Scripture Readings for Sunday August 24, 2008:  

I.                    Isaiah 22: 19-23:  Rejection of the official Shebna; Eliakim son of Hilkiah will be entrusted with authority.  “The key of the House of David”

II.                 Romans 11:33-36  Who has known the mind of the Lord, or been his counselor?

III.               Matthew 16: 13-20  Who do people say the Son of Man is?  You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.  This was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven.  You are Peter, and on this Rock I will build my Church and the gates of Hell shall not overcome it.  The Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven:  to bind and to loose.

Themes:

1. Use of the prophetic texts by the early Christians in a sapiential manner.

2. The notion of revelation seems closely allied to prophetic and apocalyptic experiences in ancient Israel.   This is also suggested by the use of the apocalyptic term Son of Man.

3. The foundation of the Church and the keys that allow for binding and loosing are not to be thought of as rewards for having received the revelation, but are part and parcel of the revelation itself, which centers on the revelatory Person of Jesus.

4. The revelation is the whole basis of the Catholic faith that comes to us from the Apostles.

Homiletic Observations:

I am sure that I know something about every one of you, every one of you that owns a house and has a kitchen and in the kitchen has a very scary drawer within which there is a great tangle of nut crackers, wire whisks, egg beaters, wooden spoons, stainless steel spatulas, floppy plastic pastry spatulas, corn cob holders, birthday candles, etc. etc. You get the idea.  Did you ever have the experience of looking into this mess to find something and, in spite of the fact that it is there, the whole tangle of things accompanying it leave the one thing you are looking for practically invisible?  The eye and the brain can’t disentangle the contents of this drawer: it is a problem too complex to be solved with a simple glance.  Maybe you have to go so far as to shake out the whole drawer and look at each item, one by one, until at last you find that blessed wire whisk you were looking for. 

Actually, any of us can be involved in problem solving of one sort or another.  The analytical people tell us about three or four stages in this process:

-          Immersion in the mass of data: you set the problem up and collect information and get the facts, figures, context, and requirements of the problem.

-          Incubation of the mass of data:  you set the problem aside for a while because it is too overwhelming, and the brain works on it “under cover”.

-          Intuition:  All of a sudden, you are sweeping the garden path, or sawing a piece of wood, or shaving, or chatting with friends, and you get an insight that cuts through the mass of details and gives a clear, coherent, and even “simple” solution.

-          Verification:  well, after all, you have to try it out, you have to discern whether or not your great intuition really works, really has anything to do with reality. 

They say that Niels Bohr, the physicist, thought up the bubble chamber for detecting sub-atomic particles in a flash of intuition while gazing (happily, I hope) at a glass of beer.  I can remember figuring out the mathematics of gradients one time, several years after I had nearly failed the course, while walking in the woods. 

In the spiritual life, the pattern is also well known.  St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, recommends that you select and outline the topic of your morning meditation the night before.  “Sleeping on it” seems to tap into a depth of creativity and intuition that makes the meditation done after a good night’s sleep more fruitful and meaningful. 

This takes us to today’s Gospel.  Jesus is very up front with Peter, when Peter answers the Big Question that Jesus asks the apostles, and continues to ask us down through the ages:  Who do people say that the Son of Man is?  And:  Who do YOU say that I am?

Peter says:  You are the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of the Living God.

Now what is interesting is that Jesus in this very Jewish Gospel of Matthew starts out by asking who people say the Son of Man is, not who Jesus is.  Then, in the more personal question, he lets us know that the Son of Man is Himself… So who was the Son of Man in Jewish lore? 

Let me tell you that years ago, I looked into Schillebeeckx’ s kitchen drawer on this topic and found a complete utterly bewildering collection of cookware, none of it particularly useful for understanding the passage.  But if you go to Daniel 7:13, you will read:  “I gazed into the visions of the night, and I saw, coming on the clouds of heaven, one like a son of man.  He came to the one of great age and was led into his presence.  On him was conferred sovereignty, glory, and kingship, and men of all peoples, nations and languages became his servants.”  The text is originally in Aramaic, not Hebrew, and is quite late in Biblical literary history.  It would have been well-known in the time of Jesus, especially among those who were alert to the imminent appearance of a Messiah.  The footnotes in the Jerusalem Bible let us know that this One like a Son of Man would be a leader, a representative and an exemplar of the “saints of the Most High.” The Fathers of the Church (particularly St. Ephraim of Syria) identify this figure with Jesus himself, so that the Daniel text is read as a prophecy of the coming of Christ. 

What the modern commentators avoid, and should not avoid, is the connection to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and in particular to the long history of Jewish visionary and mystical literature.  “I gazed into the visions of the night” is a description of what an ancient Israelite prophet would have done, meditating on a difficult situation, and opening himself or herself to the inner voice of God, that intuition to beat all intuitions.  This is also what the later Jewish writers (after the Babylonian exile) would do when they wished to find out what God had in mind for his people, especially in times of persecution or spiritual betrayal.  For the mystical rabbis of Jesus’ own time, this gazing into the visions of the night was none other than the well-known, but highly restricted and dangerous, meditation practice for ascending in spirit before the throne of God (mysticism of the merkabah).  Paul talks about such experiences in II Corinthians 12, when he describes “someone” (himself) being taken up into the third heaven to hear secret messages, or in Galatians 1:11:  “The fact is, brothers, and I want you to realize this, the Good News I preached is not a human message that I was given by men, it is something I learnt only through a revelation of Jesus Christ.” 

So now I think we can rattle around in our drawer of difficult tools and begin to understand what Jesus meant when he told Peter:  This was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven.  What was revealed?  That Jesus is the Son of Man of Daniel’s vision.  And more: That Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of the Living God.

