Twelth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Mass Celebrated by Archbishop Denis Hart
at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne,
on Sunday, 20th June, 2004, at 11.00am

Introduction

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Today’s Gospel asks the fundamental question – ‘Who do men say I am?’ The whole of our life is challenged by our answer to this question. If Jesus is someone for me, it is first because he was someone for others and so took flesh in my life through the lives of believers who showed well the faith by which they lived.

As we welcome the members of the Knights of Malta, renowned for care of those who suffer and philanthropic service throughout the world for many centuries, and speak with esteem of their service, we remember that each of us is called to show the light and hope that Christ alone can bring.

Let us call to mind our sins, that we might live in the light.

Homily

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

From the promise of Zechariah (1st Reading) to the Gospel, today we see Jesus challenging us in our acceptance of him. ‘Who do the crowds say I am?’ ‘Who do you say I am?’

Peter proclaimed Jesus as Christ of God. But Our Lord would not let him get away with it, challenging him immediately that the destiny of the Christ of God was to suffer grievously and so to win salvation for us.

Each one of us here is invited to answer that same question and to make the double acceptance of its consequences. Jesus is the Christ of God and we are confronted with a God who had to suffer just as we will have to suffer.

The paradox of suffering in Christianity is inescapable; a promise of glory, which is totally frustrated in the Cross. Yet it is in this frustration that our human condition meets the divine. It was Saint Paul who said that Jesus learned obedience through suffering. At the times when we cannot control our own lives, when pain is inescapable then, if seen in faith, our heart is open to God’s designs and purposes as the greatest reality.

It was Evelyn Underhill who wrote, “Pain plunges like a sword through creation. People tremble at the memory of wrongs done to them. Our bodies succumb to wasting disease. Our efforts at relating to others are cut through with the jagged edges of our mistakes.”

Suffering is everywhere and unavoidable. But to see suffering as the opening to the greatest purpose of all – God’s plan for us – we have not only the perfect example of Jesus, Our Lord, but the power of what he did and what he saw.

The Jesuit palaeontologist, Teilhard de Chardin, once said to his cousin, Marguerite, who had been critically ill since the age of twenty –

“Oh Marguerite, my sister, while I given soul and body to the positive forces of the universe, was wandering over continents and oceans … you lay motionless, stretched out on your bed of sickness; silently, deeply within yourself, you were transforming into light the world’s most grievous shadows.”

Jesus knew that suffering would be the resource and power by which he would transform darkness to light, sin to forgiveness and death to life. Jesus began from how the world perceived him to how each one of us perceived him and to see the intertwining reality of glory and suffering to which we are called.

For many centuries the Knights of Malta have been strongly involved with those who suffer in providing medical resources, care for the sick, relief of suffering, in imitation of the consequences of saying, ‘you are the Christ, the Son of the living God’, and realising our own limitations.

Yet this suffering has a purpose and it is linked to our affirmation that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God; to proclaim that Christ is present and active in the world; in our homes, in our neighbourhood, our communities, workplaces, in our civic and political responsibilities.

It was not surprising that in the darkest days after September 11th and since Iraq, Pope John Paul has instructed the bishops to be heralds of hope. Indeed, Jesus’ mission is to announce the time of God’s favour, the coming of the reign of God, as the fulfilment of God’s hope, desire and intention for the world.

When we proclaim that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, in the midst of our suffering and through our suffering, we announce to the world that we are partners in the remaking of the world, of society, of those close to us and of ourselves after the pattern of Christ through our suffering and weakness.

Suffering teaches us about reality, about the frailty of what we are, and the greatness to which we are called, sustained by the grace of Christ. ‘Anyone who loses his life for my sake, that man will save it.’

The surrender of our own personal gifts to the greater purpose of the will of God is the great objective of the healing and philanthropic work of the Knights of Malta and it is the contribution that we must make to the rebuilding of our society, even when all seems impossible.

+ Denis J. Hart,
Archbishop of Melbourne.