A Great Irony

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Last week (21st Sunday in Ordinary Time) the gospel reading was taken from the very same chapter of the very same gospel as today’s gospel (22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time), just one paragraph before today’s reading. We saw that Peter declared Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the Living God, and Jesus said to him that “it was not flesh and blood that revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven”, and then Jesus makes Peter the head of the Church: “… on this rock I build my Church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it”. However, a paragraph later we find that Jesus is calling him Satan and telling him that he is thinking not as God thinks but as man thinks. This is a tremendous irony. What does this mean?

What it shows is that Peter, the rock on which Christ has built his Church, the first Pope, can manage to “go off the rails”, so to speak. He can be inspired by God the Father on the one hand, but he can also find himself listening to the Evil One on the other. And what’s interesting to consider as well is the very subject matter. In the first instance, Jesus asks them: “Who do you say that I am?” This is a very important question, and it is crucial that the Church gets this right: “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God”. And Jesus says that the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church that he established, and since Jesus called Satan the father of lies (untruth), this would seem to suggest that the Church will be protected from error in the most important matters pertaining to faith–and the identity of Jesus is certainly a matter of faith, for it has a bearing on our salvation. That’s where the charism of infallibility lies, namely on statements of faith, that is, on the deposit of faith.

In today’s gospel, the matter is not about a statement of faith; rather, it is about Peter’s attitude towards suffering, specifically his understanding of what kind of Messiah Jesus is. Jesus had to foretell his passion three times in the gospels, because the Jews were expecting an anointed king, like David, who conquered through the force of arms and who, like other kings of this world, was served hand and foot. This is not the kind of Messiah that Jesus is. Rather, Jesus was described by the prophet Isaiah, in chapter 53: “He was spurned and avoided by men, a man of suffering, knowing pain, like one from whom you turn your face, spurned, and we held him in no esteem. We thought of him as stricken, struck down by God and afflicted, …Like a lamb led to slaughter or a sheep silent before shearers he did not open his mouth. … For he was cut off from the land of the living, struck down for the sins of his people.”

The very notion of a king who would lower himself, who did not come to be served, but to serve and enter into human suffering and death, was simply unfathomable at this point. Jesus is indeed the Christ (Messiah), and that was revealed to Peter, but just what that means exactly is going to take time, and we see this in this gospel and in the history of the Church–the tendency to monarchy, opulence, the abuse of power, etc., is all there in our history in plain sight for all to see.

There’s a very important lesson in this. We have a tendency to idealize certain people, especially clergy: priests, bishops, cardinals, Popes, etc. And Pope Francis warned against the tendency to put clergy on pedestals. Doing so is dangerous, for even the rock on which Christ built his Church can go off the rails and seriously misjudge a situation, to the point where Jesus actually calls him Satan. The problem is that when we idealize clergy and then later discover their humanness, that they are just as sinful as anyone else, we can be scandalized, seriously disillusioned, and the result is often that we abandon the faith and will never set foot inside a Church again. This happens all the time. Not with everyone, of course, because a good number of the faithful realize that our faith is about Christ first and foremost; it’s not about Peter, James or John, Bartholomew, Paul or Timothy. Even St. Paul reminds us of this when he says: “For it has been reported to me about you, my brothers, …that there are rivalries among you. I mean that each of you is saying, “I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Apollos,” or “I belong to Cephas,” or “I belong to Christ.” Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? I give thanks to God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, so that no one can say you were baptized in my name” (1 Co 1, 11-14).

In other words, it is all about Christ, not about us. And St. Augustine said that we pray every day “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us” because we are sinful. Every day we get it wrong, and we have to repent. Yet despite that, people still engage in hero-worship. Many of the faithful still insist on treating clergy as slightly more than human. After Pentecost, however, Peter got it; we see this when the Roman officer Cornelius fell at his feet to do him homage. Peter simply says to him: “Get up. I am only a human being.”

So although the Church is guided by the Holy Spirit and has the charism of infallibility in matters of faith and morals, every single member of the Church struggles every day with his or her own humanness and tendency to sin, and if you live with someone long enough, you’ll see it, even a pope. And a great deal of how we see the world and interpret the faith is shaped by that humanness, which is why we need always take our own point of view with a grain of salt.

Father Eugene Fulton from Larchmont, New York, years ago told me the story of two brothers from the UK who went into the seminary together and were later ordained together on the same day. After many years, however, the one brother became so disillusioned with the Church that he left the priesthood. He lost his faith entirely. The other brother stayed the course. The brother who left the priesthood and lost his faith was, years later, dying of cancer. When he was lying in a coma, the other brother was sitting by his bedside praying the rosary for him. At one point, the dying brother opened his eyes, sat up in bed, looked over at this brother praying and said: “It’s all about Christ. Go and tell the whole world”. He then laid back down and breathed his last.