31/08/2008 - 22nd. Sunday Ordinary
Time - Year A
1st. Reading Jer 20,7-9 Psalm 62 2nd. Reading Rom 12,1-2 Gospel Mt 16,21-27
"who proceeds from the Father and the Son". We are talking of the Holy Spirit: he is a divine person, and not a God next to a God. God is one, but not a being that lives in solitude. God is love, lives of love, and love is relationship, it's the giving of self. Because of this we affirm that the Father generates the Son, who shares of the same divinity. There is an love relationship that goes between the Father and the Son that is called 'Holy Spirit'. Therefore we confess that the Spirit 'proceeds' from the Father: he is not created, not generated, but comes from the Father who looks at the Son with love. If we want to look for an image from our daily experience, we can say that he is like the breath that come from us, or like the light of the sun, or the sound of a voice, the heat of the flame: but he is not a thing, but a person, with all the divine characteristics: a capacity to love, to act, to answer in a perfect way! He comes from the Father, the person from whom all has origin. When Jesus promised the Holy Spirit, he said that he will send him from the Father or that the Father will send him in his name! He says also clearly that the Spirit "proceeds from the Father" (Jn 15,26). The Christians in the East, the Orthodox, in their symbol of faith profess only "and proceeds from the Father". We, in the West, from the times of Charles the Great, that is from the 800s, added "and from the Son". This addition is justified from the Gospel text 'When the consoler comes whom I send from the Father, the Spirit of truth that comes from the Father, he gives me witness" (15,26), even so, the risen Jesus says to the apostles: "receive the Holy Spirit", breathing upon them. Its from his mouth that the breath comes that makes them witnesses acceptable by God! Unfortunately the Orientals, for many centuries, have made a story about this addition, which they cannot use to justify their opposition and not looking for unity with our Catholic Church.
The revelation of Jesus doesn't please Peter, for its too distant from his
way of thinking, very different that his desires. Jesus had revealed that in
him the prophesies of the suffering servant, prophesies that speak of suffering,
the rejection by the leaders of the people, the violent death and the resurrection,
were to be fulfilled. With regards to the resurrection, as if Peter seems not
to have heard about: it's a concept to be left for the end of times, at the
end. His attention stopped at the suffering and death. Is it possible that a
man who blessed so many people, who has worked so many miracles in favor of
many, who taught how to love God as a Father, is to be rejected by the leaders
of the people? Is it possible that a man, who even raised the death, is going
to be killed? Peter was not able to think of it, let alone understand it. He
seems not to be so familiar with the Scriptures, or that the Scriptures were
a dead letter who knows till when! And so he feels bound to protest: Jesus is
not to speak in that way. So he takes him aside to do so. The disciple wants
to teach Jesus, his Lord, as if this one was blind! He became similar of the
angel that wanted to take the place of God and became Lucifer!
What was the Lord to do? Should he let go? The issue is serious and so he could
not let it go. Hence Jesus, with a decisive love, treats Peter as he had treated
the devil who tempted him in the desert. What happens there happen also here:
Peter with is protest, wanted to stop Jesus from doing the will of the Father
and live an easy messianic times made of applause, but would not offer himself
as a sacrifice for the salvation of the world. Jesus needed to keep away from
this temptation, and he does it in a visible and understandable way, distance
Peter who was being used. Then Jesus said to all his disciples that their way
is not to be different from his own: "if one wants to follow me, he must
renounce himself, take up his cross and follow me". The one who wants to
stay with Jesus is not to think of himself, or please himself, but to know him
and his Word to be his disciple even when this mean to go through the way of
suffering. The cross is not a curse, on the contrary, it's the way to be like
Jesus himself. St. Paul exhorts us "to offer our bodies as living sacrifices,
holy and acceptable by God": and to offer our bodies mean not to give in
to our desires and satify our pleasures, but to try to be like Jesus, and as
Jesus has taught us! The mind of the world, which is some times ours too, keeps
us apart from God, and hence keeps us from the true and deep joy in him. We
are not to follow the way of thinking of the world, the habits and the proposals
that come to us from outside. We went to follow Jesus and welcome his Word,
who becomes light and power for new ways of living. We do so with joy and decisively.
We cannot do less, because,