A Reflection for Thursday of the Sixth Week in Ordinary Time
Peter said to him in reply,
“You are the Christ.”
Then he warned them not to tell anyone about him.
He began to teach them
that the Son of Man must suffer greatly
and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes,
and be killed, and rise after three days.
You can find today’s readings here.
Recently I picked up my husband’s Bible, a Jerusalem translation taped up at the spine, with tiny lines of often all-caps notes crammed between the lines, like a medieval gloss on onion-skin pages. It was the Bible my husband read cover-to-cover over a summer in Rome while he was converting to Catholicism; the notes, as far as I can tell, were made by a local Jesuit, “Father Monty,” who died in 2003 and who had scrawled his name, along with Loyola University’s address, on the title page.
Monty’s scribbles identify today’s readings as watershed moments—literally, in the case of Noah. After the flood subsides, God describes how the world will look from now on: Humans are to “be fertile and multiply,” but also, “Dread fear of you shall come upon all the animals of the earth” and “If anyone sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; For in the image of God has man been made.” Monty notes that in this new world order, “man rules in fear” and the “abnormal becomes normal.” Still, this order requires and receives God’s blessing, he writes, and importantly, it sets up the paradigm that blood is sacred and has the ritual use of expiating sins.
Skip ahead 46 books of the Bible to today’s Gospel, and this paradigm has been practiced and deepened in different ways, settling into a tradition that accepts and expects ritual animal sacrifice (think of Mary and Joseph bringing their turtledoves to the temple) but in which human blood is not to be shed as a sacrifice to God (see the angel stopping Abraham from killing Isaac), though it seems to be an acceptable punishment for killing another person. Jesus, for his part, has been preaching forgiveness rather than the retribution killing that God allowed in Genesis, despite the fate that awaits him.
In the Gospels, Monty’s notes become layered; I count four different pens marking up this page. He draws a squiggly line straight through the middle of today’s reading, dividing it in half. In the first half, when Jesus asks the disciples “Who do people say that I am?” and then “Who do you say that I am?” Monty writes: “TURNING POINT - THE BIG Q - CRISIS FOR J - KNOWS OPPOSITION MOUNTING - HAS HE HAD ANY EFFECT ON THEM? ANYONE RECOGNIZE HIM? … ANYONE GRASP TRUTH?” When Peter replies, “You are the Christ,” Monty notes that Peter’s understanding is “blurred, partial” because he does not recognize Jesus as the Messiah. Jesus, for his part, realizes he needs to teach them further—specifically, he needs to teach them that he will suffer. Since the disciples don’t yet know that, he instructs them not to tell anyone who he is.
Monty’s wavy line signifies a new epoch in Jesus’ ministry: Once Jesus announces that he will suffer, die and rise, this narrative “dominates [the] rest of [the] Gospel,” Monty notes. It is a “new direction” and a “reversal of man’s sense of values,” that Jesus will “overcome evil and death by accepting defeat on its [evil and death’s] own terms.” The disciples, and Peter most of all, find this “incredible and incomprehensible – staggers them,” Monty writes. But “Faith=Blending of expected (Lord=Kingdom) with unexpected (Kingdom won by suffering).”
Jesus, after his watershed moment realizing the disciples’ grasp of his identity is only partial, begins revealing to them that he will subvert the Genesis order in which “man rules in fear” and the “abnormal becomes normal.” In Genesis, human dignity was signified by God sanctioning bloodshed in return for bloodshed, a life for a life. In God’s kingdom, brought about with the Resurrection, the inherent human dignity remains, but retribution is replaced with forgiveness. A blend of the expected with the unexpected.
With Lent approaching, let us be open to our own watershed moments, the places where God wants to introduce the unexpected, blending them with the expected to invite us to faith. For me, I think that invitation will lie in a Bible that smells of dust—where the expected texts are joined with unexpected insights and graces, jotted decades ago by a stranger.
