Homily for the Twenty Fourth Sunday in OT (B)

In today’s Gospel, when Jesus asks His Apostles “who do people say that I am,” they answer by identifying Jesus with the great men of their time. They tell Him that some think He is “John the Baptist, others Elijah, still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”

Indeed, throughout the past two thousand years, and up to the current day, there have been plenty of people who admire Jesus and think of Him as a great man – an important historical figure, even a great religious leader. They appreciate His message of peace, they respect Him as an ethical teacher, perhaps they even follow Him as a moral exemplar.

But while all of this is true and significant it is simply insufficient for true discipleship. If this were a sufficient answer to the question, it would make Jesus just another spiritual guru, a wisdom figure, or the founder of a movement. But for the true disciple, Jesus is always much, much more than that.

And so Jesus turns once more to the Apostles and asks the question He is really and truly interested in: “Who do you say that I am?” It is Peter who provides the truest and best answer to this all-important question: “You are the Christ.”

Friends, in the course of our lives, Jesus asks each and every one of us this very same question. “Who do you say that I am?” It is, for us believers, the single most important question in all of human history, and the quality of our discipleship depends on the answer we give.

Peter’s confession, his declaration of belief, is the essence of the faith which the entire Church never tires of confessing throughout all of history. We proclaim our belief that Jesus is nothing less than “the Christ, the Son of the living God.” He is more than an ethical teacher, more than a moral exemplar: Jesus is God Incarnate!

Immediately after Peter correctly names Jesus as the Christ, God’s Messiah sent to save the world, Jesus explains to the Apostles that: “the Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and rise after three days.”


Without saying as much, Jesus validates Peter’s answer, and moves on to explain the type of Messiah He will be – and the means by which He will accomplish the Father’s will to reconcile all creation to Himself.

Jesus will be a suffering, servant Messiah, the one foretold in the prophecy of Isaiah we heard read in our first reading today: “I gave my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who plucked my beard; my face I did not shield from buffets and spitting.”

And it is precisely in this suffering, precisely in the blood of the cross, that Jesus will reconcile all creation to His heavenly Father.

But this is a terribly difficult thing for the disciples to accept. Their expectation was that the Messiah would be a powerful warrior-king; one who could overthrow the Roman occupiers and re-establish the Davidic kingdom of Israel. Even today people find it hard to believe in a God who gives Himself up and suffers unto death.

So, when St. Mark recounts that Peter speaks again, his words this time come not from faith, not from what the Father has revealed to him, but from his own ego, from his own sense of how God should and should not act in the world, from his own expectations of who the Messiah should be.

Peter rebukes Jesus, undoubtedly saying what the other Evangelists record: “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.”

But in attempting to deny Jesus His cross, Peter is denying the very profession of faith he has just finished making. In denying Jesus His cross, Peter is denying Christ the means by which He will accomplish the mission of, and receive the glory due, the Anointed One of God.

And so Jesus responds forcefully, with one of the strongest condemnations we hear in the entirety of the Gospels: “Get behind me Satan! You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”

Jesus makes clear, in no uncertain terms, that to follow Him is to “deny oneself, and take up the cross.” Conversely, to deny the cross, to choose one’s own ego and self-interest, is to side not with Christ, but with Satan, the Father of Lies, and the Prince of Darkness.

If we are honest, brothers and sisters, we must accuse ourselves of often thinking, not as God does, but as human beings do. We may profess our faith, with Peter, that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God . . . and yet, like Peter, we often fail to live out that faith, and we deny His cross.

We deny Jesus’ cross when we refuse to accept a share of His cross in our own lives – when we imagine that the suffering we experience is a sign of God’s displeasure with us, or His abandoning of us, or His failing to answer our prayers.

We deny His cross when we think of and care for only ourselves and fail to lay down our lives in service of our brothers and sisters. As St. James admonishes us in our second reading, “What good is it if someone says they have faith but does not have the works” that prove their faith?

Finally, we deny Jesus’ cross when we look for a savior other than Jesus – a savior more to our own liking. We deny the cross when we imagine that the world will be saved through our own efforts, or through science, or technology, or through political parties and social reforms. We make ourselves, and these other human endeavors our Messiah instead of Christ the Lord.

Friends, this coming week the Church will celebrate the Feast of the Triumph of the Holy Cross, and the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, the titular and the patronal feasts of the Congregation of Holy Cross.

We will celebrate the astounding and mysterious reality that the cross of Christ was not a mere instrument of torture, but the throne of glory that Jesus mounted triumphantly. And we will honor our Blessed Mother, Mary, who knew grief and was a Lady of Sorrows – a woman who bore much suffering she could not understand and yet stood fast in faith.


If our profession of faith in Jesus Christ is to be authentic and effective in our lives, and in the life of the world, we need to take the opportunity these great feasts give us to examine whether we have embraced or denied the Lord’s cross.

These feasts remind us that as paradoxical as it seems, it is only in and through the cross that Jesus is Christ, and the world is saved – it is only in giving up our lives, that we find the fullness of the life that comes only through the cross.

May this Eucharist we now celebrate strengthen us to answer the Lord’s question, “Who do you say that I am?” by picking up our cross and following Him.