Mass readings for the 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time:
Isaiah 50.5-9 Psalm 116.1-9 James 2.14-18 Mark 8.27-35
At last week’s gathering of the clergy of the diocese, we took up the report of the Forward Together in Christ initiative led by Bishop Wayne Lobsinger. It’s a sobering reflection on the state of the Church, specifically of our diocese, but it reflects the bigger conversation Pope Francis initiated in his call for synodality. As many of you know, the word synod means “a going together” and its use by His Holiness to remind us that we travel not singly as disciples, but we are a community brought together by our Lord’s sacrifice, and each of us charged to play our own part in proclaiming the gospel, and in bringing Christ to a world in need of him.
Now, synodality cannot be understood from a worldly perspective. Frame it according to the world, and it looks like a new power-sharing agreement, or more radically, as a revolution overturning the authority of the Apostolic tradition in favour of populism. Synodality is journeying together, but it is “in Christ” that we do this; and what guides us is not the political or cultural conventions of this world as the stuff of our arguments and debates as competing factions, but the Holy Spirit is our inspiration and leader in a process of discernment together.
The report is critical of our efforts of recent years, decades really, to carry out Christ’s mandate. And when Bishop Lobsinger presented this, he asked rhetorically, “does this report mean we’ve been doing it wrong all this time?” He paused and said, “No… well, yes.” And in that response, he wasn’t so much saying “yes” but trying to capture an essential ambiguity.
He went on to say was that we have made mistakes with good intentions, that in the things we are doing reasonably well, we could always do better. However, to continue as we are cannot, in the assessment of any rational person, lead to anything but continued decline. In my hearing of his comments, I sensed he was trying to tell us that something insidious has been at work in the Church undermining our efforts. But what could that be? How could that be? Are we not the faithful remnant in a time of faithlessness? Are we not the hopeful in this era of cynicism? Have we not been the ones keeping the churches lit in the darkness, and continued the journey with Christ, even as we look with concern at those who have left and wandered off into the wilderness. And yet, this report in its frankness, even as it sounds an optimistic note, tells us we’ve gotten something wrong. Something of the world has informed our thinking and brought us, as devoted as we are to Christ, to a place in our journey where the GPS doesn’t know where we are, we’ve no map, and the geography isn’t friendly.
Today’s gospel story is jarring. Things start off so well. We go from the celebrated confession of Peter that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, to the same apostle’s condemnation by our Lord as an agent of Satan. We can be forgiven the sensation of whiplash. Now, paying attention to the text, we know that the one moment didn’t directly follow the other.
First, Jesus asks the question, “Who do people say that I am.” And after the fumbling responses of his closest disciples, by grace, Peter has the correct answer.
There is a time of teaching by our Lord, and he lays out the great plan for the rescue, of not just Israel, but of humanity. That plan involves suffering, rejection, his death, and then there is this mysterious notion that he will rise from the grave. I imagine that took a bit of time to explain, with interruptions for questions, but also some quiet reflection by the apostles.
It’s then that Peter likely approached Jesus, and said something like, “Can I have a word with you, teacher?” And then proceeded, as we know, to tell Jesus his plan is madness (“Peter rebuked Jesus”); that neither he, Peter, nor the others had signed up for this. The promise was the restoration of Israel. This was no way to go about it: a senseless death, and what’s this resurrection business?
I think we all wonder what it would be like to spend time with Jesus. I mean this in the sense of going back to the Galilee, and being among the Apostles in those brief years of his ministry, traveling with him, listening to him and talking with him outside the public events; being backstage as it were. How much better we would understand him today!
So, here is Peter, having that experience that we can only imagine and envy. And yet, for all that time spent in building up a relationship, Peter does not trust that Jesus knows what he’s doing.
The Church is going through a profound process of reflection and careful discussion. We are again meditating upon Jesus’ teaching, and again, pondering his plan. When the disciples did this, the people of Israel were not in a good place; indeed, they had lost the place effectively – the Promised Land was increasingly not their own but the property of an empire and its surrogates.
The Church is in trouble; but not everywhere in the same trouble. In Africa the issue is that of violent persecution of the faithful; in Asia it is one of political persecution of Christians; in Western Europe and North America, it’s a crisis of faith, a loss of hope, a dissolution of our society as the foundation crumbles and the whole edifice begins to crack and sway, threatening to tumble down on us.
