Sunday, September 13, 2015

God’s Ways

Get Thee Behind Me Satan, James Tissot
          In Go Set a Watchman, the recently-released novel by Harper Lee, Jean Louise Finch is devastated when she learns that her father, the noble Atticus Finch, is a racist.  Everything she knew about him, every childhood memory she had of him was shattered and suddenly reconfigured in light of that terrible discovery.  She felt that her life had been a lie, that a part of her had just died.  What really upset her was that Atticus wasn’t the man she wanted him to be; his ways weren’t her ways, and Atticus refused to conform.  That’s exactly why Peter got upset with Jesus and why Jesus got upset with Peter in today’s Gospel.

          In our Gospel passage, we hear Peter’s great profession of faith that Jesus is the Messiah.  But when Jesus starts to explain what it means to be the Messiah – that he will suffer, be rejected and be killed – Peter rebukes him.  Jesus wasn’t the Messiah that Peter wanted him to be.  Jesus’ ways weren’t Peter’s ways.  But Jesus refuses to conform.  He rebukes Peter because Peter’s ways aren’t God’s ways, telling him that he’s “thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”

So what did Peter expect Jesus to be?  While there was no agreed understanding of what the Messiah would be like in Jesus’ time, most people envisioned the Messiah as a warrior who would vanquish Israel’s enemies and usher in an era of peace for the Jews.  Like many in his time, Peter understood the Messiah in terms of power, not suffering, rejection and death.  “He wanted Jesus to be a conquering hero so that he might share in his glory.”[1]  But that’s not who Jesus is.  Jesus is the suffering servant described by Isaiah in our first reading.  He’s one who humbles himself, who conforms himself to God’s ways even though he’ll suffer rejection and death as a result.  “The key to understanding Jesus properly will turn out to be the mystery of the cross:  Jesus the healer and teacher is the suffering Messiah.”[2]  To follow him means to conform our ways to God’s ways.  That’s the key to our eternal peace; that’s the key to our salvation. 

          So what are God’s ways?  Well, we don’t know completely.  “God is that strange and disturbing reality whose love and power and goodness infinitely surpass our puny capacity to understand or our pathetic attempts to control.”[3]  But through his loving revelation, especially through Jesus Christ, we learn that God is all-powerful and all-knowing, that God is tirelessly loving and endlessly merciful, that God humbled himself to take on our humanity, to suffer and die for our sins so that we could be united with him for all eternity.

Well, that is strange.  How in the world do we reconcile an all-powerful God with humiliation, suffering and death on a cross?  That’s what Peter couldn’t understand.  We want a God who conquers our enemies and hates evildoers.  Well, “[we] can safely assume that [we]’ve created God in [our] own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people [we] do.”[4]  God’s not like us.  God’s ways aren’t our ways.  God’s “omnipotence isn’t expressed in violence and destruction but rather through love, mercy, and forgiveness.”[5]

No, God’s ways aren’t our ways, and God will not, God cannot conform his ways to our ways.  We need to conform our ways to God’s ways.  Jesus came to divinize us, to give us a share in his divine nature, to make us like God.  That’s what we pray for in the Liturgy of the Eucharist – to become what we eat.  Listen to the words the priest or deacon prays as he prepares the cup for consecration:  “By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”  It’s our goal to share in Christ’s divinity, to live in God’s love and peace now and forever.  It’s our goal to be like God. 

But to be God-like, we have to conform our ways to God’s ways.  To receive a share in Christ’s divinity, we have to say no to ourselves and yes to Christ; we have to say no to our love of ease and comfort; we have to say no to every course of action based on self-seeking and self-will.[6]  We have to accept suffering and rejection, take up our cross and follow him.  Saint James tells us in our second reading that our faith has to be manifested in our actions, so to follow Jesus, to be like God, we have to love our enemies, extend mercy to those we hate, and forgive all who hurt us. 

That can be a pretty tall order, especially at this time of year when we remember all who died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  Inevitably at this time of year, I’m asked a difficult question:  “Are the 9/11 hijackers and Osama Bin Laden in heaven?”  Most people don’t like my answer, which is – “I don’t know, but they could be because there’s no limit to God’s love, God’s mercy or God’s forgiveness.”  It’s hard for us to think that God might welcome the perpetrators of such heinous crimes into his heavenly kingdom, and even harder to accept that we’re called to be like God and to extend the same love, mercy and forgiveness to them that he does.  Faced with such incomprehensible demands, we may lash out in anger, and some may even turn away from God.  But in the end, if we conform our ways to God’s ways, we will share in the peace of the divine life, even in the most challenging circumstances.

          Jean Louise Finch lashed out at her father in anger and frustration when he refused to conform to her ways.  But once she got it out of her system, she accepted Atticus for who he was and found inner peace with him.  When we accept God and all his strange ways, especially when his ways don’t conform to our ways, we, too, will find inner peace with him and in him.  If we want a share in the divinity of Christ, we have to accept that God’s ways aren’t our ways, and that it’s our duty, it’s our salvation, it’s our eternal peace to conform our ways to God’s ways.

Readings:  Isaiah 50: 4c-9a; Psalm 116; James 2: 14-18; Mark 8: 27-35



[1] Jude Winkler, New St. Joseph Handbook for Proclaimers of the Word, Liturgical Year B, 2015 (New Jersey, Catholic Book Publishing Corp., 2014) at 332.
[2] John R. Donahue, Daniel J. Harrington, Sacra Pagina: The Gospel of Mark (Collegeville, The Liturgical Press, 2002) at 17.
[3] Robert Barron, Thomas Aquinas: Spiritual Master (New York, Crossroad Publishing, 2008) at 186.
[4] Anne LaMott, Traveling Mercies (New York, Anchor Books, 2000).
[5] Pope Benedict XVI, Wednesday Catechesis (January 29, 2013).
[6] William Barclay, The Gospel of Mark (Louisville, Westminster John Knox Press, 2001) at 235.

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