HOMILY WEEK 18 04 – Yr II

Covenant Love – St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross

(Jer 31:31-34; Ps 51; Mt 16:13-23)

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Yearning for intimacy is one thing God and humans have in common. For God, that was always expressed through covenant relationships.

The liturgy today invites us into an ever-developing covenant relationship with Jesus that involves following him into even some redemptive suffering.

The first reading from the prophet Jeremiah is all about covenant love. Scott Hahn, a convert to Catholicism, notes God has sought a covenantal, marital relationship with God’s people throughout our salvation history, starting with Adam and Eve (a couple), then Noah (a family), followed by Abraham (a tribe) and then Moses (a holy nation, a people set apart to be an icon of God’s presence on earth). The covenant with King David became, unlike the previous covenants, a covenant of unconditional love finding its fullest expression in Jesus, always considered to be a Son of David, of the lineage of David, born in the City of David.

In the gospel, we see Jesus in the region of Caesarea Philippi in northern Palestine, a crossroads of religions, cultures and economies at that time, asking a question about his identity. Inspired by the Holy Spirit, Peter identifies Jesus correctly as the Christ, the anointed one, the Messiah and Son of the living God. He would be the one who would fulfill the prophecy of Jeremiah, and write the law of love on our hearts, an intimate covenant relationship.

The reaction of Jesus to this correct identification is not just joy, but also very significant in terms of our celebration today. Jesus identifies Peter as the rock or foundation on which Jesus will build his church, his ecclesiaor qahal– a new people set apart to live a true, genuine, heartfelt covenant relationship with God through him. We simply cannot separate Jesus from his body, the Church, the People of God.

One day, people were upset at an on-line headline claiming Pope Francis said it was dangerous to have a personal relationship with Jesus. In spite of being told by one particularly zealous Catholic “It’s all in the headlines!” I asked to see the whole article. There I read Pope Francis cautioned it was not a good idea to try to have a personal relationship with Jesus not connected to community.

I could not agree more, because to do so is actually Protestant spirituality – “me and Jesus” – in which connection to any particular faith community is secondary. That is not Catholic spirituality, right from the mouth of Jesus – who identifies himself with the believing community, his Body. As  important as prayer before the Blessed Sacrament is, the primary presence of Jesus for us is not in the tabernacle, but in our neighbor, where Jesus might be much more difficult to love in practice than in pious prayer before the tabernacle.

On top of that, Jesus establishes forgiveness as the core principal of life in the Church, and of a covenantal relationship with him. Peter is given the keys to the kingdom of heaven, and with them the awesome responsibility of either building up that kingdom through forgiveness, or holding back the growth of that kingdom by withholding forgiveness. This is such a revolutionary development that Jesus cautioned the disciples not to tell anyone he was the Christ, until they would see this teaching lived out by his forgiveness on the Cross.

That lack of understanding is immediately evident in Peter’s negative reaction to the prediction of the passion Jesus shares with them – he could not comprehend how the Son of God, the Christ, the Messiah, would have to suffer and die. So Jesus addresses not so much Peter, but Satan whose thinking that statement by Peter articulates. It is precisely through the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus this new covenant would be established, because on the Cross Jesus would reveal the true, final and complete identity of God as mercy, humility, compassion, unconditional love, forgiveness and total non-violence, an image of God the world still resists to this day.

To sum up, we are invited into an intimate covenant relationship with God our Father through Jesus, Son of the living God. We do so as a community, as the Church, mandated to make forgiveness the core of our lives, and openness to redemptive suffering as one certain way the kingdom of God will be realized in our lives.

Today, the Church remembers someone who lived these teachings, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Edith Stein was the youngest child of a large practicing Jewish family in Breslau, Germany (present day Poland) on October 12, 1891. She studied philosophy with Edmund Husserl, received her doctorate from the University of Freiburg at the age of 25, and had a distinguished career as a philosopher although her academic career was impeded because she was a woman.

Reading the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Ávila brought about her conversion to Catholicism and she was baptized on January 1^st, 1922. She taught at a Dominican girls’ school and studied Catholic philosophy. She became a lecturer at the Institute for Pedagogy at Münster but was thrown out of her post in 1933 as a result of the Nazi régime’s anti-Semitic legislation.

She entered a Carmelite monastery in Cologne and took the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. By 1938 anti-Semitism was widespread, and her prioress moved her to the Netherlands to keep her safe from the growing Nazi threat. While a Carmelite she wrote an important philosophical book, seeking to combine the phenomenology of her former teacher Edmund Husserl with the philosophy of Aquinas, and also wrote on St John of the Cross.

On 20 July 1942 the Dutch Bishops’ Conference had a statement read in all churches condemning Nazi racism. In retaliation the authorities ordered the arrest of all Jewish converts to Christianity. Edith and her sister were arrested by the Gestapo on August 2, 1942. On August 7, 987 Jews were deported to Auschwitz, and on August 9^th, Edith Stein, her sister and others died in the gas chambers. Although a convert to Catholicism, Edith Stein always acknowledged her Jewish heritage. Canonized on October 11, 1998, she is co-patron of Europe with Saints Benedict, Cyril and Methodious Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Sienna.

The Eucharist is a banquet celebrating our covenant relationship with Jesus and the Father. May our celebration strengthen our faith in Jesus and empower us to follow him even to the Cross as it may come to us in our lives.