September 25, 2026 — Friday, 25th Week in Ordinary Time
Luke 9:18–22
Homily
Who Is Jesus?
For a long time, this was undoubtedly a theoretical question for us, one that took on new meaning the day we were led to ask ourselves about 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. Devotional writings of recent centuries have spoken to us of a Jesus who possessed the beatific vision from the very 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 before men—a Jesus who grows in the discovery of his mission and his identity. A Jesus who is as fully human as he is fully divine, who, like every human being, needs to be affirmed by his friends in his initial—and then growing—understanding of his identity.
The more I reflect on the Gospel we have just read, the more I am convinced that when Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?”, this is not a theoretical question. Nor is it a pedagogical exercise. He—Jesus—needs to hear Peter’s answer: “You are the Messiah of God,” and this confirmation allows him to fully embrace what he already sensed 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 recognize the signs of the times in his own life: 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 make this discernment...
There is a time for everything, a time for every matter under the sun. We must not, under any circumstances, interpret this through 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 speak of “passing the time,” and even of “killing time.”) The Semitic mindset rejects this conception of time. For the Semite, what exists is not a duration to be filled. What exists is, above all, a certain number of realities, such as death, joy, sorrow, and war. Each reality has its own time. In the course of our human existence, we encounter some of these realities in their own time. And what matters is to recognize each of these realities in their own time. There are times we experience personally only once, such as birth and death, but there are other times we encounter frequently, such as joy and sorrow, peace and war, and so on. Jesus rebukes his contemporaries for being able to recognize the weather—knowing, by observing the signs in the sky, whether rain or sunshine is approaching—yet failing to recognize the times of the Kingdom of God.
When it comes to the future of our communities as well as to our personal lives, our responsibility is not simply to make human calculations but to recognize the season that lies before us and to respond to it: Is it a season of growth and expansion, or a season of waiting—and perhaps even, in some cases, a season of death?
During this celebration, let us ask for the grace to recognize the time we have to live.
Armand Veilleux