Today's readings: Isaiah 50, 5-9; James 2, 14-18; Mark 8, 27-35.
In the evolution of any religion, correct doctrine and heresy always go hand in hand. In today's readings from Isaiah, James and Mark, one sees how the identity of God as saviour, and of Christianity itself, were two major themes whose interpretation was always oscillating between truth and falsity, first in the history of Judaism and then of Christianity.
In the Gospel, the vision Jesus proposes of himself is very much in line with what we read in Isaiah in the first reading. The prophet is seeking to correct the way people were thinking of vindicating their belief in a powerful God. He speaks of a Messiah who offers no resistance in the face of evil and injustice. Likewise, Mark redefines the title of Messiah, which was misinterpreted both in public opinion and within the community of the disciples.
True salvation leads to full personhood through discipline, habit, and obedience - words which are anathema in today's language. For example, we live in times that make it more difficult than ever to dwell on ideas of non-resistance in the face of evil, or of renunciation as something that possibly makes sense in daily life.
Jesus affirms: "If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me." In our culture, freedom is not seen as something you acquire through discipline, or that can be governed by moral constraints. Freedom is seen as simply liberation. Roger Scruton, a well-known critic, novelist and TV personality, calls this the "freedom delusion". He considers it a deep philosophical error.
The idea that you can choose your values, your identity, your sexuality, and so on, and that only these things are truly yours because you have chosen them, persists even as a major premise of therapy - free the client from all that is 'oppressive', and his suffering will cease.
This may amount to self-delusion, which is one of the principal causes of unhappiness in modern societies. On the contrary, true happiness comes from forgetting the self; from seeking to give, not to take.
When Jesus today speaks of saving one's life by losing it for the sake of the Gospel, he is hitting the nail on the head. Jesus penetrates the depths of our being to challenge our vision of happiness, of well-being, of what can ultimately save us.
We cannot create a Jesus to our liking or an idea of salvation that suits us. In today's Gospel, Peter, who had just affirmed Jesus as Messiah, turns heretical when he adds his own version. His failure to accept the mystery of the cross is corrected. This is the contrast between the way we think and the way God thinks. We all imitate Peter when we judge things from our standpoint.
Authentic conversion to who Jesus really is has serious and deep implications in both our being and doing. It is a conversion in the way we see and judge reality. For example, today we acknowledge that our concept of the social order in the past was wrong. We always thought of social order as established by God and hence sacred. The ideology of Christendom even went so far as to justify slavery and social class.
For too long in its history, the Church itself succumbed to this ideology and sided with the colonisers and the rich against the poor. The way James writes in the second reading shows that the early Christian communities were already falling into the heresy of exclusion. Heresy is not just a question that concerns what you believe about the Trinity or afterlife.
When our communities have no priorities whatever as to how they spend money or how community life is geared to alleviate the poor and downtrodden, that is heresy. That is a distortion of the true image of God and of Jesus Christ. Deep discernment can give us clear glimpses of God's ways of thinking and seeing things.