Who am I? Who do people say that I am? Who do YOU say that I am? What do you believe in your life of faith? This gets to the heart of the questions that Jesus asks his followers today.
When we see Jesus in today’s Gospel, he’s in the midst of his ministry here on earth. He and his disciples are going all over the countryside proclaiming the kingdom of God. In our Gospel readings in recent weeks, we’ve seen Jesus speak to great crowds, performing the miracle of multiplying the loaves and the fish. People have come to him for healing and change in their lives. At this point, Jesus is wondering what the people have learned, how they perceive him. So he asks the disciples: “Who do people say the Son of Man is?”
Put that question in the context of our own day. When we meet someone for the first time, we wonder: “Who are you?” And if you ask someone to tell you about himself, what that person says and does not say can be very revealing. We can answer a question based on profession: I’m a teacher, a farmer, a lawyer, a prison guard. We can answer based upon religion: I’m Catholic or I’m Jewish. We can focus on relationships: I’m a father or a brother, a wife or a daughter. We can focus on our geographic identity or ethic group: I’m from Pearl, or I’m Irish-American. There are so many way we can identify ourselves – the list is endless.
Well, Jesus got a lot of answers about how the crowds identify him. Some say he’s John the Baptist, while others see him as Elijah or Jeremiah or one of the other prophets.
After Jesus’ death and resurrection, his followers spent centuries debating Jesus’ identity and what they really believed about him. These followers struggled to understand how Jesus was both fully human and fully divine, a concept that is indeed difficult to comprehend. They struggled to understand how God manifests himself in our world as a God of three persons: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The beliefs of the early Church that developed after Jesus’ death and resurrection are reflected in the Apostles’ Creed. Later, at the Council of Nicea that was called by the Emperor Constantine in 325, the early Church started writing the Nicene Creed, which we still profess today. Professing this creed as what we believe as Catholics reflects our roots in the early Church, the faith passed down by the apostles and the early Church fathers and mothers.
When Jesus asks the disciples bluntly and directly about what they believe about him, Simon Peter takes the lead, proclaiming with great enthusiasm: You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God. We are called to profess that same belief in our lives of faith here in the modern world, that Jesus is indeed the Savior of all the world who redeems us through his death and resurrection.
Who do we say Jesus is? That is an important question. But who do we say we are as a Church? Avery Dulles was a Jesuit priest from here in the United States. He spent a lot of his career as a university and seminary professor. It is unusual for a priest who is not a bishop to become cardinal, but he was honored by Pope John Paul II by being named as cardinal in 2001. One of his celebrated works is a book called Models of the Church. I had chosen this as one of the five spiritual books that made an impact on my life when Deacon John and posted a video on that topic. Dulles states that these models are essential aspects of the Church, that we don’t choose one and disregard the others. According to Dulles, we as the Church are a mystical communion, united by the Holy Spirit, connected to God and to our brothers and sisters in Christ. We are Sacrament, the visible sign of Christ in the world, a sign and instrument of God’s grace. We are also servants, an instrument of social justice reaching out to the least in society just as Christ did. We are also heralds of Good News, proclaiming the kingdom of God in the world and being evangelizers of Christ’s message. We are also an institution of structure and order built upon the rock of Peter, on which Christ established his Church. Finally, we are a community of disciples, a community of people learning how to follow Jesus, with Jesus as our model in the way we live out our lives. All these models of Church are important to us in the way we identify as the people of God, as followers of Christ.
I love when the Gospel asks us questions. Questions are an important part of our journey. Deacon John was just telling me the other day that the questions we ask as we learn and grow in the faith are so important - crucial, actually. Let the questions Christ asks us today help us to learn and grow.
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