CHRIST OF THE POOR - Homily at St Anne's House Chapel 20th Feb 2014

Thursday in 6^th Week of Ordinary Time

Eucharist at St Anne’s House Chapel, Dunbar 20^th Feb 2014

CHRIST OF THE POOR

James 2: 1-9 Did not God choose those who are poor?

Mark 8:27-33 The way you think is not God’s way, but man’s.

Poor foot-in-mouth Peter so often has the unenviable privilege of standing in our place and speaking, as it were, our lines. This time he speaks our fears, our hesitations, our unwillingness to take risks. Jesus has just responded to a profession of faith and love straight out of Peter’s best self ("Lord, you are the Christ!”) with the prediction of all that is to happen in Jerusalem. So now that faith Peter’s just expressed – and we can be assured he meant it at the time – now collapses in on itself, or rather into himself, into his dark and fearful places. Those are places which only the light of the Risen Christ will finally transform. For now this is the Peter we’ll see on that dark night of denials where “You are the Christ” and “Lord, to whom shall we go; you have the words of eternal life” turn into “I do not know the man”. It won’t be until the lakeside breakfast and that dialogue of “Do you love me?”/ “Lord, you know that I love you!” that the fearfulness we see in Peter here will be replaced by a courage that will enable him to stand in the very city of his denials and proclaim Jesus as Lord.

Why can’t he do it now? Why can’t he see why Jesus must embrace this path? It isn’t just his fears that blind him. He has yet to see that this Christ “had to be made like his brothers and sisters in every respect” (Heb 2: 17a), a destiny which includes embracing the poverty of his brothers and sisters, which includes our poverty, all that we lack as human beings and all our incompleteness. To this Cross, which so appals Peter in this Gospel, his half-understood Christ will take every shred of human vulnerability and know the helplessness of that vulnerability to the very depths.

This is why James in his Letter is so confident in asserting the identification of Jesus with the poor. The heirs of the poor Man of Nazareth, the one who had nowhere to lay his head and who called the poor “blessed”, daren’t fool themselves that the poor can be ignored. Peter’s Christ, made destitute in crucifixion and glorified in resurrection, compels us to see things differently. The poor have best seats at God’s kingdom banquet – a realisation to affect how we act, speak, spend and even vote. Neither is our own particular kind of poverty left out in the cold as unimportant enough to deserve a place. The Cross which Peter so much feared and resisted is nothing less than our gilt-edged invitation to the banquet of life.

“The Christ of the Poor” by Jose Ignacio Fletes Cruz