24th Sunday in Ordinary Time

          “Who do you say that I am?”  There’s a lot riding on this question – not only for the Apostles, not only for Peter, not only for the world and the Christian faith, but for each of us individually.  How we answer this question will determine so much of how we see ourselves and the world, our sense of purpose and mission in this life, and even what we say, do and think on a day-to-day even moment-to-moment basis.

          And there are really only a couple of possible answers to this question.  C.S. Lewis, the great 20^th century writer and Christian apologist, address this nicely, I think, in what is called his famous “trilemma” in his book Mere Christianity.   He first notes that many people try will say, “I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God.”  This, Lewis says, is “the one thing we must not say.”  He goes on, “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being [simply] a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”  He continues, “Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.”  To paraphrase, Jesus was either a man with a severe and delusional mental illness, or He was a charlatan who pulled off the greatest hoax in the history of the world, or He was exactly who He said He was and who Peter proclaims Him to be in the gospel today: the Christ, the anointed one, the Son of God made flesh for us and our salvation.  There’s simply not room for anything else based on what He taught and did while on this earth.

          Now, I imagine that many, if not most, of you have already “made your choice” as to who and what you think Jesus is, and that’s probably a big part of why you’re here this morning/evening and not at home watching football.  Though, maybe some of you here are still really wrestling with this question.  That’s okay.  Others have perhaps “intellectually” answered this question, but still struggle to really enter into a daily, living relationship with Jesus.

          I can’t even tell you definitively when I myself “first believed” in this sense.  Like many here, I was born and raised Catholic, so the “intellectual conversion” came fairly early.  I knew what my family taught me about Jesus and had a basic understanding of what our Church taught about Him.  But it was probably not until late in grade school or junior high that I really “let Jesus into my heart,” to use language that I know as Catholics can make us uncomfortable – though it really shouldn’t.  In some way, in those years I made a conscious and deliberate act of the will to address Jesus as a living person and say to Him, “Jesus, I don’t just want to know about you; I want to know you.  I love you and I want to be as close to you.  I want to live with you and for you always.”

Now, I am sure I didn’t put it exactly in that way, but that was the gist of it and, again, I can’t give you a precise date when this happened, like I can with my baptism (which truly began my relationship with Jesus) or my first Holy Communion (when I received him for the first time “body, blood, soul and divinity” in that great sacrament”) or my confirmation (when I was strengthened in the gifts of the Holy Spirit).  Rather, this probably happened multiple times over different years and in different ways.  And I will be completely transparent, going on fifteen years as an ordained Catholic priest, I still have to renew this act of faith daily, and even sometimes moment to moment.  For me, it is not a “once and done” kind of thing, but truly something ongoing – an ongoing conversion of heart. 

          There is something, I think, that may help us understand this choice we all face in regard to who Jesus is.  Catholic theology has long spoken of the “fides quae” and the “fides qua.”  Don’t get too hung up on the Latin, but here’s what these phrases mean.  The fides quae is the content of our faith, or the “what” of our faith.  The best and most and succinct example of this is our creed, which we will recite together in a few moments.  This reminds us what, precisely, we believe. 

          But then, there is the fides qua, this isn’t the content of our faith so much as the act of believing – itself.  If the fides quae is the “what” of our faith, the fides qua is the “that” of our faith, that is, that we believe at all.  It is a deliberate and personal act of faith.  This is what many of our Evangelical Protestant brothers and sisters mean when they ask, “Have you accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior?” or “Have accepted Jesus into your heart?”  They’re not wrong to ask this, even if in our Catholic sensibility this makes a squirm a little.  The fact is as Catholic Christians we are really good at the fides quae – that content, the “what” of our faith. In our two-thousand year tradition, we have volumes written by some of the best minds in the history of humankind about what it is precisely that we believe about God, Jesus, the Church, the Sacraments, et cetera.  We have a Catechism that lays everything out so beautifully and concisely.  For this, we are the envy of our non-Catholic Christian brothers and sisters.  But, in a sense, all of this is “straw” if we don’t have that fides qua, that personal act of faith.  This is something, as Catholics, I believe we can and must grow in if we would dare to call ourselves “disciples of Jesus Christ.”      

And so, again, in my own story I had the beginnings of the fides quae in my upbringing and early catechesis, and then somewhere in the middle of that came the fides qua, that individual choice to believe. 

Then, I will admit, when I came here to college both of these (the fides qua and the fides quae) were challenged as I came into contact with people of different faiths or of no faith, as I came into contact who those who professed faith but who did not seem to live it, and with those who professed no faith but, in a sense lived it better than many who did.  Not to mention that I had to face my own weakness and sinfulness without some of those “built in” supports to my faith that I had prior to coming to college.  Also, my faith was challenged as I began more serious study of philosophy, theology, and history.  Many of our students may feel this way now.  This is okay.  It can, if you let it, lead to a deeper, more mature faith.

I think I have gotten to know our theology professors reasonably well.  I may not always agree with all of them on all points or at least in the way those points are expressed (even as I have the highest regard of their own academic accomplishments), but I think I can say with all confidence, that there is no intentional, much less diabolical, plot on their part to destroy your faith while you are here in college – quite the opposite.  These are men and women of faith who, in part because of their personal faith (and not just out professional interest) have devoted themselves to the study of God.  If anything, they challenge in order to strengthen your faith, to see the things of God with clearer vision.  Or to borrow a phrase I happened to overhear Dr. Kiel using outside my office this week, “The goal is not to disorient for disorientation’s sake, but to reorient” to the true, the good, the beautiful.  Hopefully, they are careful not to “excavate foundations that don’t exist,” but are truly working to strengthen or, in some cases, to establish those foundations.

Certainly, in my own case I found that the more I studied philosophy, theology, and history the more not only my knowledge of the faith grew (fides quae) but also my personal faith deepened as well (fides qua).

But there is still a missing piece!  We have the “what” (that fides quae or the content of our faith) and we have the “so what” (that fides qua or our personal act of faith) – in the sense that our acceptance of the truths of our faith suddenly give our lives new meaning and direction – but we still need the “now what.”  This is where our second reading come in.  The Apostle James writes: “Faith without works is dead…Indeed someone might say, ‘You have faith and I have works.’  Demonstrate your faith to me without works, and I will demonstrate my faith to you from my works.”  To live our faith concretely, in our everyday lives and choices, in our willingness to stand up for what is right and just and true, in our willingness to be broken and poured out for others…to do this is the surest sign of a mature faith.

With Peter we profess that Jesus is the Christ.  And I invite you all to once again renew your personal faith in this same Jesus or even to make that profession of personal faith in your own way, in your own words in the quiet of your hearts for the first time here this morning/evening – to truly let Jesus into your hearts, to begin or to rekindle a living relationship with Him.  And finally, may we live this faith, demonstrating our faith by our works.