Twenty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time (A), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, August 26, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twenty-First Sunday of Ordinary Time, A, Vigil
August 26, 2023

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday. In it, he’s going to ask us the same two momentous questions he asked the apostles 2,000 years ago in Caesarea Philippi: “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” and “Who do you say that I am.” These get to Jesus’ real identity: Who is Jesus? And who is he in my life?
• In response to the first question, the apostles said that their informal poll showed that the people were numbering Jesus among the greatest figures, past and present, in Jewish history. Some, like the murderous Herod Antipas who had decapitated the Lord’s precursor, were saying Jesus was John the Baptist risen from the dead. Others were claiming he was Elijah, the greatest of all the prophets, the one whose return they believed would set the stage for the Messianic age. Others said he was Jeremiah, the one whom they believe had hidden the ark and the altar of sacrifice before the destruction of the Temple and the one they anticipated would return to reinstitute true worship. At the time Jesus asked the question, many of the Jews were accustomed to say that there had not been prophets for 400 years, and therefore, whoever Jesus was, the crowds believed that he was likely the greatest figure in four centuries. But as exalted as those estimations of Jesus’ reputation were, they weren’t even close. We can hear similar things today about Jesus. Many, including Christians, say that Jesus was a very good man, compassionate, kind, encouraged people to love, imparted a peaceful philosophy of life, or even was the holiest guy who ever lived. In short, they admire Jesus, but Jesus didn’t take on our human nature and die on Calvary for people’s approval or admiration. As CS Lewis once famously wrote, Jesus was either who he said he was — the Son of God made man — or a lunatic who mistakenly thought he was, or a fraud and one of the worst liars of all time. Merely a good man he wasn’t and simply couldn’t be.
• That’s why Jesus’ second question is so important. He asked his closest followers, “Who do you say that I am?” It’s clear that each of the apostles would have been grappling with the question of Jesus’ identity as they heard him preach, watched him heal the sick, cleanse lepers, exorcise demons, multiply food, walk on water and calm storms, but eleven of the 12 apostles stayed silent. They probably feared going on record, even if every ounce of their being recognized that Jesus was someone beyond what the mob was murmuring. Nathaniel, in fact, the first time he met Jesus cried out, “Rabbi, you are the son of God. You are the king of Israel” (Jn 1:49), pointing both to Jesus’ reality as son of David and son of the eternal Father. But for whatever reason, he was too reticent to say in front of the others what he had said to Jesus directly. Peter, however, took that risk. He stood up and boldly replied that Jesus was far more than a great prophet, far more than the greatest figure in centuries, far more even than Moses. He was the Messiah in Hebrew, the Christ in Greek, the anointed one in English, the long-awaited Savior whom the Jews had been expecting for a millennium. He was also, Peter said significantly, the Son of the Living God, the God who is alive and gives and holds us in life. Peter made a great act of faith, a bold profession holding nothing back, one that Jesus noted he couldn’t have said all on his own. “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah!,” Jesus said in reply. “For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.” Similarly, the only way one can confess Jesus to be Messiah, Son of God, Savior of the world, and Lord, he implied, is by a special grace of God the Father, who reveals this wisdom to us by the same Holy Spirit by which he revealed it to Simon Peter.
• And like Simon Peter, we need not just to receive but respond to God’s grace to confess Jesus in this way, to go out and give courageous witness that Jesus is the Savior and the long-desired of the nations. At the end of today’s Gospel, Jesus strictly ordered the apostles not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah because he feared that they would classify him according to their own political Messianic expectations instead of learn to accept Jesus on his own terms of mission. After the fulfillment of his mission with his passion, death and resurrection, however, Jesus has commanded and commissioned us to do the exact opposite, to go to the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature (Mt 28:16-20). This proclamation we make of Jesus’ true identity is not supposed to be some dry factual declaration, like a monotone, apathetic recitation of what we say in the Creed. It’s meant to a proclamation of someone we know intimately — like we would identify our husband or wife, or son or daughter, or brother or sister — done with joyful words and witness. As Pope Francis wrote in his exhortation Joy of the Gospel: “It is not the same thing to have known Jesus as not to have known him, not the same thing to walk with him as to walk blindly, not the same thing to hear his word as not to know it, and not the same thing to contemplate him, to worship him, to find our peace in him, as not to. … With Jesus life becomes richer and that with him it is easier to find meaning in everything.” God the Father will give us the grace that exceeds what flesh and blood reveals so that we, too, may proclaim Jesus’ identity in the midst of the world and how who he is grounds who we are.
