Who Do We Say Jesus Is?, 24th Sunday (B), September 15, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
September 15, 2024
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 the homily: 

• Today in the Gospel Jesus asks his closest followers two related questions that are among the most important for students and any of us to get right. The first question is, “Who do people say that I am?” The apostles were eager to respond to this poll of what other people were thinking and saying. They informed Jesus that the multitudes were numbering him among the greatest Jewish heroes of all time, like the prophets Elijah and Jeremiah, and, more recently, John the Baptist. Some, of course, like many of the Scribes and Pharisees, were of a different opinion. They thought he was a blasphemer, a drunkard, a friend of sinners and even diabolical, working miracles by the power of the prince of demons. Others, like the Romans and their collaborators among the Sadducees and Herodians, thought Jesus was a dangerous man, perhaps a revolutionary. But none of these answers was the right one. Truth is not determined by polls, or by what people believe. Jesus was far greater than Elijah, Jeremiah and John the Baptist. He was greater than Abraham, Moses, David and Solomon. And it wasn’t enough for him to have scores of “fans” and “admirers,” because he hadn’t come into the world to be a celebrity followed by millions but as a savior, and the first step in that salvation was for people to relate to him as he truly was.
• Similarly in our day, there remains great confusion about who Jesus is. Who do people say that Jesus is today? Most everyone knows about him. About 2.5 of the 8 billion people alive profess 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, their fellow Jew, a heretic, blasphemer and leader of a schismatic sect. Most of the human race considers him a famous moral teacher, alongside Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, certain Hindu gurus, and various figures in own age like Ghandi, Martin Luther King and others. Various secularists, like the ancient Romans, thought he was a maverick rebel. Some regard him, out of dislike for his teaching, as a bad man, a loser, a judgmental misogynist, homophobe and transphobe, proto-Marxist, a pacifist, and rebel. As I mentioned last week, one Columbia professor in Contemporary Civilizations believes Jesus is a psychopath like Hitler or Lenin. 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 it’s never enough to remain at the level of what others say. It’s never enough for us to consult Wikipedia or ChatGPT. It’s never enough for us even to echo what the Catechism teaches, or the Doctors of the Church, Popes, Bishops, and saints have said, or what our parents, grandparents and godparents have taught us. All of that is helpful, but it’s not sufficient. Just like Jesus does in the Gospel with his first followers, so he wants to do with us: to pass from the informative, “Who do people say that I am?,” to the highly personal and consequential query, “Who do you say that I am?” We Christians are those who profess that Christ is more than just a holy and good man, more than an inspiring prophet who announces ethical, even divine, words and ways. We are the people who confess, with Peter and the Church built on him, who Jesus really is, who Jesus himself says he 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 not only announces the words of God, but is their Author. As C.S. Lewis made famous in his classic Mere Christianity, it’s really not sustainable that Jesus can remain just a great moral teacher, because he claimed to be the Son of God. This realization assisted in his own conversion from atheism to the Christian faith. Either Jesus is who he says he is, or he is a lunatic who crazily considered himself divine, or he is a diabolical liar who tried to pretend he was divine. Lewis writes, “You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can … kill him as a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” The great Oxford don concludes, “It seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.”
• When Jesus asked his second question in the Gospel, however, all but one of the apostles seemed to have come up with a case of sudden onset laryngitis. Whereas everyone was willing to share the results of the survey as to how others were identifying Jesus, in response to the question as to who each of them thought Jesus was, all but one lacked the courage to say anything out loud. I’ve always been stunned that Nathaniel, a.k.a Barthlomew, didn’t speak up. In his first conversation with Jesus, after Jesus said he had seen him under the fig tree, he exclaimed, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God, you are the King of Israel” (Jn 1:49). The latter meant he was the Messiah, the son of David the King; the former meant far 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 much more 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, the former tax collector 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 — and not in a good way. 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 publicly executed. 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 there would be confusion or misinterpretation, but that they would all know it clearly. To get a sense of their shock, it would be like someone who had just won a Presidential election in his victory speech saying that, rather than lead his supporters and the country to prosperity, power and peace as they hoped, he would instead be seized by members of his party in conspiracy with the opposing parties and various foreign powers, be humiliated, tortured, and finally hung from the most famous national monument in the capital.
• But Peter, emboldened by his previous affirmation and obviously desiring not only to be the principal advisor of the Messiah but chief 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 far 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 followthe Lord. To tell him to get behind him was to make him a disciple rather than a roadblock. Jesus 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 aspirations and personal ambitions, rather than with the eyes of faith, the eyes that God seeks to give us. Peter at first grasped 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 realize 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 Jesus called them all together and said that not only would he suffer, but if we sought to remain with him, we must suffer, too. These are among the most challenging words in the Gospel and therefore among those we are most tempted to water down and ignore. “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 goals, pick up his own noose, and follow him to the national monument to be hung alongside him. But as the Church pondered and celebrated yesterday on the Feast of the Triumph of the Cross, the cross Jesus is asking us to assume is not fundamentally an instrument of torture, pain and suffering but a sign and means of the love that can make even that much pain and suffering bearable. Instead of being principally an instrument of torture, humiliation and death, for Christ and the Christian, the cross is a weapon of holiness, a sign of victory over selfishness, sin and the death to which they lead.
• Let’s get to the practical applications of this dramatic encounter Jesus had with the apostles in Caesarea Philippi and has with each of us today at Columbia.
