Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, September 11, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Vigil
September 11, 2021

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, when we will eavesdrop and participate in perhaps the most pivotal dialogue in the Gospel, when Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” and “Who do you say that I am?”
• 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. 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 to be more than the Messiah, but 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. 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 his party in collaboration with 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 continued the consequential conversation by calling of them 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. 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^thanniversary 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.
• “Who do you say that I am?” As we prepare, with all the Church, to confess Jesus as Messiah and Son of God on Sunday, and 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.

The Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

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