Peter got it right.  Not because he was a particularly gifted mystical rabbi or prophet, but because God the Father of Jesus Christ willed to reveal this to him as part of a wide, and ever-unfolding plan of salvation for the entire world.

This is why we should not understand the following words of Jesus as somehow a “reward” bestowed on Peter because – as someone might mistakenly think – he went through the trouble to try to strive up into heaven to grab onto some kind of revelation.  No.  That is not it at all.

Jesus says:  “You are Peter and on this Rock I will build my Church and the gates of Hell shall not overcome it.”  That is, the one who has been revealed, Jesus, is now continuing the content of the revelation to include Peter and the Church and Hell and everything that exists, right up to the present day and to this Eucharistic assembly, and everyone in it:  you are with Peter, on the rock over which the divine revelation pours itself out like a flood, a storm, a rushing bath of divine love and mercy, and as long as Peter, and his successors, continue to transmit this flood of divine revelation to people on earth, the power of hell itself will not be able to overcome the People of God or the Good News that has been given.  So deeply planted in Peter and his successors is this seed of the Good News that even their faults and imperfections will not impede the message and its saving power.

Nor are the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven and the power to Bind and Loose a reward.  They are an integral part of the revelation itself; you cannot separate the reality of Jesus Christ, True God and True Man, Savior of the World, the Risen One present in the proclaimed Word and in the Sacrament of his Body and Blood, from the Church itself, which Paul heard – on the road to Damascus – to be the Body of Christ! 

You cannot separate Christ from Church,

Church from Body of Christ,

Eucharist from Church,

Eucharist from Christ, Eucharist from Peter,

Eucharist from the Priesthood in Christ,

Church from Papacy,

Papacy from Eucharist,

Vicar of Christ from Christ,

Binding and Loosing from Christ,

Nor can any of this be severed from the revelation of the Father’s love that poured itself into the heart of Peter the fisherman of Galilee.

In other words, this passage is the whole basis of the Catholic faith that “comes to us from the apostles”.  Last month, when Pope Benedict XVI was in Australia with the youth of the Catholic Church from around the world, he and they were bearing witness to the continued - though contested - vitality of this astonishing revelation to the Fisherman of Galilee.

In Australia the contestation was in the form of a law allowing anti-Catholic protesters the right to “harass” the pilgrims to World Youth Day.  Freedom of speech becomes freedom to be rude, freedom to insult and denigrate the faith of others; in reality nothing much came of it.  At WYD in 2005, the German press was shamelessly delighted to tell the world that the Holy Father was coming to a Germany that is proud to call itself “no longer Christian”.  One can only wonder what they mean by Christian.  The French press back in 1997 was saying the same thing, almost as if they had a kind of fear of Christianity.  And who is afraid of Christianity, if no one is following it? That the gates of Hell shall not prevail was also part of the revelation to the Fisherman.  One of the signs of the presence of Evil is aversion to the sacred; another sign is total confusion.  In the presence of people at prayer, Evil trembles.  And the instruments of disarray fall into self-contradiction.

So we are invited recall our Baptism when we declared war on the Evil One, and we ask ourselves if we have been keeping up the fight.  Actually, in the midst of our reflections, we might want to turn back in our imaginations to see if in fact our ways of thinking and acting and meditating are at all influenced by the treasures in the storehouse of faith, or if our minds resemble the cluttered drawer in our kitchens…the one we hate to open up, the one where things get lost, the one that smothers hope and imagination, and creativity.  A little reflection every day might in fact open up the contents of divine revelation in ways that might take us by surprise.  We might find ourselves gifted with holy intuition, and, following through on the whispered wisdom of God, we might see it all verified in the way we live.

NOTE: Father Francis V. Tiso is Associate Director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, where he serves as liaison to Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, the Sikhs, and Traditional religions as well as the Reformed confessions.  

Before coming to the USCCB, Father Tiso was assigned to the Archdiocese of San Francisco where he served as Parochial Vicar of St. Thomas More Church and Chaplain at San Francisco State University and the University of California Medical School.  He was also Visiting Professor in the archdiocesan School of Pastoral Leadership, where he taught courses in Foundational Theology.  He was also Parochial Vicar in Eureka, CA and in Mill Valley, CA.  

A New York native, Father Tiso holds the A.B. in Medieval Studies from Cornell University.  He earned a Master of Divinity degree (cum laude) at Harvard University and holds a doctorate from Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary where his specialization was Buddhist studies. He translated several early biographies of the Tibetan yogi and poet, Milarepa, for his dissertation on sanctity in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism.  He has led research expeditions in South Asia, Tibet and the Far East, and his teaching interests include Christian theology, history of religions, spirituality, ecumenism and interreligious dialogue.

Father Tiso is a priest of the Diocese of Isernia-Venafro, Italy, where he holds a Canonry in the Cathedral.  He was Diocesan Delegate for Ecumenical and Inter-religious Affairs from 1990 to 1998 and rector of the Istituto Diocesano delle Scienze Religiose.   He was also chaplain of the well-known Hermitage of Saints Cosmas and Damian at Isernia

In 1995 Father Tiso was invited to accompany Cardinal Francis Arinze, then head of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, to a dialogue with Buddhist leaders in Taiwan.  He has traveled extensively in India, Nepal, Tibet, Thailand, Japan, and Bangladesh.

  
Father Tiso has written and lectured widely. He is the recipient of grants from the American Academy of Religion, the American Philosophical Society, the Palmers Fund in Switzerland, and the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, CA.   He is a musician and paints in acrylics and watercolors.