Have you noticed in the gospels that Jesus, it seems, doesn’t want people to know his true identity as the Christ, the Messiah? Why? Fr. Rolheiser writes that Peter has the right answer but the wrong conception of that answer. He has a false notion of what it means to be the Messiah. When Peter says: “You are the Christ,” his Messiah is one who has come to bring about earthly glory and worldly triumph. In Peter’s view, he will be someone so powerful, strong, attractive, and invulnerable that everyone will have to fall at his feet. Hence Jesus’ sharp reply: “Don’t tell anyone about that!” Jesus is not a Superman, a Superstar, or a miracle worker who will prove his power through spectacular deeds. Who is he? Jesus is the Messiah, a dying and rising Messiah who, in his own life and body, will demonstrate that evil is not overcome by miracles but by forgiveness, generosity, and nobility of soul and that these are attained not through crushing an enemy but through loving them more fully. And the route to this is paradoxical: The glory of the Messiah is not demonstrated by overpowering us with spectacular deeds. Instead, it is shown in Jesus letting himself be transformed through accepting with proper love and graciousness the unavoidable passivity, humiliation, diminishment, and dying that eventually found him. That’s the dying part. But when one dies like that or accepts any humiliation or diminishment in this way, there’s always a subsequent rising to real glory, that is, to the glory of a heart so stretched and enlarged that it is now able to transform evil into good, hatred into love, bitterness into forgiveness, humiliation into glory. That’s the proper work of a Messiah. So, how do you imagine the Messiah? How do you imagine triumph? Imagine Glory? If Jesus looked you square in the eye and asked, as he asked Peter: “How do you understand me?” Would he laud you for your answer or say, “Don’t tell anyone about that!”