By Bill Moseley
Note: The following reflection was delivered before the start of mass at St. Frances Cabrini Catholic Church on Sunday, August 23, 2020.
First Reading – Isaiah 22:19-23
Responsorial Psalm – Psalm 138
Second Reading – Romans 11:33-36
Gospel – Matthew 16:13-20
Good morning everyone. My name is Bill Moseley and it is my privilege to reflect with you on today’s readings.
One of my favorite poems is “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. It starts as follows:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Many of us encounter different choices in life, and we may wonder about the road not taken. Sometimes these choices are clear, you have a decision to make, and at other times political forces and structures guide us in a way that make us less conscious of our decisions.
Dogma is an example of one such force that guides our thinking. According to Merriam Webster’s dictionary, dogma is defined as “a doctrine […] concerning faith formally stated and authoritatively proclaimed by a church.” I would suggest that today’s Gospel reading is one of the building blocks that has been used to establish church dogma. It purports to answer two important questions. First, what is the nature of Jesus, is he God or a human prophet? And second, how will the legacy of Jesus be carried on after his passing? I want to interrogate both of these two questions and ponder some other interpretations than the established ones. You might call this a heretic’s view. But maybe it’s just another view, a view of a fork in the road we did not take long ago.
In today’s Gospel reading from Matthew 16, Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Humanity is?” They answer, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or another of the prophets.” Jesus asks: “But you, who do you that I am?” Simon answers, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Jesus then replies, “Blessed are you Simon, son of John!”… “For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but God, my Father and Mother, in heaven. I tell you, you are the Rock, and upon this Rock I will build my church.”
Biblical scholars debate different aspects of this gospel text, but they largely agree that some parts were added at a later date, namely the question “who do people say that I am” as well as Jesus’ praise for Simon’s response and even the famous line “you are the Rock and upon this rock I will build my Church.” After you subtract the later additions, what remains are these different takes on the character of Jesus.
What does this text say about the nature of Jesus? Does it matter that a question was added at a later date? It might because the way you ask a question frames the information before us. There is a famous Peter Seller’s line in a Pink Panther film in which, upon seeing a man and a dog, he asks “does your dog bite?” The man answers no, so Peter Sellers reaches out to pet the dog and he is promptly bitten. Sellers then says “I thought you said your dog does not bite” and the man responds “that’s not my dog.” Many questions are loaded with assumptions.
I think it is significant that the question, “who do you say that I am,” was added later. This question sets up a dichotomy or a binary, Jesus is either human or divine, full stop. Furthermore, we are led to believe from Jesus’ appraisal of Simon’s response (also added later to the text), that divine is the right answer. But maybe this was never the question asked? Maybe this was a decidedly 4th century question reflecting a 4th century way of thinking about the world (the 4th century being the time when the Council of Nicaea codified the nature of Jesus). We know from contemporary queer theorists, and LGBTQ activists, that much of the world doesn’t fit into neat binaries. Sometimes things manifest on a continuum, simultaneously co-exist, or even just defy categorization.
Perhaps it’s my Vatican II sensibilities, but it makes sense to me that Jesus was simultaneously human and divine, as I believe the divine runs through all living things. Jesus’ task, as I understand it, was to show us how to let that divine more fully emerge in our daily lives, by being kind to others and ourselves, and by recognizing the common humanity and divinity in all of us, be they friend or foe. This was the path he charted for us to build heaven on earth, or the ‘way’ to contentment. Perhaps we are tempted to label Jesus as only divine, but I think that actually minimizes the true miracle of the transcendence he achieved. Rather than demonize or shun our humanity, we must embrace it.
As some of you may know, I recently lost my father to cancer just a month ago. He wasn’t a young man, but he was a very youthful 81, and I was taken aback by how quickly he declined at the end. While I have buried grandparents, aunts and uncles, the death of someone very close to you, be it sibling, spouse or parent, is equally devastating and deeply grounding. To help him bath one week, and then to touch his dead body in another was one of the realest things I have ever experienced. To see his ashes literally poured into the soil made vividly visceral the Ash Wednesday refrain, from dust you come and to dust we shall refrain. His death, perhaps the most human of human actions, made me feel oddly more connected to the world. I think the challenge of modern society is that we are so removed from aspects of our humanness (birth, illness, death) that we rarely connect to deeper energies.
