NewCreation

Homily for Sunday 24th in Ordinary Time, Year B

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this, the homily for the 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time. And as you can see, I have a different backdrop than usual. I'm in the house of a friend in Mexico, in Cuernavaca, Mexico. So this will be the first of three Sundays in which, on each occasion, I will be in a different house until I get back to my home in Madrid at the end of September. In today's Gospel, the Gospel where Saint Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ, this takes us to the very centre of Saint Mark's Gospel. This is the halfway point. Everything has been building up to here, and then from here on a new dimension will start. Jesus will start going back to Jerusalem and to his death, as we'll see. But in order to understand how we have got here, we've jumped over in fact two or three Gospel sections between last week's Gospel — where we saw Jesus healing a man who was deaf and had an impediment in his tongue — between that passage and today's Gospel. A number of things have happened. One of them was the feeding of the four thousand, with seven baskets of fragments left over. And you'll remember that with the five thousand there had been five loaves and twelve baskets left over, signifying the five books of the Torah and the twelve baskets signifying the twelve tribes of Israel. But here we have four thousand, with the four signifying the cardinal points — north, south, east and west — meaning the Gentiles, and the seven fragments left over referring to the seven Noachide laws, the laws which were supposed to govern the way the Gentiles behave. In other words, this is Jesus' move towards the land of the Gentiles. You'll remember that it's in this mixed territory between Gentiles and Jews where Jesus is performing his healings and teaching, and it's where the Pharisees have sent worried emissaries to see whether he's got his evangelization technique right. And Jesus puts his disciples on guard against the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod — resolving things by excessive purity, resolving things by political shenanigans. He's about something quite different. And then immediately before today's Gospel we have a particular healing, the healing of a blind man, with a rather particular story in it, because Jesus first of all lays hands on the man and asks whether he can see. He says yes, I can see upside-down men walking like trees. Then Jesus lays his hand on him again and this time he can see brightly, as the Gospel says. And Jesus tells him not to tell anybody and lets him go away. He's done this very privately. But the interesting thing is this vision of people walking like trees, because one of the things which you'll notice in today's Gospel is Jesus makes a reference to carrying the cross, and many of us think, "Oh well, that must have been stuck in there afterwards." I would suggest now — at least my guru, whom I rely on, Duncan Durrett says no. In the healing of the man born blind and the reference to the men stumbling like trees, walking like trees, we have a reference to the Book of Lamentations. One of the prophecies in those days is that princes will be hung up by their hands and men will stagger along under loads of wood. It's towards the very end of the Book of Lamentations. It's also one of the prophecies of the end times that when the blind see, they will see what seemed like fields turn into forests; the fields of Lebanon will be turned into forests. In other words, it may well be that Jesus here was picking up something about when it was going to be the right time to tell the disciples what was going to happen, and that in the reaction of this blind man he got a sense that the prophecies concerning the men staggering under loads of wood would be coming true, and that now is going to be the time to tell his disciples what's going to happen next. So this is part of the build-up to Jesus then asking them the question. So here we get in today's Gospel. Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi. Now here's the point. This is the very, very farthest northern reach of the Holy Land, the farthest northern reach of the Israelite territory. Up till now it's been the mixed land with Jews and Gentiles left over from the period of Joshua. By the time you get to Caesarea Philippi you're in a pagan town. This was a town formerly called Panias, for the god Pan, which Philip the Tetrarch had renamed Caesarea Philippi. So the town of Caesar, courtesy of Philip — so he gives himself a little boost in the naming as well. This is a pagan town. So here Jesus is actually bringing, if you like, the apostolic group to the very edge of Israel, at the very point from which shortly they will be launching out into the completely Gentile world. This is the furthest reach to which he takes them. On the way there he asks his disciples, "Who do people say that I am?" Now I'm assuming that Jesus isn't simply, you know, a worried YouTuber or Instagrammer who's concerned with how many likes he has. He's trying to get from them whether they're going to be ready for what he's got to start teaching them next. And they answered him: "John the Baptist." Okay, John the Baptist. Some say John the Baptist. John the Baptist had been killed. John the Baptist was his cousin. And if people said that he was John the Baptist, it's because they were believing in some kind of miraculous resurrection, some kind of more or less ghostly appearance — which is what Herod was worried about, because he knew he'd put John the Baptist to death and thought that Jesus might be John come back to haunt him. So the wrong sort of resurrection. And others said Elijah. Elijah famously was associated with the resurrection, because he had been carried to heaven in a chariot, and it was assumed that he was going to come at the end of time. He was the one who would come just before the coming in of the kingdom. And still others said one of the prophets. And he asked them, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, so that's what other people say, but who do you say that I am?" And Peter, or the rock, answers him: "You are the Christ, you are the Messiah." Now please notice that Peter is not the first time — Peter's answer is not the first time this phrase has appeared in the Gospel. Before, it has only appeared in the mouths of demons. Jesus has been casting out — in different, slightly different ways of referring to this reality — the holy