“You are the Messiah!” is what Saint Mark has Peter say in his version of Peter’s Confession. Saint Luke sweetens the pot a little in his version: “You are God’s Messiah”. And Saint Matthew (whom we heard today) pushes it all the way: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”  Mark, the writer of the oldest of the present Gospels, makes it very simple and elementary; Luke, building on it, embellishes Mark’s version slightly; Matthew, last but not least, adds the full-fledged churchly creedal statement.

In response to these variations, Fr. Raymond Brown in his usual understated quiet way says the following:

“Matthew alone adds “the son of the living God.” This additional title, which goes beyond the confession of messiahship, very probably reflects the more developed faith of the primitive Christian community; Mark has preserved the original saying. By speaking of the more developed faith of the community, we do not imply that the community had a full understanding of the Sonship of Jesus; but they professed their belief in the entirely unique relationship of Jesus with the Father.”

What I would like to point out is that we have here a graphic example of the development of theology and understanding concerning the Incarnation, the relation of God the Son to God the Father and of Jesus to the Sonship. At the historical moment captured in today’s commemoration, it is simply psychologically and pedagogically impossible that Peter could have said those words that recognized Jesus’ divine nature. Peter just could not have comprehended that sophisticated a theology yet – he could not really even have had any serious suspicions about it at that point. Indeed, the prodigious leap he took in just naming Jesus “Messiah” was more than enough of a great stretch at that moment.

If one is a careful scholar, one can trace the slow but inexorable creeping pace of the understanding of the Apostles and of the early Christian church towards a grasp of the implications of the Incarnation. And I would also like to suggest that that slow growth is not finished even today!

But I want to apply that same principle to our lives as contemplative religious. Recently I listened to a radio talk show which was about healing beyond the medical model and featured an Indian doctor. During the call-in portion of the show, a woman telephoned to ask the doctor’s advice. She said she had tried so many different things, but she was still unhappy most of the time! The doctor burst in, almost robustly, and virtually cried out, “Wonderful! Excellent! How fortunate you are, because as long as you are discontent, there is hope for you. It is only out of chaos that a dancing star can be born.”

And that struck me as a sort of paradigm for the kind of lives we lead. When one is seriously immersed in the processes of spiritual development, there are very few, very rare instances of arrival at the goal — indeed, it is virtually impossible even to express the goal for the contemplative way. I mean, we can blithely say that what we seek is union with God — but we really don’t have the foggiest notion of what that means or even of what it would look like if we attained it tomorrow. There is a very real sense in which we must learn to content ourselves with the process alone – with the apparent futility of wanting, longing, striving, and not reaching! It is true that here and there, for short periods of time or in rare instances, one touches a kind of resting place where things get easier for a brief time, but dissatisfaction and discontent are really some of our most important tools in the spiritual way, because it can be guaranteed that we will never reach our goal in any way which is going to mean we can finally stop, rest on our laurels, and congratulate ourselves for having made it. Even if there is a momentary insight, a flash of God-given truth, a growing recognition of the pattern, it will never be enough — not in this life.

I think I do not speak just for myself when I say I would like to have that package dropped in my lap one of these days, I would like to be able to let down my guard, relax my spiritual muscles, put my spiritual feet up and say, “There! That was a good job, well done!” But it will never be so — no matter what cosmic leaps any of us may be able to make. There will always be more.

So, Peter was able to come to that dramatic and life-changing moment when he could say, “You are the Messiah!”  And I suspect that he thought he had just about summed it all up — but within a very short time, he and the Church had gone leagues beyond that first statement. Even in his own lifetime, Peter would have seen the changes, the growth, the improvement in understanding.

But, if he and the apostolic Church had decided that that minimal recognition of Jesus’s Messiahship itself was the whole ball of wax, the entire nine yards, then he and the Church would have been crippled and seriously blinded. Even with Jesus’ s immediate encomium: “You did not learn that from any human being; it was revealed to you by my heavenly Father”, Peter cannot stop to rest there — even if he wants to. And we would be wise to remember that only six verses later, when Peter has again demonstrated his loutishness and incomprehension, comes that horrible line, “Out of my sight, Satan; you are a stumbling block to me. You think as mortals think, not as God thinks!”

Discontent, then, not fulfillment or satisfaction, is the key identifier for the true spiritual way. And it is a reality that Julian captured in unparalleled clarity in her paradoxical point of truth:

And thus I saw Him and I sought Him,

and I possessed Him and I lacked Him.

And this is, and should be, our ordinary behavior in this life, as I see it. (Ch. 10)

Whatever mountaintop we may come to, we can be assured that as we rise above the peak and look out at the world, we will see only an unrelieved progression of peaks – some higher, some lower, some wild and craggy, and some smooth and easy – but we will not be able to see our goal, and, pray God, we will always be dissatisfied with where we are at any given time.

Let me take a short radical digression here to show you what I mean about never being satisfied with one’s one understanding of God. You and I and the whole of Christendom for two thousand years have spoken of “God the Father”, “God the Son” and “God the Holy Spirit” in our creedal statements. And I want to declare that those are very poor and wholly inadequate theological statements – even though they seem to have been spoken by Jesus himself in the Gospel accounts. The words “Father” and “Son” in our world imply a derivation: that is, a father must exist before a son, and a son derives his existence from a pre-existing father (and mother?). So, although we speak of the creed as the Son being “…eternally begotten of the Father…” it is psychologically impossible for us simply to escape our culture and use words entirely contrary to the way we have used them ordinarily. The words are, first, obviously sexist: however much we may try to deny it, they at least imply some kind of masculinity about God. In order to avoid that, some people have used words like “Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier”, but those are equally inaccurate because it was the entire Trinity who created all that is, seen and unseen. And it was the humanity of Jesus – not the divinity of God the Son – which redeemed us. And it is the entire Holy Trinity that sanctifies us, not just that isolated #3, the Holy Spirit. Now, I have no problems with the Creed nor with the usual appellations we apply to God, but in doing so, I must finally come to know that this is a metaphysical and theological conundrum: a sheer inadequacy as an effort to describe God. And, as a contemplative, I really must come to a deeper, less verbal intuition about the nature of God. In fact, Mother Julian’s application of “motherhood” to God is a certain indication that her understanding had already moved beyond the simplicity of the Church’s traditional descriptive words. IS there a Father and a Son and a Holy Spirit? Well, no – not in any definitive mystical comprehension. Those words are first steps, but in no way ultimately or exhaustively true. Even such a core and central comprehension of God is open to deepening perception and intuitive growth.

Neither Peter nor the Church could stop with just the elementary understanding of Jesus’s being Messiah — and we cannot stop with whatever may be our current insight or experience. One foot goes in front of another – and, like Peter, we are often taken where we do not choose to go – or at least where we never dreamed we would go. And that developing and growing and deepening never, never stops this side of the Beatific Vision itself.