Sit in your cell as in paradise. Put
the whole world behind you and forget it. Watch your thoughts like a good
fisherman watching for fish. The path you must follow is in the Psalms— never
leave it. If you have just come to the monastery, and in spite of your good
will you cannot accomplish what you want, take every opportunity you can to
sing the Psalms in your heart and to understand them with your mind. And if
your mind wanders as you read, do not give up; hurry back and apply your mind
to the words once more. Realize above all that you are in God's presence, and
stand there with the attitude of one who stands before the emperor. Empty
yourself completely and sit waiting, content with the grace of God, like the
chick who tastes nothing and eats nothing but what his mother brings him. –The
Brief Rule of St. Romauld
If any man would come after me
The English poet, Stevie Smith, who never
managed to abandon or accept her childhood Anglicanism and called herself 'a lapsed atheist' complained in one of her poems:
Oh
Christianity, Christianity
Why
do you not answer our difficulties?
Oh
what do you mean, what do you mean?
You
never answer our questions.
Whatever else you might say about that, Christianity is the most questioning religion there is. Fides quaerens intellectum: 'faith seeking understanding' so said Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas. It may well be the case that we do not understand or like the answers because it is faith which does the seeking. But we are not the only ones to
have questions; Jesus has some questions for us as in the Gospel this Sunday.
“Who do men say that I am?” “Who do you say that
I am?” and an answer to a question which is not asked “who are you?”
In the first three Gospels this set of questions
is a turning point in the life of Jesus. Jesus has acted like a messiah and you
would have to be pretty dense to miss his messianic credentials. But messiahs
are a dime a dozen. So the question is what kind of messiah? So important is
this question that St. Luke prefaces it by telling us that Jesus prayed alone. This
is St. Luke’s habit. When the heavens were about to open during Jesus' baptism,
when Jesus was about to begin His public ministry, when He chose the twelve
apostles, at the moment of His transfiguration, and on the Mount of Olives
before His Passion, Luke specifically tells us that Jesus prayed. And so
today's Gospel is on a par with these great events in Jesus life. The question
of who Jesus is is the fundamental question. It is only once Peter has
confessed that Jesus is the Christ of God, that Jesus is able to reveal His
mission to His disciples: the Son of man must suffer many things, and be
rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the
third day be raised.
Peter gives, we think, the right answer: ‘you
are the Messiah of God” Unlike St. Matthew’s account St. Luke does not mention
any congratulations given to Peter: nothing about being blessed or being the
rock of the Church because Peter’s image of the Messiah remains an Old
Testament one.
Peter’s understanding of the Scriptures had led him
and most of his contemporaries to expect the Messiah to be a triumphant king,
who would liberate God’s people from political tyranny, especially the Roman occupation. But Jesus needed to teach the apostles to see
His mission in a much harsher light. The Messiah would fulfil the role of the
Suffering Servant of the Lord, as prophesied by Isaiah. He would be despised,
rejected, suffer a cruel death, but would rise triumphantly from the grave. “Messiah’
is a term so easily misunderstood that Jesus forbids his followers using the
term: ‘he charged and commanded them to tell this to no one’.
Whatever the crowds may say, whatever Peter and
the other followers may say, Jesus knows who he is: “Messiah crucified, a
stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles”.
It is at this point that things get really
interesting and inconvenient. Jesus answers the unasked question: who are you.
There is a kind of Christianity which imagines that once we know who Jesus is
and profess our faith in that Jesus, then we have done all we have to do and
Jesus will take care of the rest. But Jesus insists we have to become like him,
be rejected like him, die like him, if we want to be raised like him. Faith
must embrace fully conformity to the life and death and resurrection of Jesus.
Who are we anyway? Sigmund Freud maintained that
man had received in the last few centuries three wounds to his pride; first he
realized that the earth and its inhabitants were not the center of the
universe; second that man himself was simply the product of blind biological
processes; finally that reason, man’s greatest pride, was just the result of the
survival of the fittest. That is a pessimistic view, which has nothing in
common with the uniquely optimistic view of man found in the Gospel.
Rejection, self-denial, carrying crosses certainly
sounds pessimistic but it presupposes that we have the ability to choose and
that there is a choice to be made: “whoever would save his life will lose it;
and whoever loses his life for my sake, he will save it”.
If any man would come after me
No comments:
Post a Comment