It’s just after five a.m. on a Sunday, and you’re walking quickly—but not too quickly—through the streets of Center City Philadelphia. You have a purpose to your mission, but you don’t want others to pay you too much attention. Although it’s a Sunday, the city is already coming alive. Sunday is no longer a day set aside for public worship. It’s another busy workday like the rest of the week.
You’re on your way to Mass, but you don’t want anyone to know about it. What you’re doing is illegal, and if you’re caught, you could end up in prison, or worse yet, be killed. In one of your pockets is a small piece of bread that you baked at home. You turn a corner and are on Delancey Place, but you discreetly head to the back alley to enter the house of a wealthy Christian. Someone is keeping the door to ensure that those who enter are familiar and not spies. You nod at the doorkeeper and enter the parlor of the home. A small but faithful congregation has assembled around a table, covered by a white cloth. A man in civilian clothes sits in a chair, and you recognize him as the Bishop of Pennsylvania. Before you take your seat, you place your piece of bread on the plate resting on the altar.
After a few more minutes, the bishop rises, welcomes those gathered, and begins to pray. He’s joined by several other people in civilian clothes. They’re priests. The bread and wine, which have been brought by you and all those assembled, are prayed over, the Bread is broken, and then the Bread and Wine are shared.
When this sharing in the breaking of bread and common cup is ended, everything is put away, and all are dismissed. While you’ve only been there for twenty minutes or so, the city is now bustling outside. Under the current government, production is king. The workday is starting earlier and earlier. Many people are rushing to work, and should one of them see you and a host of other people leaving this prominent house at the same time, you might tip them off to the fact that you’re Christians.
If they noticed several people leaving the house on Delancey Place, it wouldn’t be too long before they whipped out their cell phones and called the police. Shortly thereafter, you, the others, and even the bishop, too, would be handcuffed and hauled off to the police station. You’d be efficiently judged—hastily, because there’s no real just process these days. You’d be asked if you’re indeed a Christian, and of course, how could you deny it? To deny it would be to deny Christ himself.
Now, there might be someone in the group that was hauled off to the station who waffles before that question, “are you a Christian?” He says no, but the judge suspects that he really is. “Bow down before that picture over there of the president and show your allegiance to our real ruler,” the judge says. For a time, the person is tempted to do it, but then he simply can’t. He turns his back to the picture on the wall and proclaims that he’s a Christian. You and your handcuffed companions become the next victims of the state’s violent system of capital punishment. And it’s not even noon yet.
What I’ve just described is very difficult for us to imagine. It’s a modern riff on an imaginative scenario posed by the late Anglican monk and liturgical scholar Dom Gregory Dix in his famous book The Shape of the Liturgy. Dix, writing in the 1940s, imagined a similar situation in his own day. A London grocer attended a furtive celebration of the Mass in the home of a wealthy woman in the Hyde Park neighborhood, under the constant threat of persecution from an anti-Christian monarchy. Dix was trying to demonstrate how modern Christians have lost a sense of the danger of Christianity.[1]
In the early Church, sharing in the breaking of bread and in the common cup was a life-or-death matter. But the riskiness of going to Mass was softened, even eliminated, once Christianity was legalized and became a source of power rather than a target of persecution. Christians became complacent. Dix’s transposition of the early Church’s Eucharistic practice into twentieth century London reminds us that at the center of every Mass, beneath the ritual actions and layers of tradition, is the seminal question of Christ: Who do you say that I am?
Jesus’s incisive question to his disciples lies exactly halfway through Mark’s Gospel. And Peter’s hasty answer shows that he, like the rest of the disciples, have no clue who Jesus really is. They may grant that he’s the Messiah, but they’re ignorant about just what kind of Messiah he is. And this is why Jesus immediately forbids them to tell others exactly who he is. To speak of Jesus only in terms of his healing work and miracles is to shield Jesus from the cross and to protect his followers from the cost of discipleship.
But while Jesus urges reticence about his messiahship, he speaks openly and plainly about his future passion, death, and resurrection. This is the kind of Messiah he is to be. He won’t be the anticipated Messiah who’ll gather an army and drive out the occupying Roman forces, thereby winning victory for the Jewish people through violence. He’ll be the victim of the state, the one who goes to the depths of hell and refuses to return violence for violence as part of his saving work. And by this action, he’ll destroy the power of human violence once and for all. In this great inversion, death becomes life, and life becomes death.
In an age where we can walk or drive without fear from home to Mass, we have it all backwards. In this nation, at least, we need not worry about being spied out leaving this church and then hauled off to a crooked court of law and executed. We can be Christian without others so much as blinking their eyes. Increasingly, it seems that the world outside the doors of this church is more and more apathetic to what we’re doing inside this church. And paradoxically, this has caused a huge problem for us as Christians.
We’re willing to confidently profess who Christ is for us. We wear crosses around our necks as attractive jewelry. We’re the rightful heirs of that primal Christian charge: go and proclaim the Gospel to all nations. And, of course, this we should do. But there’s also a tragic cost to the ease with which we embody our Christian faith, and the cost is that we forget about the demands of discipleship. We forget that when we answer Jesus’s question, “who do you say that I am,” our response is a matter of life and death. And what we think is life is often death, and vice versa.
Whether we’re living in a police state where Christians are persecuted or on the Main Line in the twenty-first century, one thing never changes. Christians in every time and place are always at the risk of choosing death over life, especially when they want to save their lives. To take up our cross to follow Jesus is far more than bearing with the annoyances and frustrations of a relatively uncomplicated life. And it’s most definitely not about voluntarily introducing unnecessary pain and suffering into our lives. Finding life is about putting ourselves behind Christ, to whom our answer is always yes, no matter the cost.
To walk the way of life and to follow our Lord is to find our lives bound up with one another. Another’s death becomes our own death, another’s pain becomes our pain. Another’s loss is our loss, but another’s rejoicing is ours, too. And in a privileged and complacent society like ours, this means that the seemingly small choices in life are really matters of life and death. They’re the choices of how we treat our neighbor, because the dignity of another can never be sacrificed to our own personal, emotional, or financial security. These are the difficult choices that lead us to deny our own comfort for the flourishing of the whole human family.
And while we might not lose our physical lives by choosing life over death, we’ll experience a kind of death. We’ll die to our selfishness and greed. We’ll die to some of our most deeply cherished convictions. We’ll die to our tightest alliances with earthly rulers and instead choose loyalty to our true King, the one who rights the world not by violence but by sacrificial love.
Here in the Mass, we choose life over death. At its heart, it appears to be an action centered around death, but it’s really all about life. Here in the Mass, we celebrate that the worst of human violence doesn’t have the last word but is overturned by a selfless act of love that sets us all free. Here in the Mass, we give it all—our selves, our souls, and our bodies—back to God. We give God all our petty grievances and all our selfish instincts. Here, we refuse to make peace with oppression, but we know that real peace doesn’t come quickly or easily. Here, we can’t choose life by ourselves; we must choose it together, in community. Here, we must make an honest answer to the question that Christ daily poses to us. Who do you say that I am? You are the Christ, we boldly say. And before we go to tell all the world that Christ is our Lord and Messiah, we must speak plainly about the way in which the Gospel will give us life. It will give us life when we’re willing to face death, whether physical death for the sake of the Gospel or death to our unholy allegiances that comfort us while causing death for others. You are the Christ, we say, and we know that if we lose our earthly life for the sake of the Gospel, we’ll gain something far greater.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 15, 2024
[1] Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London: Dacre Press, 1945), 142-145, also referenced in Rowan Williams, Passions of the Soul (London: Bloomsbury, 2024), 102-106.