• In this Sunday’s consequential conversation, it’s important that we also focus on Jesus’ confession about Peter. Jesus says, “For my part, I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.” We’ve heard the words of this Gospel so many times that we can miss their true shock value. Jesus changed the name of Simon to “Rock” (Kepha in Aramaic, Petra in Greek) and said that he was going to erect the continuance of his entire saving mission on him. The place where he made this confession is Caesarea Philippi, which I’ve had the privilege to visit many times in the Holy Land. It’s in the north of Israel, very close to the Syrian border. There’s a huge limestone mountain face where Philip the Tetrarch, one of the Herod the Great’s sons — the brother of Antipas and Archelaus — had built a temple to the pagan god of the wild and of sex, Pan or Ba’al. There was a huge cave in the mountain face that was considered at the time the gates of the netherworld from which a powerful stream would mysteriously emanate and where people would worship God by committing acts of bestiality. For Jesus there to say to Simon that he was the Rock was to emphasize how solid he would become after the descent of the Holy Spirit and how important would be his mission to strengthen his brothers. To promise that the gates of hell won’t prevail against the Church was to emphasize that the Church would triumph over the pagan worship encountered there and elsewhere. And to speak about the building of the Church there is important, because it is from there that the Jordan is born from that underground stream, a symbol of baptism by which people would enter into the Church built by Christ on Peter. Jesus chose Simon Peter and gave him his own incredible authority, symbolized by the keys of the kingdom of heaven and the power to bind and loose in heaven and earth. Jesus made Peter his vicar, his authoritative proxy, his definitive ambassador, to act in his name. Peter, having received those keys, has passed them down to his successors, right down until his 265th successor, Pope Francis. Sometimes the Popes will be great saints. Sometimes they’ll be pretty uninspiring men. On a few occasions, they have actually been notorious sinners. But Christ has continued to choose men to be his living Rock, to construct his Church on the papacy, to give the pope his keys, and to send the Holy Spirit to help the Pope in a particular way to confess him, to feed and tend the sheep he has entrusted to him, and to triumph over the gates of hell.
• That’s why, if we have faith in Jesus, we must have faith in his confession and his instituting the papacy. When the Pope writes or says something applying God’s revelation to the nitty-gritty situation of today’s world, we should listen to what he is saying, especially when he is teaching definitively about something on faith and morals. Do we read papal encyclicals and exhortations, by Pope Francis and his predecessors? Do we pay attention to the Angelus messages the Pope gives each Sunday and his Wednesday catecheses? Do we have reverence for the Holy Father? Some Catholics in every age stand in judgment over the pope, evaluating what he says on the basis of their personal preferences, and often weigh what the Pope teaches as less valuable than their own or others’ opinions about the way things ought to be. Sometimes they behave as if they believe they have a better grasp of God’s ways than the Successor of St. Peter on things that we need to believe or do to please God and enter fully into his life. This approach does not take seriously what Jesus has done. The Pope is infallible, of course, only when he teaches definitively about faith and morals, in union with the deposit of faith, and to be held by all people of all time, but that does not mean that the rest that he says is the equivalent of an opinion column in a high school newspaper. To believe in Christ means to believe in what Christ did in instituting the papacy, and to believe in the papacy means to reverence the pope, to pray for the pope, and to listen to the pope with greater attentiveness than to any other human being.
• This Sunday is an opportunity for us to join Simon Peter and shout out, with words and in our life, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God,” and order our life consistent with that confession, as Peter did. And it’s also a time to join Jesus in shouting out to Peter and all his successors, “You are Peter and on this rock Christ has built his Church,” to pray for him, and to build our life on him and his successors whom Jesus has made the living rock.

The Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

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