24th Sunday in Ordinary Time
St. Mary's Cathedral, Sydney
Is 50:5-9; James 2:14-18; Mk 8:27-35
+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
13 Sep 2009
In today's readings we deal with a number of central issues: who and what Christ is; the meaning of suffering and how we understand it and cope with it.
We should begin by making the obvious point that the gospels are quite different from contemporary biographies, because they are not trying to chart Our Lord's psychological development and therefore contain very little information about the first thirty years of Jesus' life apart from the information of the infancy narratives, especially in Luke's gospel and then the incident when Jesus was lost in the Temple as a young teenager (although there were no adolescents then, only a brutal transition to adult life).
The gospels were written to explain Jesus' central claims, to recount his deeds and his teachings. The Jews were strict monotheists, rejecting anything that hinted at reverence for the many pagan false gods that surrounded them. Naturally we share this strict monotheism with them and the Moslems (although neither of these religions has a Trinitarian concept of God), while Hindus often believe in many gods and Buddha himself was agnostic about God, saying nothing on the topic.
The Jews were expecting a Messiah, but from a Christian perspective they were searching for a different set of characteristics. The separation of Church and State is a recent development over the last couple of hundred years, which does not exist among the Moslems and which did not exist then for the Jews. Many were expecting a joint religious and political saviour figure like King David or King Solomon, who would liberate them from Herod and the Romans, as well as leading a religious revival. They were not expecting nor hoping for a suffering Messiah someone who would be so weak that he might be crucified as a young man.
When Peter professed his faith and acknowledged that Jesus was the Christ we should be clear about what he was saying. Christ is not a surname, like Smith or Nguyen, two of the most common names in the phonebook. Christ means the anointed one, someone anointed with the oil of chrism; a title given by the early Christians to acknowledge that he was the Messiah. So today a Christian is a follower of Christ, and a person who has been anointed in the sacraments of baptism and confirmation with the oil of chrism.
We are used to crucifixes, to praying to Our Lord on the cross, but this is not pagan common sense. The instinct is to expect a saviour to be a winner, if not an instant success. The resurrection does show that love and goodness will win out in the end, but there is a long story of evil, suffering and disappointment before the final triumph.
We should never pretend that some of Christ's teachings are not hard to put into practice. It can be hard to forgive others, hard to return good for evil, to turn the other cheek. We need a strong faith to accept and follow these demanding moral teachings.
I have great sympathy with Peter. Our Lord would have been a baffling figure to apostles – much loved by them, provoking their intense loyalty, but unpredictable.
They knew of the suffering servant in Isaiah, of the Jewish time of exile in Babylon; but they wanted all that out of the way. Like us, they did not want to be saved by suffering, much less by the suffering of their much loved leader: i.e. for them the notions of Messiah and suffering servant not linked.
I think we can all imagine ourselves saying to a friend that the worst will not happen to him, that we will do what we can to protect him and believe we can be successful. But Our Lord did not let Peter down gently, thanking him for his concern, explaining that the situation would in fact work out differently. He called him Satan, and told him to get out of the way, because he was thinking in pagan, commonsense terms, not with Godly perspectives.
A word or two about the second reading from plain speaking St. James which complements Christ's teachings about his own suffering. In this life God has no hands but ours, and our faith requires that we help others when they are in trouble. Faith does justice; faith requires us to act compassionately, to stick together in trouble. But in order to stick at being just and acting compassionately, we need faith. Otherwise we don't persevere, we run out of gas. James was right. Faith without works is nearly always dead.
A few today want to be Catholics without the Cross: they want to write their own ticket to do very little; to be told they don't need to repent, to be released from their burden of guilt without personal repentance. It is not in my power, nor in the power of Pope to speak like this! But it would not work, even if we talked so foolishly. Life and the Christian response are different.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
