"You, Who Do You Say That I Am?"

It seems to me important to let ourselves be challenged by a question: "You, who do you say that I am?" (Mk. 8:29).

I would like us to be able to place ourselves within that people called "new Israel" and from within it truthfully attempt to give a reply. It is not a matter of looking for the right answer, nor of searching in the memory for the answer from the catechism or other definitions. It is not enough.

It is necessary to go deep, into the personal history of each one, attempting to give an answer from this depth/truth. It is Jesus himself who does this with his disciples. First he asks generically: "Who do the people say that I am?" and the apostles begin, certainly with a kind of pleasure, to repeat what the people say about Christ. But then he backs them against a wall: "Well! But you, what do you think?"

It is a question that I ask myself seriously every once in a while and for which I find there is never an answer given once and for always. There are new situations, a deeper awareness of self, new truths in and around yourself which require you to go beyond theories. You feel that the answer given a year ago is no longer true today.

Unfortunately most of the time we take for granted the existence of God, of Christ, as if it were not the foundation of our life. The only question which we are called, definitively, to answer existentially is this one. On our answer to this question depends the meaning of our whole life. I would like you to avoid taking the answer for granted. Instead, let it challenge you; seek it in the events of your history, beginning from this truth, trustworthiness, on which we are reflecting.

One of the most serious experiences we can have (with ourselves and with the people of our generation) is the discovery of the lack of solidity, of truth existing today. Certainly this has been influenced by the experience of a generation marked by nazi-fascism, with its pretended mask of solidity, of authority, of security. A mask, because behind it there is often only disorder and infantilism.

I have met many young people in my life; some of them lived on the margins (even totally outside) the law; in the name of the liberation of man they felt themselves authorized to throw bombs, to assassinate people. Most of the time behind these youths there were really family tragedies: at home they had been influenced by a climate of respectability, of security, even of violence; a façade of falsehood; behind it they discovered a father with a lover, a mother with a fixation for the hairdresser.., the emptiness. This provoked a violent split. If to all that, you join a serious inability of both sides to dialogue, a certain amount of fear in young people about saying what is inside of them, you can understand the instability, the insecurity which comes from it. And there is the flight to join groups, gangs ... In fact, it is typical.to use the contrasts of history, the failures and the meanness of the surrounding structure, not to help seek an answer, but to generate, to organize within, a system of hatred and of violence. Hatred and violence. made use of for its own purposes. It is precisely the lack of solidity, of truth-trustworthiness, of discovery-presence of God within history, that has provoked in many young people the ebb toward gangs, or a concern only with how much money one can make or strange ideologies, sought as a substitute for solidity and stability. Some of the young today run toward a lack of commitment, a withdrawal from everything, to live in the restlessness of instability. It is the world of drugs, of lust, of consumerism, of indifference.

With this I do not intend to present a defeatist or negative vision of the youth of today. I repeat continually that the world of today has not invented even one sin. All the sins of today were there yesterday, and the day before, and two thousand years ago! No defeatism therefore. The young people today are not absolutely better or worse than those of other generations. Youth is that fantastic illness that afflicts everyone for a little while, then goes away forever.

But I am convinced that, as Christians, we are entrusted with a real mission in facing the tensions and problems of our generation. If the problem, at least one of the fundamental ones, of this generation of ours is the lack of stability-truth, of trustworthiness, then it increases our responsibility in view of what we are reflecting on. To answer the question: "But you, who do you say that I am?" takes on the color of the mission to which we are called. It is not only a solitary intimacy, seeking God within us to keep us "warm." A person who finds God becomes becomes a way for all humanity. For this reason Jesus of Nazareth declared himself "way." But this "way" needs to be made visible today. God is calling you so that you may want to "lend" - "offer," as St. Paul says (Rom. 12:1) - your person for this mission: to render visible for our generation, to make "legible" in you the trustworthiness-stability-truth of God.

I invite you to seek within yourselves an answer to the question, which Christ poses to you today: "You, what do you say of him?" What trustworthiness, what truth, are found today in your life? On what are you basing your life? On whom? If you can, stay with your feet on the ground, without escaping into idealism or desires.

Don't let this seem exaggerated to you. Jesus himself was not removed from the events of history. You can read in chapter 13, verses 1-5, of St. Luke. Christ knows how to interpret in the light of God the event of those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them.

If, in fact, in the face of such important events, we do not succeed in grasping the presence of God, if instead their meaning is proposed to us by the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, or MTV.well, we can say we are "disciples" of MTV but not of God and of Christ.

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