Saturday in the 25th Week of Ordinary Time, September 26, 2020

Luke 9:43b-45

While they were all amazed at his every deed, Jesus said to his disciples, “Pay attention to what I am telling you. The Son of Man is to be handed over to men.” But they did not understand this saying; its meaning was hidden from them so that they should not understand it, and they were afraid to ask him about this saying.

Jesus has just descended the mountain where he had been transfigured before his Apostles Peter, James, and John, and a man has brought his only son, who is possessed by a demon, to Jesus.  After Jesus exorcises the evil spirit, the boy is restored and the gathered crowd rejoices. St. Luke tells us that, “they were all amazed at his every deed.”  The Greek word has the meaning of “awestruck”.  It is at this point that the Lord begins to prepare his Apostles for his coming betrayal, arrest, Passion, Death, and Resurrection.  The journey to Jerusalem which they had now begun was to be the final one with their Master, and they could not believe their ears when he told them this.

In the midst of the acclamation by the crowd, the Lord said to them, “Pay attention to what I am telling you.”  He had often spoken solemnly on matters of the law, but here he speaks as a parent to a beloved child, warning him of some danger.  The peril of which he speaks pertains to him: “The Son of Man is to be handed over to men.”  That is, he does not warn them of am imminent, physical danger to themselves, but only to him.  He warns them in this way because he knows that their faith will be sorely tested.  Indeed, if the Lord had not prepared them and told them what would happen beforehand, the Apostles might not have stayed in Jerusalem after the arrest but fled back to Galilee.  He tells them what they need to hear, that he will be “handed over to men”.  The literal meaning of the Greek is more urgent: The Son of Man is about to be betrayed into the hands of men.  Even if the Lord had said nothing more than this to them on this occasion, these words by themselves would have caused great alarm.  Already, shortly before the Transfiguration, to go by Luke’s chronology, the Lord had said to his Apostles, “The Son of man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed and the third day rise again” (Luke 9, 22).  Now, he emphasizes that he is about to be “betrayed” into the hands of the rulers of the people.  

The Apostles were thunderstruck: “But they did not understand this saying; its meaning was hidden from them so that they should not understand it.”  Was Jesus speaking to them in a parable?  Was he quoting some obscure Scripture?  At the height of his success in Galilee, it seemed impossible that he could be speaking literally.  And if he meant some danger of which they had not heard, then surely he would be able to avoid it.  “Its meaning was hidden from them.”  Luke uses a figure of speech.  God is not “hiding” the meaning of these words from them, but allowing them to wonder about them or to ask Jesus what he meant by them.  But they do not ask: “They were afraid to ask him about this saying.”  

We are often in the position of the Apostles, concerned about what is happening to us or around us, and afraid to ask about it.  A friend of mine, a Harvard MBA, once told me that she was driving down the street in her car when suddenly a loud clanking erupted under the hood.  I asked her what did she do, and she told me that she simply turned up the volume of the radio. This can also happen to people when they notice some physical change in their bodies that might indicate the progress of a dangerous disease: some strange swelling or pain, perhaps.  Many people would go to the doctor to find out about it, but many would “turn up the volume” and hope that if they forgot about the problem it would go away by itself.  This can happen in the spiritual life as well.  A person feels the guilt of some unconfessed sin but always finds a reason for not confessing it.  Admitting the serious nature of the sin they have committed means recognizing a state about ourselves we may not care to see.  The Apostles would have benefitted from asking the Lord about the words he had spoken, but they preferred not to know.  We should not feel afraid to ask our Lord the important questions which we have: Who am I?  Who are you, O Lord? What am I to do with my life?  Let us not be so afraid of his answers that we keep quiet.