The current Catechism of the Catholic Church has 2,865 numbered sections, and in this edition it runs to at least 700 pages. In the index you’ll see that it covers topics from the Trinity to ordination to bioethics, and you can pull it down off the shelf to settle almost any argument about Catholic theology and customs and practices. If you want to know what the Catholic church teaches, a lot of it is right here.
But here’s the problem with having that big a book as our catechism. It can make what you need to know and believe to be a Catholic Christian seem much more complex than it actually is. There is seemingly so much to know, most of which we feel we don’t know, or used to know and forgot, lists and definitions and important distinctions, and maybe there are other pieces that we do know and have a hard time supporting or believing. There’s just so much, that we have a tendency to place ourselves off to the side as Catholic amateurs or part-timers. We get nervous about the idea of explaining the faith to someone else, and we think we don’t really know enough in our heads to be full-time, enthusiastic Christians or Catholics out there on the front lines.
But today we find out that there really is one question in those thousands of questions that seems to be the one that makes a difference, and it’s the question that Peter today is the one disciple able to answer. Who is Jesus, really? I don’t want to tell you to forget the rest of the catechism, because I’d be out of my job here pretty quickly if I did. But here is the one question that matters more than almost any other, it’s why we’re here today, it’s the only question that enables to understand the rest of this book, it’s why this whole operation of the Catholic church is in business.
We hear in this gospel reading all the other things that “people” back then were saying Jesus was, and the answer was that he was a remarkable man, maybe a prophet like Jeremiah, Elijah, John the Baptist. People thought that Jesus was just like all the other inspired religious leaders who had come and gone over the years, or perhaps even one of them come back to life. But Peter is willing to say that Jesus is literally God’s presence on the earth in a way that presence was never given to us before, the Son of the Living God. That’s a life-changing answer, for him, and for us.
Every once in a while, my guess is that someone, despite how eager you might be to avoid it, someone asks you what you are up to as a churchgoing person. Why do you believe when it seems that so many people, or even most people, don’t? Why are you still Catholic? What’s so special about your religion? And at that moment, who Jesus is for us is really the question, isn’t it, because his presence is the genuine answer to why we’re here. It’s great to tell people about our wonderful Catholic tradition and culture, our rituals, history, art, moral theology, authority, all of that. But people who wonder why there’s such a thing as Christian faith above all need to hear who Jesus is, that to us he is not just an inspiring religious figure that we quote the same way we’d quote Gandhi or Dr. King or the Dalai Lama. That he is not just a great moral teacher who said a lot of things that we believe are true.
As Peter says, he is in a different category entirely. Jesus is the son of the living God, alive and active, the presence of God in this world still through the power of the Holy Spirit, a presence and a personality that is slightly frightening, that can seem far too distant in history, but someone who is still powerfully attractive, someone who only wants to give us true freedom in this life, someone it’s impossible to stop wondering about once you have come to realize that he was just possibly who he said he was.
Today just as much as at the moment this gospel took place, it’s Jesus and who he is that people need to hear about, not pounded into their heads as if there couldn’t possibly be another opinion, not spoken smugly as if the whole thing is obvious, but spoken from the heart. Pope Francis has told people over and over this past year or so that this basic message about Jesus and why we love him is how to preach the gospel. It’s not just a starting point for newbies who then need years of catechesis on all sorts of other topics. It is the kerygma, he calls it, the kernel, the belief without which all the other topics in this book will be dead issues. He says the thing we need to tell people can be surprising to say out loud, and sometimes hard to believe, but he puts it this way: “Jesus Christ loves you; he gave his life to save you; and now he is living at your side every day to enlighten, strengthen and free you.”
We’ll never always be able to live up to what that means, Peter couldn’t live up to what he believed about Jesus, and we can’t either. But we’ll never even begin to live up to it until we start saying it. It’s not simple to believe in Jesus, but it’s simpler than we think to tell someone everything they need to know about who he is and why we come here each week just to be closer to him.