Hi everyone and welcome to Weekly Homilies with Father Mark Suslenko, Pastor of SS. Isidore and Maria Parish in Glastonbury, Connecticut. We are part of the Catholic Archdiocese of Hartford. I'm Carol Vassar, parish director of communications, and this is Episode 29 of Season 7 for the Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time  - September 15, 2024. Our Gospel reading is from Mark Chapter 8, verses 27-35. 

Jesus and his disciples set out for the villages of Caesarea Philippi. Along the way, he asked his disciples, "Who do people say that I am?” They said in reply, "John the Baptist, others Elijah, still others one of the prophets.” And he asked them, "But who do you say that I am?” Peter said to him in reply, "You are the Christ.” Then he warned them not to tell anyone about him.

He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and rise after three days. He spoke this openly. Then Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. At this, he turned around and, looking at his disciples, rebuked Peter and said, "Get behind me, Satan. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do."

He summoned the crowd with his disciples and said to them, "Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and that of the gospel will save it.”

The Gospel of the Lord 

“The Misperception of Seeing Through Human Eyes,” by Father Mark S. Suslenko, Pastor, SS. Isidore and Maria Parish, Glastonbury, Connecticut

As human beings, we have such an incredible capacity to know things. In every sense of the word, our knowledge is inexhaustible. There's always something else to learn, something to read, facts to absorb, and pieces of the puzzle of human life to put together. Our brains are very powerful tools, and scientists are quick to remind us that we haven't even seen the full capacity of what the human mind can do. 

Understanding things is important to us. It allows us to negotiate our world and tells us what is safe and unsafe, what is worth investing in, and what is not.  This need for understanding is also brought to our faith. And so, to the extent that I look at the faith that is before me, the extent to which I can take A plus B and equal C then determines whether I invest in that faith or not. When it comes to the simple elements of our faith, the dots are easy to connect. When it comes to those more complex, however, the dots are not as easy to connect. 

I'm privileged to often have incredible conversations with folks who are searching for faith. Questioning who God is, what faith is all about, what the church stands for, and what it is all about. And often, there's a bit of an impasse, and some of these folks stay on the fence because they can't adequately connect the dots: A plus B is not equaling C.  

And this occurs with some of those very foundational elements of our faith, but also those that are a bit more profound. Things such as the incarnation and our belief that Jesus Christ is both God and man. As someone tries to connect those dots, it's very difficult to put those pieces together and come up with a reasonable explanation for how someone could be both fully and completely. 

Something such as the Eucharist is another. That the bread and wine, that the consecration, is truly transformed into the body and blood of Christ. While it still looks like and tastes like bread and wine,  our faith tells us those elements have been metaphysically changed into the body and blood of Christ. Someone trying to connect the dots finds something like that very difficult to comprehend. When our Lord tells us that we must give up our life in order to find it, a reasonable mind sees that as somewhat contradictory and can't fully understand what he's really saying.  

The one that really becomes challenging, however, is something that has found its way into every one of our lives in one form or another, and it goes something like this: if God is a God of love and complete compassion and mercy and forgiveness, then why and how does he allow such suffering in our world? If God truly loves me, why must I undergo these trials? Why must children who are innocent suffer so needlessly? Why is there such injustice? And why doesn't this God of love simply bring it all to a halt? Someone trying to connect those dots will find it very difficult to do so.  

And so if we approach our faith based on what we can understand about it, then sometimes folks end up simply walking away because it all becomes too overwhelming and too much. For many of us, however, we usually gravitate to something we can comprehend. Something we can connect the dots to and something that does make rational sense. Something like understanding Christ as the Messiah and Jesus being that Christ. That we can accept that God loves the world and God wants to save the world, that God preached in the person of Jesus Christ and reached out to the poor and the afflicted, that he called us to love, love him, love our neighbor, love ourselves. All of that we can easily get our heads around and it makes complete sense to us.  St. Peter felt that same way, too.  When he looked at Jesus and he said, "You are the Christ." He wasn't wrong. He was spot on, and neither are we. But if we leave our faith at that very basic level and it doesn't evolve and it doesn't grow and it doesn't mature, then when we stumble upon something that's a bit more challenging, like our mortality, like suffering, like injustices in our world, and the inequities and the unfairness that abounds around us, then we find ourselves coming up short because we can't reconcile those negative experiences with this God of love. And St. Peter was in precisely that same place. When Jesus instructed his disciples that he must suffer, that he must be ridiculed,  that he must die and then rise, Peter had a very difficult time connecting A plus B and getting C. 

Saint Augustine tells us that faith is believing in what you cannot see. Very basic and very simple. Faith is believing in what you cannot see, and that makes sense to us as well. But if we're approaching our faith first with our minds  and trying to formulate ideas and understanding about that faith, we are creating mental images and mental pictures. 

Our minds are forming ideas and thoughts, which really, when you stop and think about it, is a form of seeing. Ideas and thinking and insight and knowledge is a way to see the world. So, by trying to mentally process all of those things about our faith, we are, in one sense, creating vision. So, if our minds are trying to understand our faith before we accept it, then what really is the need for faith?  Because we are really desiring to see first and then believe.  

He further goes on with a pearl of wisdom that will help us put all of this in context.  He says, "Understanding is the reward of faith." Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore, do not understand so that you can believe; rather, believe so that you can understand. Believe so that you can understand.  

So our faith becomes, for us, this light bulb. This way of seeing the world, not through our own eyes, but through God's eyes, because that's exactly what Jesus said to St. Peter. You are seeing not with God's eyes but with human ones. Human eyes cannot make sense out of Jesus being both God and man. Human eyes cannot make sense out of how Jesus becomes present in the Eucharist. Human eyes cannot make sense about how a god of love can also tolerate and allow for suffering and death in the world and injustice. We simply cannot do that with our human capacity. Hence, we need faith in order to understand those things. And our faith has to evolve. It has to grow. It has to mature so that we can. Because Jesus also said something very profound and something we all must do. Life is going to give every single one of us crosses to bear. We cannot escape it. We will all have to carry our cross, some of them more than others, in whatever form or shape they take, regardless of whether we want them or not. And Jesus doesn't say to us, take your cross and give it to me. What he does say is take up your cross and follow me. Follow me.  

Follow me where? 

Follow me to the cross. In other words, let me teach you, as your suffering God, how to hold God's love, suffering, death, and injustice together. Allow me to help you as you're suffering, God, to see them as coexisting, not in competition with one another, but elements of the journey, a journey that will have a joyful end in the Resurrection if you but follow me. Now, if you're sitting here and you're saying to yourself, "I don't carry my crosses very well. I have a hard time seeing God's love in the midst of my suffering and the suffering of the world. I have a hard time understanding how the two of those things can exist." If that's where you are today, don't beat yourself up too much. You have a very good friend in St. Peter, the first Pope, who was exactly where you find yourself to be today. His faith had to evolve and mature, and that's the task that is before us all. But it's not something we can do on our own. It is something we can only do when we persevere in prayer, developing a deep relationship with God, and putting ourselves on a path of trust so that the deepening faith we receive can enlighten our path and show us why and how those two opposing things can exist in the joyful hope to which we are all one day called. 

Father Mark Suslenko is the pastor of SS. Isidore and Maria Parish in Glastonbury, Connecticut. Learn more about our parish community at www.isidoreandmaria.org. And follow us on social media: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Our music comes free of charge from Blue Dot Sessions in Fall River, Massachusetts. I’m Carol Vassar. Thanks for joining us.