NewCreation

Homily for 12th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this homily for the 12th Sunday in Ordinary Time. And now we plunge back into the centre of Luke's Gospel. This was where we left off a long time ago, before Lent and Easter. So several months have gone by, but we now move on from very close to where we left off the last time. The last time we were with Luke, Jesus had called the twelve together and gave them power and authority over demons and to cure diseases. So he sent them out on the journey. After that, questions arose as to who he was, and Herod, the ruler, heard about it and got perplexed. He got perplexed because some people were saying that John had been raised from the dead — John the Baptist, whom Herod had killed. And some were saying that Elijah had appeared, which would be a sign that the final judgment, the day of the Lord, was about to appear, because it was assumed that Elijah came immediately before the end. And by others, that one of the ancient prophets had arisen. But Herod said, "Well, John I beheaded." So, in other words, it can't be him. "Who is this about whom I hear such things?" And he tried to see him. So there's, if you like, a lot going on about Jesus's reputation in the wake of him sending out these disciples. And the fact that he sent out twelve, standing in for the tribes of Israel, suggests that he's coming to fulfill something to do with Israel. So you can see why people would have thought the way they did. In other words, Jesus's messaging was getting across that he was doing something about the ransoming or the restoring of ancient Israel. The messaging was coming across. So after that, the disciples — or now apostles — return and tell Jesus what had happened, and then there follows the feeding of the five thousand. And during this, Jesus enacts Moses and he enacts Elisha, two other major prophets. Thus adding to the sense that people were going, "Who is this? What's he doing?" There was definitely a Mosaic element to the sign and definitely an Elisian element to the sign. And that was what the crowd were left with after this feeding, after the miraculous feeding. And it's at that stage, after the feeding of the five thousand, that we come to today's Gospel. Jesus and the disciples have moved away from the area of the five thousand. Mark gives quite a complicated account of different boat crossings, but Luke resumes all that. And we have: so once, when Jesus was praying alone… And the translation says here, "with only the disciples near him," to give the impression that Jesus was in fact alone, whereas the Greek says, "with only the disciples with him," suggesting that our notion of aloneness and their notion of aloneness were not the same. Alone could mean with other people around you, but not in a public form of prayer. So Jesus praying privately, meditating privately, with the disciples around, and without Jesus being bothered by that. But then he puts out this question to them: "Who do the crowds say that I am?" In other words, he wants to know how his messaging is going, whether they're getting across what he has been signing — what he's been creating signs of — by sending out his disciples, by producing the feeding of the 5,000. What is being understood by this? And the disciples reply in a manner that's very similar to Herod, because they've clearly heard the same stories, the same rumours have been going around. They answered, "Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others that one of the ancient prophets has arisen." So all well and good — there are the senses of the messaging going around. And strangely, Jesus doesn't seem to be concerned about that, and he says to them, "But who do you say that I am?" In other words, are you merely being amplifiers of the common voice, or are you filtering it somewhat, you understanding the message more clearly? And then Peter answers: "The Messiah of God" — "the anointed one of God." The Christian Mark's Gospel is just, "You are the Christ, you are the Messiah." Here it's "the Messiah of God." In other words, taking Jesus completely outside the realm of the prophetic, of the purely prophetic. Now, and again, one wonders whether it wouldn't have been nicer if Peter wasn't such a blabbermouth and hadn't let some of the others answer first. But Peter notoriously jumps in… And of course he gets it both absolutely right and absolutely wrong at the same time. Absolutely right in that this is in fact what Jesus is — he has seen it. But with this he risks the terrible, terrible misunderstanding. So Jesus sternly rebukes them and commands them not to say this to anyone. And here the translation says he sternly ordered and commanded them not to tell anyone, but the Greek is: he rebuked them and said, "Do not say this to anyone." In other words, it's that particular phrase, "the Messiah of God," that he doesn't want them to say. Not because it isn't true, but because it produces too much risk of radical incomprehension, with all the expectations that were around concerning the coming of the Davidic high priestly royal figure. That was expected — to have announced it beforehand would be great, great expectation. So the title doesn't help; it's the content that is the important thing. So this is how Jesus says effectively: listen, it's not the title, it's the content that matters here. And the content is going to be this: the Son of Man will undergo — must undergo, that's the whole of this project, which has been told in the prophets — implies the Son of Man undergoing great suffering and being rejected by the elders, chief priests and scribes. The elders — that's the political elite, these are amongst the Jewish people. The chief priests — that's the priestly elite, obviously. And the scribes — that's the intellectual elite. In other words, the messiahdom, that Jesus was the Holy One of God, would be bitterly contested both by the political, the religious and intellectual authorities. They would find very good reason to say that's not who he was. So in other words: the type of Messiah that I will be will not be available until all that has happened, and on the third day be raised. So the Hebraism: sometime shortly after, be