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O'Malley's Best Jesus
Snarls This
gospel passage comes immediately after last week's. In that upbeat episode, Peter declares who Jesus is-that is, his
purpose: the Messiah, and in return Jesus declares who Peter is-his purpose:
the quite precarious rock into which the Church is rooted. Then we come to today's reading, which is as
disconcerting as the last week's was, well, "concerting." Jesus spells out just what the Messiah's
role is-and presumably the role of those who "follow him"--to go up
to Jerusalem to be slaughtered. Imagine
what you'd do if the most revered person in your life, someone you idolized,
said with great forcefulness: "They're coming to get me, and I won't get
away." Wouldn't your instinct be
to look for escape routes? To protect
him or her? And then think of someone
as big-hearted and fiercely loving as Peter.
"Like hell you will! Not if
I have anything to do about it!" And for
that, Jesus really blasts him! Calls
him an adversary, an enemy, a devil.
Humiliates his friend in front of the others. Jesus meek-and-mild snarls. For the
first time in all these years, I was so ticked off at Jesus about that, I went
carefully through Matthew's whole gospel up to this chapter,
section-by-section, and found this is the first time he's mentioned his
death--much less his execution--at least in Matthew's account. He's spoken about persecutions that lay
ahead for his followers, about not bringing peace but a sword. Matthew has editorialized about the
pharisees' developing plot to stop Jesus.
Jesus has quoted (once) a passage from Isaiah about The Suffering
Servant, but there was no clear connection to himself-and God knows even
crystal-clear connections were not sufficient for the guys he so incautiously
chose. So far, Jesus has said a lot of
disconcerting things about material possessions, about enemies, about
overcoming one's reticence, but at least as far as these recently cured eyes
can discern, this is the first time in Matthew he's spoken of his
execution. A few
minutes earlier, Jesus praised Peter for an uncanny, God-given insight about
Jesus as God's Messiah. (Even
though--if it was God-given--Peter had done nothing praiseworthy.) And almost in the next breath, Jesus blows
him away for not seeing something unimaginable. I'd
like to weasel out of my discomfort by asserting without evidence that this was
one of those times a meddlesome scribe amended the text. But no.
Anything that disconcerting somebody (someone like me) would long ago
have eliminated-just as Luke spares Peter by eliminating this passage. The fact that something so discomfiting as
Jesus rearing up against Peter so savagely, for what seems to be an act of
love, lasted this long is pretty clear evidence (at least to me) that God quite
definitely didn't want it removed. What
gives at least some easement, I think, is precisely the disciples' thick-headed
need for more-than-crystal-clear explanations.
This crucifixion business (and the resurrection it occasioned) is, after
all, the main lesson of the Son of God's sojourn among us. Peter and the others were oh-so-willing to
testify to the Messiah-the one who would sooner or later ensconce the Twelve on
those gold thrones from which they could dispense judgment against all the
people who'd treated them like dirt all their lives. "No, no, my friends," Jesus says. "If you want to use the name Christian,
you're going to have to suffer. You're
going to spend a lifetime bleeding out your self-centeredness." As St. Paul says in Philippians, when the
Son of God took on humanity, he "emptied himself"-sese
exinanivit. "Not my will by thy
will be done." That's the message.
This
episode-unarguably-puts an exclamation point on that very unwelcome lesson
about what following Christ means: being unjustly condemned, looking a failure,
denying one's desires. That's not what
the priests and nuns told me when I was a boy, even in a Church we've since
seen as overly punitive. And it's
definitely not what hymns and homilies have been telling me ever since about
being nice and upright and unafraid.
It's a message that has for quite some time been bowdlerized, softened
down, so it wouldn't be too harsh, too upsetting, too unacceptable. But
this passage says, quite unequivocally, that Peter's simple good-heartedness is
a wonderful, wonderful thing. But
it's-disconcertingly-not enough. |
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