This is a reflection on the readings of Mass for the twenty-second Sunday of the Church year in which Jesus challenges Peter to put aside his human way of thinking in favour of God’s; St Paul says something similar to the Christians in Rome, namely, to avoid pagan behaviour in line with their new mind based on their discovery of the will of God.
Then, the Prophet Jeremiah protests that God is forcing him to be a messenger of bad news which only brings him grief. He too must adapt his limited mindset to mirror the mind of God. And to cap it all, even the Gospel Acclamation is a prayer to the Father, to, “… enlighten the eyes of our mind.”
St Paul is quite clear that, for any Christian believer to “discover the will of God and to know what is good, what it is that God wants and what is the perfect thing to do” (Romans 12:2), must involve a worthy way of thinking.
In this reflection I want to suggest that one important way of doing this is to learn from an ancient doctrine that goes back to the Greek philosophers entitled the “coincidence of opposites” and I want to apply that teaching to the case of Peter in the Gospel reading, while recognising that Peter can represent us all.
What do we mean by this strange sounding terminology? How can opposites coincide? Perhaps a better word to use is “harmony.” How can opposites “harmonise?” This term suggests a link with the musical realm and neatly brings us back to the ancient philosopher Heraclitus, who one day was listening to the music of a harp or lyre and recognised that the harmonious sound came from strings that were in tension or in opposition to one another.
It strikes me that our usual sense of opposites tends to be negative, where some sort of struggle is necessary for the “better” opposite to win out over the “lesser.” So, ignorance must be overcome by its opposite, knowledge, or wisdom. Weakness must be replaced by strength, illness by health and ultimately, life must defeat death.
It is quite a challenge then to our normal way of thinking to treat opposites in a gentler way, holding the tension between them creatively, balancing opposites patiently, with an aim to achieving harmony and ultimate peace.
Some examples should help us to focus on the advantage of looking at these tensions in this positive light.
Take the tension between ignorance and knowing. Instead of thinking of ignorance as something you need to overcome, consider how knowing how little you know can spur you on to seeking the truth. The wise person, the philosopher Socrates said, is the one who realises that he or she knows nothing! Imagine how boring life would be if you knew everything and there was nothing new to learn.
Indeed, one of the temptations in life is to neglect to improve our minds, to settle for what we already know, to give up on a healthy curiosity (beyond gossip and Hello magazine!) In the area of religious faith this is, sadly, a common phenomenon, where believers rest content in a knowledge that stopped the day they left school.
Ironically, in a world of specialisation, people can know more and more about less and less. One could be the smartest of scientists but lack emotional intelligence, a sensitivity to what is going on in the heart of another, even in oneself. Be happy that you know so little, because there are so many wonderful things to learn.
Another example is the tension between weakness and strength. As with ignorance, weakness and disability are seen as challenges to be overcome. But there are many dangers in aiming at power and strength and forgetting one’s fundamental vulnerability. It is when we appreciate our weakness that we can prepare to be strong.
The experience of Covid and recent natural disasters are reminders from God and nature that we are not in charge of our destiny in spite of our technological knowledge and expertise. St Paul recognised this paradox in boasting about his weakness so that he could experience the power of Christ embracing him (2 Cor.12:10). True strength is realised in a humble, reverent recognition of our dependence on an almighty God and being interdependent in relation to our fellow human beings and creation itself.
Above all, the mystery of the Incarnation reveals a God who sets aside his power to become a dependent child in a poor stable and who saves us when nailed to a cross. If God can embrace weakness, can we do any less?
And, finally, there is the ultimate tension between life and death. Our natural instinct is to struggle against death and to hold on for “dear life” as long as we can. Heaven will be wonderful, but in practice our attitude is typically that “Heaven can wait!”
I find it helpful in facing this opposition to understand death in a wider sense of the letting go of certain aspects of life as the necessary condition for experiencing newness. The various stages of our life, for instance, from childhood to adolescence to mature adult to the ageing person is a process of moving from death to life.
