VITAL QUESTIONS

VITAL QUESTIONS – 24th Sunday Ordinary Time, Year B

            The question of Jesus, “But who do you say that I am?” and the question of James, “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone says he has faith but does not have works?” go together. If Jesus is who we believe Him to be, then our life and actions should reflect this faith. James is against professing faith without living faith. These two questions face us constantly in our life. Our response to them determines in great measure how we choose to live out our lives before the Lord, others and ourselves.

            In various circumstances of our life, we can hear the Lord asking those questions. He especially asks His questions at turning points, times of suffering, times of temptation, and times of important decisions in our life. When Jesus asked the question of the disciples, He Himself was at a critical point in His life. His public ministry was progressing toward Jerusalem and the final confrontation with the authorities. Peter attempted to stop Jesus from following His course up to Jerusalem. Often our friends and those who are close to us attempt to stop us from carrying out some difficult decision or work for the Lord which will involve sure suffering and sacrifice. Unwittingly, they take the place of Satan who disguises himself best through those who love us. Peter must have been most surprised to learn he was taking Satan’s role when he heard Jesus say: “Get behind me, Satan. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do”. The discerning person can often see this happening in Christian life among the Lord’s closest friends and followers, when good people try to prevent people from carrying out difficult good works demanding great sacrifices.

            Knowing the Lord’s standards and teachings becomes crucial for the disciples of the Lord. Through the Church’s teaching, liturgy, and the example of faithful followers of Christ, our minds and hearts and lives are formed by God’s standards. This formation of the attitudes and ways of faith is a lifelong process and journey. The seeds of faith in our hearts may not mature into actions for years and decades. The same is true for the seeds of sin, which take years and decades to mature into actions, attitudes and ways of life opposed to God’s ways.

            We should keep an eye on our actions to learn what is going on in the deeper levels of our person. Our faith tells us what should be flowing out of our minds and hearts into our actions. The good deeds of meeting the needs and hopes of others in the Spirit of Christ grow and develop slowly over our lifetime as other growth processes do. The process involves our whole person, body, mind, emotions, spirit and soul. As growing persons going through different stages in our life cycle, we can never say we totally understand in our awareness and personal lives in practice, the standards and teachings of Jesus. None of us can say we are living fully by His teachings on life and love of God and neighbor. Perhaps we can say we are doing the best we can at this time.

            Praying, reading, learning with others, and studying His ways will always be necessary as a basis for moving ourselves to put our faith into practice. This life long process is never completed. Today we hear the Lord in a way we couldn’t hear Him yesterday. Tomorrow we will hear the Lord in a way we couldn’t hear Him today. We certainly will be able to carry parts of the Gospel into practice tomorrow that were beyond us yesterday or today. What was impossible to us in a previous decade of our life becomes possible in another one. Growth and maturity in our natural life cycle accompanies our growth and maturity in our faith life.

             Here Peter is an example of hope too. He moved in his life from hindering the Lord from going up to Jerusalem to the cross and suffering, to himself going up to Jerusalem and taking up the cross of suffering and death for the Lord. He learned over the years of his discipleship to live by Jesus’ teachings. He learned that “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and that of the Gospel will save it”. Each stage of life offers challenges, and each stage of life reveals if faith is growing stronger or weaker in practice. Never should we stop listening to the two questions and testing ourselves on our responses.

            At each stage of our life, the questions of Jesus and James can mean more to us. We know the understanding and knowledge of ourselves and others takes a long time. The building of good, solid, human relationships in friendship, marriage, family, work and the parish community takes time and effort and is not the work of a single day or year, but the work of a lifetime. The same is true of our knowing the Lord and His teachings, and putting them into practice in our life. Only gradually do we come to know the Lord as our messiah, our redeemer, our savior, our Lord, our revealer of the Father and His Kingdom of eternal life.

            The Gospels reveal the slow development of faith in the disciples. Many thought Jesus was Elijah, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets. Only gradually did they come to see and know Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of the living God, the savior of the world, the Risen Lord of glory. We know from the Scriptures great truths about Jesus as the revelation of God the Father, as the one whose dying and rising have reconciled all mankind back to God, and made it possible for us to live His life in our own life by the gift of the Spirit. Yet in the practical order of the lives of many, these great truths are not immediately connected to actions and attitudes in daily life. The movement from knowing Jesus as the world’s savior to my savior can be a long and slow one. What we believe with our minds and hearts about who Jesus is, doesn’t always or immediately find expression in our hands and feet of faith.

            Even if we know the creeds of the Church, it doesn’t mean we have made it so personal to ourselves that we are going to live by them even at the risk of suffering and possible death. The evidence of our lives tells us this. When faith moves out of our hearts and minds and into our life, so that our attitudes, emotions and stands in life become our profession of faith, we know the meaning of the questions of Jesus and James.