The Fundamental Option
Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time Scripture Readings
Although it may not be immediately evident, today’s liturgy asks us to delve deeply into the mystery of the Incarnation—that is how the universe of spirit and divinity interfaces with the world of flesh and humanity. The Christian message is, after all, the good news that God and humanity are not only not incompatible, but that, in Jesus, God has manifested himself in and through humanity. In Jesus, God has shown us that we were wrong: we were wrong about divinity, and we were wrong about humanity.
Humanity—and that includes all of us—recoils at the thought of God getting his hands dirty with human concerns. Left to our own devices, we insist on seeing God as God and us humans as merely human. It’s way more comfortable for us to relegate God to Mount Olympus, or Valhalla, or heaven. We either envision God as too divine—the ineffable “clockmaker” who got this all started—or too human—messing in human affairs like a puppeteer. Either way, there’s us: humans down here, and them: gods and goddesses up there. Once again, it’s the perennial conflict between “us” and “them”.
The scandal of the Incarnation plays itself out, first of all, in our gospel reading. Last week, Peter says, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus says, “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church.” Everything is reversed this week. Peter says, “God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you.” And in reply, Jesus says, “Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me.” There is, evidently, a dichotomy between God’s perspective and God’s way of thinking and the human perspective and our way of thinking. Isaiah [55:8-9] spells it out: “‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the Lord. ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.’”
This introduces us to an important Greek term that has no exact parallel in English: φρόνησις (phronēsis). This term means much more than “thoughts.” It encompasses an entire social, moral, and spiritual worldview. It’s the universe of values that each of us inhabits. That’s the term Jesus uses in today’s Gospel when he says to Peter (and to us), “You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.” Peter’s thinking—his φρόνησις (phronēsis)—was not incarnational. It could not bridge the gap between the human and the divine. Peter’s φρόνησις (phronēsis) determined his understanding of “the Christ, the Son of the living God.” That meant for him the embodiment of safety, triumph, and the avoidance of suffering.
Our human φρόνησις (phronēsis) is grounded in the pleasure principle: seek pleasure and avoid pain. That’s the motivating principle of all life, the principle of self-preservation. It’s the most fundamental of Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. In Jesus, we find the ultimate example of the divine φρόνησις (phronēsis), that the path to life in the spirit cannot be found by going around suffering, or even over or under it. True spiritual life can only be found by going through it. The path to spiritual life confronts the human survival instinct at every level. This confrontation can’t be understood as an end in itself. There’s no value, spiritual or otherwise, in suffering for its own sake, whether it’s self-inflicted or inflicted on us by others. Acceptance of suffering is only valuable in that it leads us through and beyond our human limitations. It is, in effect, our doorway to participation in the Incarnation because our God passes through that doorway with us.
It’s obviously a path we’d rather not tread because on it we must confront our own survival instincts. Yet God’s voice calling us to go ever deeper spiritually is never silent. When we were young, we all heard that whispering voice. We understood what it offered and may have been eager to pursue it. We didn’t know about “incarnational spirituality”. We didn’t know that pursuit of the spirit could force us to confront our own mortality. When we were forced to confront it, it may have seemed like too great a price to pay for what was, at least in our understanding, merely a promise. “You duped me, O Lord, and I let myself be duped… I say to myself, I will not mention him, I will speak in his name no more. But then it becomes like a fire in my heart, imprisoned in my bones.”
I entered the minor seminary in 1963 at age 15. The seminary program included high school and junior college. In my last year, at age 20, the pressures from changes in my intellectual, social, physical, and spiritual life became too much. I had missed too much of growing up and felt alienated from my world and myself. I’d never been on my own, never really socialized, never even dated; I was facing an existential crisis. “You duped me, Lord, and I let myself be duped.” I could not go on. I dropped out, was accepted at the University of Florida, and moved there. I did all those things that I thought were missing from my life. Yet, as good as my life was in the “outer world,” there was something vital missing. It wasn’t enough. As Jeremiah said, O God, “you were too strong for me, and you triumphed.” God had his hooks in me, and I could not get free. There was that “fire burning in my heart.” I relented. The following September, I entered the major seminary in Ottawa, Canada.
Look at the words that we find throughout today’s liturgy. They speak of metamorphosis, of transformation. It’s a metanoia, a change of mind and heart—not so much a becoming spiritual or becoming more human; it’s an opening up, a breaking open, a setting free and allowing these two seemingly incompatible realities of spirituality and humanity to take possession: not spirituality apart from humanity, but spirituality through humanity. That’s the cross, that’s the essence of self-denial. It isn’t about making ourselves suffer or putting to death our humanity to become more spiritual. It’s about having the courage to go through our human experience with all its pleasures and joys, pains and sorrows, and even death to discover the reign of God within it, because it can’t be found anywhere else.
Remember who the Satan is: it’s the prosecuting attorney who accuses us day in and day out. The Satan is the voice that tells us we’re too weak, we’re not good enough, we’re not wanted, we can’t afford it. It’s too much. Give up. Settle. Take the easier, softer way.
Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner talks about morality in terms of a “fundamental option.” The options in today’s readings couldn’t be clearer. Give up and give in to the voice of the Satan and let your survival instinct rule you and lock you away from going deeper into the reality that’s calling you, or take up your cross, challenge your fears of failure, suffering and death, and go through them to rise into the life of the spirit, the life of trust in the God who loves you through it all. For all of us, the fundamental option is the same: death or life. Choose life.
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