HOMILY WEEK 25 05 – Year I
Living Out Our Identity in Christ:
Optional Memorial of Blessed Émilie Tavernier-Gamelin
(Haggai 2:1-9; Ps 43; Lk 9:18-22)
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The gospel today highlights the identity of Jesus as the Messiah, the importance of finding our identity in him, and living it out through the Paschal Mystery.
Bishop Robert Barron points out the unique ontological nature of Jesus, in stating that “Who am I?” is a question no other founder such as St. Ignatius or leader such as Mahatma Ghandi would ever ask. Who Jesus is, is of critical importance, and so Jesus puts that question to his disciples. The answer from both the Synoptic Gospels and from Martha in the Gospel of John, is: “You are the Messiah, the Christ, the anointed Son of God.”
As the long-awaited Messiah, Jesus actually had a three-fold mission – to redeem, to sanctify and to inaugurate the kingdom or reign of God here on earth. To redeem is to forgive, and to sanctify is to heal, thus Jesus would inaugurate his kingdom especially through forgiveness and healing. So, we must come to him to receive forgiveness of all our sins, and to experience healing of all our painful emotions and negative attitudes, our sinfulness – that which makes us sin.
The method the Father invited Jesus to use to accomplish his mission is called the Paschal Mystery, made up of six stages: his passion or suffering, his death on the cross, his resurrection from the dead, his appearances to his friends, his ascension into heaven, and finally, the outpouring of his Spirit on the early church at Pentecost. That was the event capping both the identity of Jesus and the mission that identity entailed.
The question Jesus posed to the disciples about his identity is also posed to us. Who do we think Jesus is? Having contemplated that question for many years, I now begin my holy hour each morning with this prayer of praise to him: “Lord Jesus Christ, totally receptive to the Father’s love; humble, obedient, pure and faithful in response to that love; Son of God, Son of Man, Son of David; Savior, Redeemer, Word made flesh; sinless one, free from addiction, the Way, the Truth, the Life; the resurrection, suffering servant, crucified Messiah, sacrificial victim, risen Lord, victorious king.” Perhaps each of us could come up with our own prayer proclaiming who Jesus is for us?
Identity is an important question for each of us as well. The late motivational speaker, Serge LeClerc, mentioned in his talks how all through his life as a gang leader in organized crime, he was searching for an identity, and discovered he could manipulate both the rich and famous because they were also searching for identity.
Mary Eberstadt, a Senior Research Fellow at the Faith & Reason Institute, wrote a book entitled Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. In an interview about the book, she mentioned how suffering, rage and despair underlay the demonstrations around identity politics. She concluded that “beneath the noise of identity politics lies something real: A desperation to find in collective identities some simulacrum of a family, at a time when the literal family of humanity and the figurative family of God are in decline across our civilization.”
The commentary in The Word Among Us builds on this idea of family and relationships as a source of our identity. Our identity doesn’t really exist in a card with our picture on it. Our identity exists in the web of relationships that define us and sustain us: our parents, siblings, close friends, children, colleagues. All of them helped shape us in ways no single card could ever contain.
Peter’s response, then, to the question posed by Jesus, comes from the way his contact with Jesus had already indelibly marked and shaped him and eventually led him to give his entire life to following Christ, as well as sharing in his suffering and death (tradition tells us he was crucified upside down on a cross).
We can stand tall in our identity in Christ: We are children of a loving God, brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ, temples of the Holy Spirit, a Beatitude people, living in the reign of God by living the commandments to love God, others, ourselves and our enemies as Jesus has loved us.
Our intimate relationship with Jesus will hopefully empower us to pick up our cross and follow him through our own version of those six stages of his Paschal Mystery – dealing with our hurt (passion) through forgiveness (ascension); dealing with our losses (deaths) by grieving (the appearances); going beyond surviving to thriving (resurrection) and enjoying the new eternal life of peace and joy only the Risen Jesus can give us (Pentecost).
Today the Church honors Blessed Émilie Tavernier-Gamelin, born in Montreal in 1800. By the age of 28, she had endured the death of her husband and three children, drawing her closer to Our Lady of Sorrows. Émilie then devoted her life to the poor, sick, orphaned and imprisoned, setting up Houses of Providence for their care. With the blessing of Bishop Bourget, she founded the Sisters of Providence in 1843, and became their Superior in 1844. Her last words as she lay dying in 1851 were “humility, simplicity, charity, but above all, charity.” Émilie Tavernier-Gamelin was beatified in 2001.
The Eucharist is where the Messiah, who became poor for our sake, encounters us in all our brokenness and poverty, calls us to share in his mission to initiate the reign of God and empowers us to live the Paschal Mystery as the privileged way to accomplish it. So, let us place our faith in Jesus as the Messiah, and follow the footsteps of Émilie Tavernier-Gamelin by living out our identity in Christ as she did, through the Paschal Mystery.
