26 September 2025 -- Friday, 25th Week of Ordinary Time
Homily
Who is Jesus?
For a long time, this was undoubtedly a theoretical question for us, but it took on a new meaning the day we were led to question our own identity. (Even if we may not have asked ourselves the question explicitly.)
The answer to the question ‘Who is Jesus?’ determines the answer to the question ‘Who am I?’.
The Son of God accepted all dimensions of human existence. The devotional books of recent centuries have told us about a Jesus who had a beatific vision from the beginning... But contemporary Christology leads us to rediscover a Jesus more in line with what the New Testament tells us: a Jesus who grows in age and wisdom before God and men—a Jesus who grows in the discovery of his mission and identity. A Jesus who is as fully human as he is fully divine, who, like any human being, needs to be confirmed by his friends in his initial and then growing perception of his identity.
The more I meditate on the Gospel we have just read, the more I am convinced that when Jesus says to his disciples, ‘Who do you say that I am?’, this is not a theoretical question. Nor is it a pedagogical device. Jesus himself needs to hear Peter's answer: ‘You are the Messiah of God’, and this confirmation allows him to fully assume what he already perceived in his human soul: "The Son of Man must suffer greatly, be rejected by the elders... be put to death and rise again..."
Jesus knows how to recognise the signs of the times in his own existence: for him, there is a time to preach courageously and a time to hide, a time to live and a time to die. His disciples, and Peter in particular, help him to make this discernment...
There is a time for everything, a time for every matter under the sun. It is important not to read this with our Western conception of time. For us, time is an immense void, a continuous line with a starting point and an ending point: a void that must be filled.
(We sometimes talk about occupying time, and even killing time.) The Semitic mentality ignores this conception of time. For the Semite, what exists is not a duration to be filled. What exists is above all a number of realities, such as death, joy, sorrow, war. Each reality has its own time.
During our human existence, we encounter some of these realities with their own time. And the important thing is to recognise each of these realities with their own time. There are times that we only experience once in our lives, such as birth and death, but there are other times that we experience often, such as joy and sadness, peace and war, etc. Jesus reproaches his contemporaries for recognising the weather by looking at the signs in the sky, knowing when rain or sunshine is approaching, but not knowing how to recognise the times of the Kingdom of God.
When it comes to the future of our communities, as well as our personal existence, our responsibility is not simply to make human calculations, but to know how to identify the time that is coming and to respond to it: is it a time of growth and expansion, or a time of waiting, and perhaps even, in some cases, a time of death?
During this celebration, let us ask for the grace to recognise the time we have to live.
Armand Veilleux