Who Do You Say That I Am?

      As I mentioned in the homily last Sunday, there is a move underway by the bishops of Spain to tackle the serious problem of loss of belief in that country, once so strong in Catholic faith.  The bishops’ diagnosis of the cause of this disaster is interesting, not so much for its brilliance (for the cause is obvious and has been diagnosed accurately of other places often enough), but rather for its boldness.  It is one thing to timidly make suggestions of a “positive nature,” and another to point the shepherd’s crosier at the wolves attacking the flock.  The bishops name names.  They refute specific ideas that are erroneous and yet have been accepted and propagated in many areas of the life of the Church in Spain.  Their Eminences and Excellencies, even if a bit late in the game, propose anew the Church’s answers to all these warmed-over heresies that crop up through the ages and present themselves as ever so new, a winsome tactic in any era but all the more so nowadays with moderns’ overwhelming tendency to hanker after the latest and newest. 

      The reason I refer to what’s going on in Spain is because the situation there is indicative of much the same thing in most of the developed world, where for the last few decades the Faith has just not been taught; rather has a kind of mish-mash of ideas that uses much of the traditional language of faith, but transforms the meanings of the terms used to try to bring Christian teaching in line with modern notions of relativism, pluralism and radical democracy.  The Spanish bishops target a large number of these issues in their recently published study of the Church’s life, but they concentrate on an area that has also been visited frequently by the Pope himself in his weekly Wednesday audiences:  the reality of who Jesus Christ is and His relationship to the Church – the heart, really, of our Faith, which has been so obscured.  Only with clarification here – concerning Christ and His Church – can there be any real understanding of St. John’s “Bread of Life Discourse,” which we have been considering these last few Sundays.

      When we reflect carefully on the passion of Christ as presented to us in the Gospels, we see the conflict there boils down to the question of His identity.  Our Lord Himself raised this central issue with His disciples when He asked them the question of all questions, “Who do men say that the Son of Man is?” and “Who do you say that I am?”  This is, of course, the scene of St. Peter’s great confession, as he answered Christ, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”  “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona!” Jesus responds to Peter, “For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.”  Here we see the identity of Jesus Christ revealed, and interestingly, its intimate connection with the Church, which Christ immediately speaks of founding:  “And I tell you, you are Peter [from the Greek word for ‘stone’], and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16). Just as the powers of death, of this world, would not be able to triumph over Christ – for He rose from the dead – so also the Church would prevail through time, founded on Peter and the Apostles, proclaiming through the ages this confession made by Peter of who Christ is and teaching the world the meaning of Christ’s life, words, suffering, death and resurrection.

      But what is the meaning of the title “the Son of the living God?”  It can mean only one thing:  it is Christ’s title of divinity; that He is truly God.  Yet our Lord most often referred to Himself as “the Son of Man,” the title of His humanity – that He is also truly Man.  In the early Christian communities, wayward thinkers were to err on one side or the other, and the Church would always maintain both.  She would answer each from her apostolic tradition and writings, and over the centuries she would formulate her propositions of the faith in order to secure Christ’s revelation to her.  It is precisely here that the Spanish bishops have noted in our days the reoccurrence, after a fashion, of ancient, wayward thinking:  that it does violence to the modern mind to speak of Christ as divine, that it nullifies His humanity.  But the Church insists, again, that without both – His divinity and humanity – one can make no sense of Christ’s presentation of Himself in history as recorded in the holy Scriptures. 

      In her Christological doctrine, gained from incessant meditation of the Scriptures and Tradition, with refutation of heresies, the Church proclaims ever anew what Peter did two thousand years ago, Peter who knew this Man from Nazareth and yet also came to see, by the light of heaven, that He was, is, also God.  The Church, living and acting according to her nature as St. Paul described it, as “the pillar and support of the truth,” has defined the marvel of the God-man as the “hypostatic union”:  divine and human natures harmoniously united together without confusion in the Person of the Son of God, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity:  the one divine Person of the Son and two natures – the divine nature the Son eternally has as God and the human nature He received from the Virgin Mary in the Incarnation.  Here is no agency of a human father, but rather the power of God and the gift of a Woman. 

      Thus, our Lord was no such monstrosity, as is imagined by some, of a mere human body manipulated by the divine.  Though we cannot, must not speak of Christ as a human person – for in personhood He is God – but nevertheless fully man with body and soul.  His divine Person could, and does operate through either nature.  Thus Christ’s power to perform miracles, and His experience of hunger and thirst and fatigue; His eternal life of oneness with the Father by their Spirit, and His human death on the cross.  So too do we see the redemption accomplished by the God-man:  as man He could die; as God His human death, and His resurrection, became infinitely valuable and meaningful to us. 

      Next week, we will look at the implications of all this for our understanding of the Eucharist and the Church as the Body of Christ.