raised. But it's quite clear here that Jesus is referring to prophecies like, for instance, the one which is our first reading — the rather beautiful one from Zechariah, about "they shall gaze on him whom they shall have pierced" and be covered with a spirit of compassion — but also, famously, the Isaiah servant songs, the references to the Son of Man in Ezekiel and in Daniel. So Jesus is saying: forget the title for the moment; this is a project. For this to be comprehensible, I'm going to have to do these things first, or else you're going to get it quite wrong. It's going to make it more difficult if this is going to be done publicly. So again, Jesus is managing the message. This is message control. Then he says to them all — and so here again we have a scene of Jesus alone in prayer, then surrounded by the disciples, who he knows have understood something, but who need to control the message, lest that produce a terrible misunderstanding. But then, for everybody else — and this is a rather important point — "if any of you want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily." and follow me. "For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it." That's the translation which I'm going to question a little bit in just a second. But so here he's saying, the project which I'm going to live into, and which is going to be very painful and full of rejection and ultimately death, and only then will it become clear who I am — that's something that everyone who wants to follow me lives into. You only become me by following the same path as I. I'm not saying that you are necessarily going to have to die for this; that's why this translation is not a good one. But the pattern of your life has very much got to be a pattern of life lived as if you were going to. So he says, "If anyone wants to become my followers" — in other words, to work out what I am and what I am doing — "then let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me." In other words, this is a daily thing. Jesus is here specifically not urging people to rush out quickly and become martyrs. He's urging people to do the much more difficult thing, which is to live this day with a lightheartedness towards your end, being able to give yourself away in the midst of whatever circumstances you face — which of course is a much more difficult thing to do than suddenly to give yourself away to martyrdom. One of the comments made about the Crusades was the number of these Norman and English knights who galloped off to the Holy Land in order to die, as they were unable to live — which is, for the Gospel, the wrong approach. Here the important thing is not the dying; it's the living into death. Let's look at these words. Jesus says, "For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it." The Greek is psyche — which is often translated, "those who save their soul will lose it, and those who lose their soul for my sake will save it." And the background Hebrew word, and the Aramaic equivalent, is nephesh. The nephesh means — it's actually a way of referring to your body. It's the whole bodily dynamic, the notion that you externalize yourself in part of yourself, that doesn't actually mean something vague; it means very concretely the whole of you as an intentional, deliberate body. Excuse my saying this, but the nearest thing, at least in modern American slang, is "your ass" — "get your ass over here," or "it's your ass on the line." That is the self externalized, as it were, into a body part. No one thinks that the rest of the body is not going to come to the meeting if you say "get your ass over here." But it means, get the really important part of yourself over here. that's really implicated in this. And every culture has a word or a phrase by which we externalize what is really important to us, what we would call in English our self, into a bodily movement, an intense bodily movement. That's why the reason I stress the bodilyness of this is because that's more or less obvious in the Semitic languages, but not at all obvious in our translations. "Give your life" suggests that it's a request for martyrdom. "Your soul" has become such a vague term for us that it means something ethereal. But no, this means: for those who want to save their asses — and as silly as that sounds — really will lose it. In other words, if you are frightened, if you are run by anxiety and want to run away, fight — for instance, the people of Israel in the desert who wanted to go back to Egypt because it felt safer than wandering through the desert for such a long time — and you lose. And those who are prepared to take a risk and throw themselves lightheartedly into the future, being perfectly prepared to lose their life, to get their asses handed to them as it were, those people are the ones who are going to save their asses. In other words, those are the ones who are going to be brought to life. But this is punchy, bodily stuff about where your heart is, where your ability to sit lightly to yourself — something like that we would say. But the point of it here is that Jesus is saying it's the content that counts, not the title. Just as he had explained after Peter said, "You are the Son of the Christ of God," the risk was the misunderstanding of the title. It's the content. This is what it's going to look like to be the Messiah of God. Don't use that word until it's done. And to anybody who wants to be like me, it's the content. It's the being able to sit loosely to yourself, give yourself away, live an oblation the whole time — that's the only thing that's going to make you like me, that's going to make me alive in you. So this is quite strong stuff, quite stern stuff. But Jesus is engaging in strong message control here. And we, I hope, are learning what it's going to be like to become his follower, what it's going to be like to give ourselves away, to sit lightheartedly to loss, to deprivation, to the thing referred to as denial here. Because we are receiving who we are from someone who is other than us. And it's as we let go that we are given. That, I think, is what's going on in today's Gospel, and we'll see more of that progress as we move on. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.