
Year A / Ordinary Time / Week 21 - Sunday
Readings: Isaiah 22.19-24 / Psalm 138 (R/v 8c) / Romans 11.33-36 29-32 / Matthew 16.13-27
“I am disturbed.”
“I am disturbed,” declared Jeremiah, a student of ours at SJI. He was answering the Education Minister who visited our school last Tuesday and asked, “What makes studying at SJI special.” “Disturbed,” Jeremiah said, “because SJI opened my eyes to really see the world and to know that I have a responsibility to do something and make it a better place for others, especially those with minority voices.” Jeremiah was referring to his experience of interacting with migrant workers as part of our Lasallian leadership camp. For Jeremiah, this meeting forced him to ask, “What is my Josephian education for?”
“I am disturbed.”
I’d like to imagine that this is how Peter and the apostles might have felt when they were confronted by Jesus’ question, “But who do you say I am?” Disturbed because this encounter, like Jeremiah’s with the migrants, must have challenged them to find an answer about this man they followed.
As a people of faith, I think it would be small minded of us to interpret Jesus’ question to only be about recognizing or affirming identity. Rather, it is a question that opened up the disciples—as it should also open us up—to relationship. It is an invitation to relationship that can be phrased like this: “Do you want to enter into deeper friendship with me?” And any response we make must invite us to consider the quality of our self-giving to another.
We have all experienced this moment: recall how when someone asked you, “Who do you say I am?” and it led to a deeper relationship. Perhaps, it was when an acquaintance in school asked it and a friendship for life began. Or, when your romanticized infatuation with the woman or man of your dreams concretized into that promising reality of committing yourselves and settling down into responsible lifelong partnership. Or, when at the end of life, you and I will ask this same question of our loved ones, trusting that their grateful answer will assure us that we can let go of a Christian life well spent only to enter more fully into God’s eternal embrace. Can you, can I, recall such a moment, such an invitation into deeper friendship? I can with a good Jesuit friend; what about you?
“Who do you say I am?” Jesus asked his disciples in today’s gospel story. Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” Peter might have been disturbed by Jesus’ question. He might even have been unsure that he was giving the correct answer. But he nevertheless replied from the depths of his conviction. Peter may not have been fully enlightened at this moment, but he took a stand and declared what he really thought. That was all Jesus wanted. Peter’s conviction was good enough for Jesus to work with, and to transform Peter from a fisherman into a fisher of men and women.
I’d like to suggest that Jesus’ question is very good for us too as we continue our Christian journey in ordinary time. It should make us pause and really take stock of our friendship with Jesus. His question comes today at a time when the ordinariness of our everyday life and our liturgical calendar sweeps us along a rhythm of life that seems the same, day in and day out. A rhythm that can also comfortably lure us into complacency: nothing needs mending; everything is fine; I come to Sunday mass; I go to confession if I need to; I pray when I can; I give to the poor when I am asked.
Jesus’ question should stop us in our tracks through everyday life because it is demanding an honest evaluation. We are being asked how willing we are and how much we want to let Jesus transform us even more in our everydayness. Our answer will shape the kind of Christian life we want and the kind of Christian charity we hope to share.
The peaks in our liturgical year—the expectant advent joy and the delight of Christmas, the sobriety of Lent reflection and the Easter rejoicing, the solemnities and feast days—always afford us time to reflect and evaluate. But in ordinary time we tend to get carried away by our everyday life, our daily chores and our weekend recreation that we can often forget to attend to Jesus’ question, “Who do you say I am?
“Who you say I am?” Jesus is asking you and me right here, right now. He wants us to seriously consider how deeply we have entered into friendship with him. Or, whether we are desirous of entering even more. Or, perhaps, why we are standing by, waiting for the right time. Or even, if I am slowly stepping back and away?
Wherever we are in our friendship with Jesus, the grace of today’s gospel passage is that this question (which we know so well) is giving us another chance to answer: Who do we say that Jesus is in our lives? What is our conviction about Jesus who promises to be with us to the end? What is our faith in Jesus who has already forgiven us by his death and won for us eternal life by his resurrection?
“I am disturbed.”
I’d like to imagine these are the words you and I will utter if we are truly listening to Jesus asking us, “Who do you say I am?” Why? Because when Jesus asks this question, he leaves himself vulnerable, knowing that we—like the disciples, like the many he preached to and healed—could reject him. His vulnerability should disturb us because as God-with-us he gives himself over to us in trust, believing that in our dignity we will answer freely and rightly, and so let him transform us. All he asks of us, as he once did of Peter, is to take a stand and declare who he is in our lives.
I’d like to suggest that our faith would be richer if we begin to appreciate Jesus’ question as his heartfelt invitation for us to enter more deeply into friendship with him. And in this space of relating to one another, we can experience God’s salvation more fully. This involves embracing the saving grace that his question always is. And if you agree with me that the best response we can make to this grace that Jesus’ question is is to do as Peter does and to confess, “You are the Christ,” then, shouldn't we not welcome his question? Jesus’ disturbing but saving question that will transform how we live and what we do as Christians?
Perhaps, it is good that we pray this prayer:
Disturb us, O Lord,when we are too well-pleased with ourselves;when our dreams have come true because we dreamed too little;when we have arrived in safety because we sailed too close to the shore.
Disturb us, O Lord,when with the abundance of things we possesswe have lost our thirst for the water of life;when, having fallen in love with Time,we have ceased to dream of Eternity;and in our efforts to build the new earth have allowed our vision for the New Heaven to grow dim.
And then as our prayer draws to its close, wouldn't it right and just for us to end it with this coda: “Yes, Jesus, you do disturb me, and it is very good that you do. Amen”?
Preached at St Ignatius' Church, Singapore
photo: from Internet
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