“Who do you say I am?

Mark 8;27-35. Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time. September 13th, 2015

In the past couple of Sundays, Jesus has shown us his authority as the Son of the true and living God. Last week he demonstrated His divine authority by curing the deaf and mute man, and the week before, he showed us His divine teaching authority. Jesus was showing His disciples these things to teach them about who He was and still is. These signs which show forth the truth about who Jesus is, are not just for show, they demand a response from every single human person.

So Jesus poses the central question of today’s Gospel and really of our faith: “Who do people say that I am?” Why does Jesus ask such a question—one so seemingly obvious we have to wonder if it is worth asking? The variety of the responses given—John the Baptist, Elijah, a prophet—reveals that the answer is not so clear, and that even those closest to Jesus really aren’t sure who he is. Yet, it is crucial that we personally answer Jesus’ question, and that we, each one of us, come to understand more deeply who He really is. For the way that we regard Jesus determines the way that we relate to Him as well as respond to Him.

Your see, if Jesus is merely John the Baptism, that is, just a moral instructor who tells us to “be good”, then we will look to Him only for instruction on moral formation that is how we should act. But if he is only that, only one who tells us do that or don’t do that, then he doesn’t have the power to help us “be good, much less to become perfect, that is to love perfectly.”
If he is merely Elijah, then we might regard Jesus merely as a mystical figure who speaks of the end times, but not the One who is supposed to come again to Judge the Living and the dead. As a result, He really has no relevance in our current times, in the here and now, only sometime in the far off future.

And if Jesus is merely a prophet, then He is only one spokesman for God among many, and not God in the flesh, not God among us, not God Himself, not Truth Itself. And if Jesus is not Truth itself, then His truth is just one of many “truths.” His truth is, in other words, just His own personal opinion or notion of “truth.”

Therefore, Jesus’ question to us today, “Who do you say I am? _ is really a challenge that prompts each one of us to probe our own preconceptions, our assumptions, our own ideal, and labels of him. In light of the this unavoidable question we discover that we just cannot make Jesus to be what we want Him to be; He cannot be made to fit who we think He is or should be… In other words, it can never be about who Jesus is for me, but about who He really is!!!

The truth is, is that we really do need to know more fully who Jesus is, in and of Himself, not who we think is, but WHO He truly is. Our idea of Jesus must be purified by grace, it most grow in knowledge by study, because Jesus is not our idea of Him. This is so important because Jesus is Truth and we cannot know truth unless we know Jesus. To know Jesus is to know the Truth, the full truth, the absolute truth, the unchanging and unchangeable truth. Unlike other religions, our Catholic Faith is not based just on the teachings of the founder, but on the founder Himself.

It is only by knowing Christ that we can know His truth, his teachings and vice versa. If we do not know Him, He who is Life, then we want to have life our own way instead of the way of God. We then end up doing our own thing and become disobedient to God, thus losing our way, because we have lost the truth and so risk losing our eternal life.

But additionally, if we do not know the true Jesus but only a construct of our mind, then we cannot truly know ourselves. That is why, in giving our response to the question of “who Jesus is,” we can discover the answer to another very important question: Who do we think we are? Only Jesus Christ can reveal to us who we truly are. Just as it is our friend who really reveals to us ourselves, even more so it is our divine friend Jesus who reveals us to ourselves. Christ is the Light of World and only in this Light can we see ourselves as we are, as He created us. In fact, only Christ can reveal the true beauty and dignity of each human person, and he does so by inviting us to discover who He is, true God and true man, our Way, our Truth and our Life, the very source of our being.

In our Gospel today, it is Peter who makes the declaration: “You are the Christ-the Messiah.” But what does Peter mean by such an assertion? To claim that Jesus is the Christ requires that we must give up our mistaken ideas about happiness, power and salvation. Later in Mark’s gospel when Jesus is arrested and crucified we see others beside the apostles who fail to understand Jesus, the Messiah's true nature. For example the high priest who interrogates Jesus and the people who taunt him on the cross; they all posses a wrong understanding of the Messiah and so miss who it is they are dealing with. In fact, their only concern is what the Messiah is going to do for me, politically, materially, worldly, but definitely not spiritually and eternally.

So important and necessary is this need to understand Jesus’ Messiah-ship that Jesus even rebukes Peter, the rock, for trying to hold Jesus back from the ultimate meaning of Messiah-ship; that is, a ruler who would suffer the agony of the cross in order to teach men the truth about love so that they would imitate Him in that love, sacrificing oneself for the sake of one’s friend. Peter is rebuked because he is only judging Jesus by human standards. IN other words, Peter is judging Jesus according to how Jesus is suppose to live up to the popular notion of who and what the messiah should be—according to the Gallop poll of what and who Jesus should be.

Once we know the truth about Jesus’ Messiahship, then and only then we can fully embrace the truth about ourselves and live in a way that is in accord to that truth, for Jesus is the Truth. That is why the next thing Jesus does is “summon the crowd’ and inform them of the three prerequisites for true discipleship:-1) denying self or holy self-forgetfulness; 2) picking up one’s cross; and 3) following Him.

Without deny, without holy self-forgetfulness we end up remembering things about ourselves that only lead us away from Christ. With holy self-forgetfulness we forget our own ideas, opinions, feelings and take on the mind and heart of Christ, and of His Church.
Despite its arduousness, we take up the cross of Jesus in order to be saved from taking on things that would otherwise destroy us. We die to self and begin to live for Christ alone and others for love of Him. And we follow in Jesus’ footstep to avoid pursuing our own damning will and whim. We pick up our cross and live according to His truth, to His commands, to the teachings of His Catholic Church, and thus we find true freedom, true happiness and the fullness of life.

To follow Christ then is more than just being good, obeying the law and the teachings of the Church. It is these things of course, but Jesus wants us to live according to His truth not out of compulsion, but out of our desire to love Jesus and in loving Him to obtain Him, He who our hearts are restless until they rest in Him. To know Jesus Christ as He is, is to fall totally, madly in Love with Him. To know Him is to realize this love of His, He Himself, is available to us through the power of the Sacraments of His Holy Catholic Church. In fact, only there we will find His power, the power of His love to live according to His truth, not out of coercion, but freely;

It is in the Sacraments, especially in the Holy Eucharist, that we will find the true Jesus, the One who can touch us, heal us, save us. To the person who is in love, there are no burdens in carry out that love, only the desires of the heart to please the one we love. NO matter what we lose in the process in living for Jesus alone, we end up gaining everything, for we gain Jesus Christ our only happiness, the only fulfillment to our every desire, to our happiness and to our life.

Let us ask His Blessed Mother at this Holy Mass and at every Holy Mass to help us give Jesus the offering of ourselves, of our life, of our families, of our possession, of our everything….Let us give her our heart so that she herself can place it on the paten next to the host. Receiving our heart from her hands, Jesus will accept it as if it was hers, and allow it to be transformed into His own image and likeness so it will be accepted by His Father as if It was Jesus’ own heart. She will obtain for the grace to live out our life offering in every detail of our daily live, to deny ourselves, pick up our cross and follow her Son. She will then use us as her little ones in order to renew the face of the earth. Amen.