The movement of the seasons and even going to sleep and trusting that we will awake to a new day is both loss and gain. For Christians, due to the death and resurrection of Jesus, physical and spiritual death have been in principle defeated. But perhaps that word “defeated” is no longer appropriate from the point of view of the coincidence of opposites and we might turn to St Francis for another, better image, that of “Sister Death” praised by him in his Canticle of the Creatures.
As he prepared for his “transitus” to his heavenly home, he famously “welcomed” this loving sister. All fear gone, the tension between life and death becomes a harmony of death and resurrection.
In the gospel encounter between Jesus and Peter at Caesarea Philippi (Mt.16:13-28) there appears to be an abundance of clashing opposites, going back to previous events recorded by the evangelist. The Gentile woman who nags Jesus to heal her daughter is praised for her great faith (Mt.15:21-28), while in the previous scene Peter sinks into the sea and is challenged by the Lord as one of “little faith” (Mt. 14:31).
Then, when he gets the revelation of who Jesus is from God, he is again the man of faith, the rock on which the Church will be built (Mt. 16:18). But in this Sunday’s story we are back with lack of understanding as Peter remonstrates with Jesus about the prediction of an impending crucifixion (and resurrection – something which Peter doesn’t seem to hear).
Now Peter is described as a stumbling block rather than a foundation stone. Simon, who was called the “rock” suddenly gets a change of name to “Satan” (Mt.16:23)
In these fluctuations between ignorance and the wisdom of faith Jesus shows much patience with his chief apostle, while firmly putting him in his place, which is to “get behind” his master, to become the follower, not the leader who “takes Jesus to one side” to correct him, like a parent with a naughty child (Mt.16: 22).
Peter needs to recognise how little he understands the identity of Jesus and the destiny in store for him and to wait patiently for the full truth to be revealed when the Spirit is bestowed on him at Pentecost, while (in the meantime) Matthew keeps up the harmony of opposites in the very next chapter when Peter, James and John catch a glimpse of the glory following on the cross (Mt 17:1-8). Peter must harmonise his ignorance and the limited revelation he has received from God, by following in the footsteps of his master.
The opposites of weakness and power are clearly implied in this same encounter. Peter has just been appointed the head of the apostles, a powerful position symbolised by the language of keys being given to this one-time fisherman (Mt.16:19). But in correcting Jesus, Peter oversteps his authority and must learn the limits of his mandate.
Power and weakness in the spiritual realm must be held together in a fruitful tension, in recognition that all power is meant to be directed to service and obedience to the will of the Father. When strength and power are linked to loving service, then the harmony of opposites is well on its way to fulfilment.
The final set of opposites is the most fundamental one of all and is represented in our Gospel text with the message that in order to gain life one must first lose it (Mt.16:25). This may refer to ultimate martyrdom leading to the reward of eternal life, but it can also refer to the traditional concept of “self-denial” in the sense of saying no to selfishness and pride and yes to a life of virtue.
One must be careful, of course, in speaking of denial of “self.” The “self” in question is the false self of fallen man not the true self remade in the image of Christ through the process of conversion. Death to self, then, is fundamentally about liberation from the prison of self-centred desires which lead to so much destructive behaviour in our world.
And note that, at this stage in the gospel reading, these words are no longer addressed to Peter but to all disciples, which obviously apply to us as baptised believers, people who have been plunged into the waters of rebirth to rise to new life.
The good news for Peter and also for us in terms of this gospel account is that the coincidence of opposites can be achieved in cooperation with the grace of God in a peaceful, serene acceptance of the life-giving tension between knowing and not knowing, wisdom and foolishness, weakness and power, death and resurrection, the old life and the new life that beckons.
There are, of course, multiple further examples of the harmony of opposites in the scriptures, but my all-time favourite is the parable of the Weeds in the Wheat (Mt.13:24-30). Here, Our Lord counsels against the rush to “weed out” the negative dimension of life which is literally entwined with the positive aspect.
Beware of those who talk about rooting out evil because in doing so one risks rooting out what is good, all too easily justified by such zealots as “collateral damage” in the war against the “enemy.”
But the message of Jesus is to love one’s enemies in the hope that one day they will become friends. He died on the cross and rose again to harmonise such opposites.
Kieran Cronin ofm