, and to stop acting like all the rest, but to imitate Jesus, to follow Jesus, and to collaborate with Jesus and all those he calls to be his collaborators, becoming bread broken for the world.

• “Who do you say that I am?” As we, with all the Church, confess Jesus as Messiah and Son of God, and as we prepare to receive him within in Holy Communion, let us ask him for the grace that in all actions we may witness to him, by the faithful, courageous way we, with him, lose our lives to give them out of love for him and others.

Today’s readings were: 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download