• The first lesson is we have to know our faith. In the context of so many who misidentify Jesus, we need to know that Jesus is not who most in the crowds today think he is. We need to know our faith well enough not to lose it in conversation with them, or in the classroom, or when someone with a religious studies doctorate pronounces the latest recycled heresy du jour. We likewise need to know our faith well enough to be able, like C.S. Lewis did at Oxford, and so many have done in other circumstances, patiently to show how such assertions don’t cohere, are inadequate to the facts, and more.
• The second lesson is that we need to do more than know correctly who Jesus is and believe in him. We also need to have the courage, like St. Peter, to profess that faith publicly: to announce that Jesus is the long-awaited one, the eternal Son of God, savior, Lord, Good Shepherd, Good Samaritan, the Way, the Truth, the Resurrection and the Life, and the King of the Universe who has come to invite us into that eternal kingdom. It’s hard sometimes to go on the record. In the midst of a cancel culture in which those who want to eliminate others have intimidated them in general to live as cowards, to betray Jesus and his teachings and in the process betray what’s deepest about themselves, the Lord wants us to be the first, like Peter, to step up in his defense. Not to wait until someone else says it first, or until many say it, or until 50.1 percent of people say it. But in response to the grace of God who has helped us to see this most important truth in life, to say it so that others may come to know it and profess it, too. Jesus said in the Gospel, “Everyone who acknowledges me before others, I will acknowledge before my heavenly Father” (Mt 10:32). He wants us not just to believe in him, not just to be a secret disciple, but to acknowledge him! St. Paul wrote to the first Christians in Rome that it wasn’t enough just to believe in Jesus in our heart, but he said we need to “confess with [our] mouth that Jesus is Lord” (Rom 10:9). Jesus wants us, he’s counting on us, to do that here on campus. We know so many people who need Jesus just as much as we do, who are suffering without his light, who are doubling down on bad decisions, trying to seek solace, happiness and meaning down paths that will never lead there. They need the Divine Physician and are just waiting for us to make a persuasive referral. They know they need saving but they don’t know yet where and how and to Whom to turn. That’s one of the reasons why Jesus gave us the talents needed to get into Columbia, that’s why we are alive and here right now. But Jesus doesn’t want us just to say to him who we know he is, but to confess him to others, so that they might come to know him at the depth he out of love wants to be known.
• The third application is to put our confession into action. Our faith in Christ, however, must be more than something we believe in our heart and say on our lips. It must be something we proclaim by the way we live. That’s why Jesus speaks to us about conforming our life to his, getting behind him rather than trying to lead him, thinking as he thinks rather than the crowds. 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 all the way. 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. That’s the type of life 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. Our confession can’t remain, he implies, just interior or verbal. It must translate into our body language. The apostle underlines, “Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” If faith remains simply a thing of the head and doesn’t affect the heart, the hands, the feet, and our choices, then it is powerless. If faith is alive, then it produces works of faith, it overflows into deeds of love (see Gal 5:6; 1 Cor 13:2). That’s why St. James gets very practical, to help us to determine if our faith is alive, if our confession is consistent. “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 or even empathize with those in difficult situations. We must act on that concern and compassion 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 malnourished and starving for the word of God. The question for us is: What are we trying to do about it? The same Lord who asks us, “Who do you say that I am?,” then tells 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.” Our faith, if it is alive, must translate into the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. Every time we do, we are confessing that Jesus, the Messiah and Son of God, lives. Every time we don’t even try, we may be confessing that our faith is dying or dead. As Jesus says today, 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.
• So the question recurs. Jesus asks each of us: “Who do you say that I am?” Who do we say he is on Sunday? Who do we say he is on Friday and Saturday nights? Who do we say he is when we go to bed and wake up? Who do we say he is in the classroom, or the sports field, or at our internships? Who do we say he is with our friends? Who do we say he is on Instagram and social media? Who do we say he is when we meet him in the distressing disguise of the poor and needy? Who do we say he is when we’re underdoing temptations? Together with God the Father, Jesus sends the Holy Spirit to help us profess him, with integrity and consistency, at all times of our life, to make our whole life a response to his question. There have been times of course in each of our lives when we haven’t lived up to professing Jesus as he deserves, but tonight is a chance for us to renew our commitment to proclaim our faith in him full-time, with boldness, just like Peter and the other apostles did after Pentecost. Our cooperation with the grace of God tonight to commit to that is one way for us to know if our faith is truly alive.
• Every Mass we’re given the opportunity to confess who Christ is. Here we profess that he has the words of eternal life as we listen to him speak to us in the Liturgy of the Word. Here we likewise have the awesome gift to be able to proclaim him in the Holy Eucharist. During this Eucharistic Revival, it’s important for us to grasp that our response to Jesus in the Eucharist manifests our reply to the question he poses in the Gospel. If we confess the Eucharistic Jesus to be the Messiah and Son of God, then we will seek to order our whole life to the fulfillment of the Last Supper, Calvary and the Empty Tomb, which is our Eucharistic communion with him. To live a Eucharistic life is 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 him for the salvation of the world. When Jesus is lifted up at the consecration, when he’s shown as the Lamb of God, hear him tonight whispering to you, “Who do you say that I am?,” and respond interiorly in preparation for responding publicly, “You are the Christ! You are the Son of the Living God! You are my Savior! You are my Good Shepherd! You are my Way, my Truth, my Life!” Blessed indeed are those called to the Supper of the Lamb!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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