one of God, the Son of God, the demons. The demons have known who's coming, and Jesus has always rebuked them and told them to remain silent. But here, Peter, for the first time, a human says it. And this is quite shocking, because from now on Jesus is going to be teaching the human meaning of Messiahdom. From the demons' point of view, it merely meant that they were out of here, that there was a power greater than them. But now it comes to teaching humans what it means. And so Jesus sternly orders them not to tell anyone about him. He sternly reproved them not to tell anyone about him. It's interesting: he doesn't say not to tell them this about him, that he's the Messiah, but not to tell anyone about him, not to talk about him at all. And I suggest that this, rather than being, you know, playing fast and loose — saying if I tell them not to, they'll tell more — I suggest this is because Jesus now knows that his, if you like, the disciples' novitiate course is really going to get dense. This is the point from which he is going to be teaching them what the Messiahdom means, and that is going to be very difficult. He doesn't want them batting crazy ideas about, because that will get them and him into trouble. This is going to be the beginning of the phase of his teaching which is most important if anyone is to understand what he is really about. It says: "Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again." Okay. He must undergo great suffering, must suffer many things, be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes. That's the technical trio that formed the Sanhedrin. The elders were lay people, the priests represented the Temple, and the scribes represented, if you like, the tradition, the news, all the media, all of that. So these are the three groups that form Israel, and he is to be rejected by them. And of course the word used is the same word as is used when God tells Samuel, when the people of Israel come to ask him to make them a king. Samuel says to the Lord, "What should I do?" And the Lord says to Samuel, "They have not rejected you, they have rejected me." So it's the same verb in Hebrew that's being used behind that phrase. So it's Israel rejecting. He's talking about the fulfillment of that prophetic rejection. To be killed and after three days to rise again. After three days we tend to think of that mathematically. Actually the phrase probably meant after a short number, a short period of days. It was probably a vaguer phrase than we are accustomed to thinking. It appears quite frequently in Scripture meaning a short time later. Then it says he said all this quite openly. And this is quite important because there's a moment of open teaching, famous open teaching, in the Hebrew Scriptures where the Lord says — this is in Numbers, this is when Aaron and Miriam are getting jealous of Moses — and the Lord says that when there are prophets among you, "I, the Lord, make myself known to them in visions, I speak to them in dreams. Not so with my servant Moses; he is entrusted with all my house. With him I speak face to face, clearly, not in riddles, and he beholds the form of the Lord." So here is the Lord speaking to his disciples face to face, clearly, and not in riddles. In other words, this is the equivalent of the Lord speaking to Moses. And he says this entirely openly and he says this to their faces. Then it says and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. Took him aside — it's not quite to take him aside, it's more like takes him up, and takes him by. It's the same word in which in the Septuagint the Lord catches up the righteous man who is about to perish. It's a word which almost invariably in the Septuagint is used of the Lord catching someone up. So Peter taking him aside is doing exactly the reverse of this. It's an ironic usage, and begins to rebuke him with the same verb which Jesus has just told them all not to say anything. Jesus rebukes them, orders them not to say anything, and Peter begins to try and put him aside. In other words, Peter seems to think that he is the Moses figure who goes alone with the Lord, but he seems to have got the roles switched around, because he's acting as if he were the Lord to Moses. So Jesus, but turning and looking at his disciples — so here we have the Lord turning and seeing face to face the disciples — he rebukes Peter, treating Peter as one of them, not as a special one. There is going to be no Moses in this group. And says, "Get behind me, Satan, for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things." In other words, whatever it is that Peter was trying to dissuade Jesus from, the way he has just set out speaking clearly — he's got it in palinton and has become an obstacle, a stumbling stone rather than someone helpful. And Jesus is absolutely refusing the being taken aside. He wants to make it quite clear to all the disciples. They are, as it were, gathered in, contained within the rebuke. Then he calls the crowd with his disciples. So again, this moment with the Lord no longer speaking through Moses, now speaking directly to the disciples because they need to be prepared, and to the crowd, then says to them all, and hence to all of us — this is what the disciples after the resurrection have to go back to Galilee for, so as to live through all this and prepare more people for this: "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel will save it." So it's this notion of following that's going to come from now on. Jesus face to the pagan place, the place of Caesar, whose punishment was crosses, and having been prepared by the sign that the blind man has seen people staggering under piles of wood, Jesus now feels confident that now is the time to start to prepare people for the following. And it's following that is going to be the important thing — what later the author of Colossians called "walking in Christ." "If any of you want to become my followers, then let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel will save it." The central point where the shape of discipleship finally becomes clear. And what we're going to see from now on is Jesus will now turn his face back to Jerusalem and start heading there. The second half of the Gospel is this long way of the cross, which is designed to teach and prepare the group of disciples to bear witness to how Jesus did it, so that they, after the resurrection, would be able to bear witness to us and enable us to enter into that following. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.