Homily: 22 February 2021: Matthew 16:13-19

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(Please read the Scripture passage before reading the homily.)

“Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” Some say John the Baptist, some say Elijah, some say the Man Upstairs, and others have other names for this Son of Man.  He is not, however, a conquering army and he does not deploy weapons of destruction, neither mass nor less than mass.

When we call him Christ, the Son of the living God, we put an end to thinking of him in terms of our earth experience of sovereign leadership.  He is not an Obama, he is not a Trump, he is not a Biden.  He is not Chinese or Russian or any national leader or figure.  The Christ we know is the Son of the living God.

This puts him, in a sense, beyond our human experience.  Yet this Son of the living God remains among us and we can experience the presence of this Son of Man in the Church.  This Church is like Christ, partially available to us in human form and partly invisible to us in divine characteristics, just as Jesus in his lifetime is God among us in human form.  The true answer to who the Son of Man is must include what we can see and what we cannot see, the property of being Son of Man (human) and the property of being Son of God (divine).

Today, the presence of Christ is visible in the world as the Church.  As a whole we could call this Church the Vicar of Christ, that is, the visible powerful presence of Christ in the word today.  If the presence of Christ continues in the Church, then presence of Peter must also have a visible presence in the world because every day Peter calls Jesus the Christ the Son of the living God.  That presence is through the Vicar of Peter and the person who holds this position in the Church today is Francis, the bishop of Rome.

So, when we are asked today about the Son of Man, we recognize the Church as the visible presence of Christ in the world today.  We have a human element we can somehow see and we have a divine element that we cannot directly experience.  Together, today we can confess this Jesus as the Son of Man and Son of God.