2nd Sun Easter B – WHO DO YOU SAY THAT I AM?
That memorable question of Jesus to Peter has come down to us for our personal reflection. Jesus was scarcely a week away from accepting death on the cross when he posed that question. He was young, maybe in his early thirties, as he led his little group to Jerusalem and his horrific death. How could he, still in the morning of his life, accept without resistance that which lay ahead? Here he is, an innocent man betrayed, humiliated, illicitly charged with political subversion and then tossed into the hands of an angry mob who demanded his death in exchange for the release of a criminal. And he seemed to want it!
Jesus was raised like the other young men of Nazareth. He looked like them and talked like them and wore the same kind of clothing as they did. A day came when he noticed his horizons had grown and expanded. His awareness about himself was changing, and a new consciousness was growing inside him – about life, about the world, about people. Raised as a faithful Jew, Jesus experienced the God of Abraham and Moses at the heart of his own life. The Spirit of the Lord was upon him in such a way that he experienced God inside him. With his developing consciousness came the compelling need to speak out and act on behalf of the reign of God. A whole new type of person, a Godlike-person, was emerging.
He was neither a left-wing reformer nor a radical. He was different from all other human beings. He saw things from the perspective of total and absolute freedom, and revealed the arbitrariness and constructed nature of what others considered to be the norm. The prescripts of the scribes and Pharisees appeared to him as human impositions and not the law of his God. Thus, from a broader perspective, he healed the sick on the Sabbath. The power at work in him was not that of domination but a power of love, forgiveness and compassion – a sheer desire to lift up the fallen, help the wounded and heal the sick. His platform of love was the freedom of compassion, forgiveness, mercy, healing and hope.
Unlike other humans, Jesus was not saddled with the fear of dying. The power of God was so strong in him that life itself could not be extinguished. Jesus lived in the ultimate victory of life, which is God. He accepted death . . . death on a cross. He doesn’t seem to have been into dying as an act of satisfaction for sin. In the first few centuries of the Church, emphasis was on Resurrection and new life in God, rather than on satisfaction due to sin – a theory that became popular more than a thousand years later. Sin is not the centrepiece of our faith. “It is finished, accomplished.” Jesus died into the wholeness of love, into the fullness of God-consciousness. Love is complete when we have done all we can to actualise love in the persons we are.
Fr. QQ – 03/04/2024