28 September 2018
Friday of the Twenty-fifth Week in Ordinary Time
When God appears on the scene as man in Jesus, everyone has an opinion about him. If they do not yet have faith, they do not recognize that he is God. “Who do the crowds say that I am,” Jesus asks in Luke 9. We hear the response: “John the Baptist; others, Elijah; still others, ‘One of the ancient prophets has arisen.’” These are not bad responses. They demonstrate a basic recognition on the part of the crowds that, in Jesus, something greater is at work. But only with the help of God’s grace can the one that Jesus calls “Rock” declare to Jesus his true identity, “the Christ of God.”
Jesus asks us, too, who people say that he is, and whom we think that he is. With the help of God’s grace, we can confess that Jesus is the Christ. But Jesus invites us still further. He invites us to see that the Christ (which means “Messiah” or “Anointed One”) is not anointed for any other life than that of a Love that gives itself for the sake of every last one of his brothers and sisters. Because he loves a people who does not love truly in return (I.e. us), “the Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected” so that our hardened hearts might begin to see what love truly is, and might perhaps finally begin to love also. This reality scared Peter and it might scare us. If this Love is who God is, then it is also where we are called to be. We had thought that it might be better some other way. But no, God’s is the best way. Let us ask God for the grace not only to recognize the Christ in Jesus, but also to let the Christ reveal to us through our lives what it means to be the Christ so that we might learn also what it means to be true Christians.