Today’s readings: Isaiah 50, 5-9; James 2, 14-18; Mark 8, 27-35.

The three Scripture readings today have one underlying theme that is basic to our understanding not only of the implications of Christian living, but also of the impact it can have on the Church we project. Peter in today’s gospel is representative both of personal choices we can make in life, and of the choices the Church makes as collectivity in projecting to the world the real identity of Christ and the essentials of Christian living.

The district of Caesarea-Philippi was a major Hellenistic city and it was here that Mark chose to introduce talk about true discipleship. The interrogation on the part of Jesus as to how he is perceived concerns the crisis of Jesus’s identity which underlies Mark’s entire gospel and which extends to our own time and culture. It was already an issue at the time when Israel was in exile.

The prophet Isaiah speaks in the first reading of a Messiah totally different from the one Israel expected. He is a suffering Messiah, offering no resistance. Isaiah may have had in mind a future Messiah, but what we are sure of is that he was at the time addressing the experience of a people in trauma and exile. He was speaking words of hope that sounded utterly paradoxical.

This is the prophetic voice of Scripture we need to listen to today if we want to make sense of the time of paradox we live in Church and society alike. There is always a contradiction between God’s ways and our expectations or our imagination. This transpires clearly from today’s gospel text where Peter is commended and immediately rebuked.

Peter, having affirmed Jesus as the Christ, repudiated him an instant later for speaking of his march towards Jerusalem where he was to die at the hands of the powers that be of his time. Peter was still imagining Jesus’s march towards the eternal city as a triumphant one, not as fatal. But, without any fatalistic sense, Jesus speaks of his suffering as necessary. He is only setting down the rules of personal liberation and setting the vision and mission for his community of disciples.

Just as Isaiah the prophet had addressed the fate of Israel in exile and projected his prophetic vision for Israel’s true liberation from Babylon, Jesus was now assuming that on himself and offering it as his vision for personal liberation and for a liberating Church. Peter was behaving as the old school, imagining the Messiah as royal triumph and dreaming of the restoration of Israel’s political dominance. It is his fantasies of power that here were immediately censured. Jesus rebukes him harshly for this complete misunderstanding.

This misunderstanding, and the rebuke on the part of Jesus, throw light on the internal conflicts that presently assail the Church. The issue is not simply a question of being progressive or conservative. It goes much deeper than that. It is about the vision of Church we want to promote and about the Church people need today. If we want a Church triumphant and powerful, or a Church so sure of itself that it puts doctrine before people, then let us be crystal clear that this is not the Church Christ dreamed of.

Unfortunately we’ve always shaped our understanding of the Church in terms of political or sociological categories, giving little or no attention to the fact that the Church was always meant to be a Church of the people and not just for the people. That is why bureaucracy found its way in our churches and continues to block and complicate people’s lives just as much as it does in civil society at large.

This is what Jesus meant when, rebuking Peter, he tells him: “The way you think is not God’s way but man’s”. For too long we’ve been simply struggling to uphold the institution, to hold our ground in society, and to justify theologically and canonically a set-up which today is no longer sustainable. The Scriptures are eye-opening for us all to appreciate positively what religion is undergoing and how people, in spite of our projections, still make choices freely and responsibly.