This trouble was anticipated, by the grace of God, several generations ago by the most surprising of popes, St. John XXIII, who in his brief pontificate convened the Second Vatican Council. That council faced the challenge of modernity, secular humanism and all its ideologies (liberalism and Marxism) as the corrosive agent dissolving the underpinnings of Christian society and Catholic culture.
But for all the spirit-inspired genius of the documents produced by the council; for all the theological insight, the rational analysis, the marshalling of the Apostolic Tradition toward the coming threat, it failed.
But as its defenders point out, the failure doesn’t appear to be in any of the work that was done. The documents are sound. We certainly can debate their strengths and weaknesses; we can most definitely critique their application. I think the Church thought it was confronting ideas, that it was going to be a matter of rational debate, an enlightened dialogue to resolve questions, and to expose the modern project as civilizational suicide. The Church gave the advocates of modernity far too much credit as people of educated reason.
I’ve mentioned French academic Michel Foucault before. He is one of the villains of intellectual history, no friend to Christianity, most definitely a foe of Catholicism, and sadly, one of the most influential thinkers of the last 100 years. He was no admirer of modernity either. He thought it was a sham. And I will credit him with seeing what we the faithful did and do not see.
He wrote a famous little essay entitled, “What is Enlightenment?” Now the enlightenment is regarded as the birth of modernity, and its name implies that what came before, Christendom, was a time of darkness. Enlightenment is the elevation of rational thought as the arbiter of reality; and it places humanity at the pinnacle of the world; God is displaced.
Foucault noticed that in all that the great founders of the modern world had to say, there was nothing particularly original, nothing that hadn’t been heard before. No, what Foucault said, is that modernity isn’t a philosophical revolution, it’s not an intellectual innovation that challenges what has come before. It’s really just an attitude. As he puts it, “a way of thinking and feeling… away of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task.”
So, it’s about cultivating an attitude of dismissiveness toward one’s civilization, and creating a community around that attitude – and that it is consciously done.
Think of those we call “hipsters” who carefully construct their public image (they think about what clothes they wear in terms of how it will communicate their disdain) – they adopt an ironic attitude of detachment toward western civilization even as they live off its fruits. They watch movies and read books they have already judged as stupid, cliché, and their entertainment is in the copping of a superior attitude toward it.
Of course, there are then those who go the next step, regard themselves as revolutionaries, and as “anti-heroes” who work to destroy it all. They bemoan the injustices of our society, and in their activism, use protest to cover their violent vandalism.
But for those true disciples of the diabolical Foucault, these are all dupes, useful idiots. For the truly wise of this world use them to seize power, because power is what really matters. Let these others satisfy themselves with their masquerade of superiority, these people are dying inside. But the clever few, they will find true satisfaction, life itself in the power to remake the world.
And that was Peter’s error. And it was an unconscious one. This is what the world taught him, and clever man that he is, he understood that the contempt of the religious authorities in Jerusalem for the Romans was little more than an attitude that went nowhere. But then he made the mistake of seeing Jesus as a route to power, power that he could then use to free the people. But the solution is not in power, but in the authority of Christ. An authority we give to Christ in our confession of him as Lord. That is, we serve him because we have learned and been enlightened by grace that he is right, that his plan is the only means of success for ourselves as individuals, for our society as a whole.
So, we are called to look at ourselves. We may have had a change in attitude, no longer cynical but filled with a joyful hope, but then where do we see the means to save others and bring them out the dreariness of modern cynicism. It’s through Christ’s plan: in suffering the struggle, in sacrificing that truly costs, in seeing things within the Church, within us, die; but to offer all this in a joyful anticipation of resurrection; of renewal of life, in the reconstituting of the Church as the lost come home.
This is not going to be easy. I cannot make us do anything. That would be to try and wield power over you which is antithetical to Christ. I can’t make myself doing anything either. But I can give myself over to Christ’s authority, and by prayer and the support of fellow faithful, strive to follow the plan of our salvation, to be a follower of Christ who can deny himself, and though doing so in fear and trembling, take up my cross.
Whoever wants to save, oneself, loved ones, our world, must lose oneself for Christ’s sake with the promise that indeed God will save those who trust in him.
Amen.