The other common interpretation of this gospel reading is that it is a rationale for the institution known as the church and for papal succession. “You are the Rock and upon this Rock I will build my Church.” As noted previously, this phrasing was also a later addition. Interestingly, Matthew is the only Gospel that uses the term church or ekklesia in Greek.
The way one lived was clearly very central to Jesus’ message. His was not a cerebral, abstract message as a different approach to living was part of his project. We were to care for one another, to love our neighbors as ourselves, to share our wealth. Living in community was not uncommon for early Christian collectives and it worked, as I have heard fellow parishioner Harrison Nelson argue, because it enabled poor and marginalized communities to live a better life. The Christian message is a guide to better living more than anything else, a roadmap for building heaven on earth.
But Christians were also persecuted within the Roman Empire and they suffered greatly during the first centuries following Jesus’ death. This changed when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. This shift was important because it not only ended the persecution, but because it fundamentally changed the lived, communal aspect of Christianity. Instead of small communes led by elders who acted more as facilitators than rulers, we see the emergence of a Church organization patterned on the hierarchical and patriarchal structure of the Roman Empire with a male leader at the top.
I cannot blame our forbearers for the decisions they made. Persecution and death were no fun and I am sure they were thrilled when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Debates about the nature of Jesus ended after Emperor Constantine called the Council of Nicaea and the Roman Catholic Church became the strongest political force in Europe, outlasting the Roman Empire. That original way of Christian living, in a commune patterned on the life of Jesus with his disciples, would also become a distant, strange and alien form of social organization, marginalized to convents, monasteries, and kibbutzs. Just like the debate about Jesus’ humanity, this debate about how to live together and how to organize the faithful was seemingly shut down in the 4th century. As such, today’s gospel reading, with all its additions, shows us how they tried to close the door on future debate.
We currently live in a very unsettled time when institutions and authority are being questioned, and when sexism, racism and homophobia are increasingly recognized as systemic problems. The contemporary Catholic Church, an institution built by humans, is not immune from these important social debates.
But it is discouraging. I have been waiting since Vatican II for major church reform and it just never seems to come. I remember having a college professor in the 1980s, in a course on Catholicism, tell me that change was just around the corner. But the Church remains as hierarchical as ever, single men are in charge, and the younger ranks of the priesthood appear to be stacked with unimaginative, ecclesiastical conservatives. Part of me just wants to move on, to give up, to leave the church.
But, as much as some may have wanted to have buried it, the door was never completely closed on alternative ways of organizing the church. Jesus was a rabble-rouser who had his own issues with abuses of power within the Jewish community, turning over tables at the temple and showing his very human anger. Today’s Old Testament Reading from Isiah also speaks to the need for institutional change. As President Obama shared in a speech a few nights ago: they win if we stay home, “those who benefit from keeping things the way they are -- they are counting on your cynicism.” “We can't let that happen. Do not let them take away your power.”
Jesus, fully human and divine, had sound ideas for better living. We need to rediscover that road not taken and keep working to make it a reality, no matter the obstacles in our path. We are the Church, we have the power to make change. Thank you.
Note: Thanks to the Cabrini Word Team for helping me think through the issues in this text. Any mistakes or errors are my own.
The author may be contacted at moseley@macalester.edu or may be found on twitter at https://twitter.com/WilliamGMoseley
From day one, The Progressive Catholic Voice had Francis of Assisi as its patron saint. In his time, our brother Francis heard and responded to God’s call to “repair my Church.” It’s a call that resounds today in a Catholic Church which, at its worst, is corroded and weakened by clericalism, hypocrisy, intellectual dishonesty, a profound lack of imagination, and a monarchical mind set and structure totally contrary to Jesus’ egalitarian model of community. Yet as distressing as this is, there are many Catholics who are unwavering in their commitment to embody a healthy, life-giving, intellectually-honest, and authentically Gospel-based model of church – especially in terms of organizational structure, decision-making, and Vatican II’s call for “full, conscious, and active participation by all the baptized.”
