STM Homily | Fr. Gregory Waldrop, SJ | August 23, 2026

So, what has our Heavenly Father revealed to you lately? What has he been showing you? Have you noticed? My question may sound like a challenge. Questions about faith and prayer often do. But I pose them as an invitation to consider a proposition that, as a Jesuit, I take as axiomatic. That is, that God is always communicating with us, revealing not only God's own presence and identity, but also God's will, what God desires for us in big things and small.

And it doesn't always come through as loud and clear as it does for Shebna, master of the king's palace in today's first reading. There, God has revealed to the prophet Isaiah God's disapproval of Shebna's prideful, high-handed ways, and now Isaiah communicates very clearly the bad news to Shebna. You're done, and Eliakim is taking your place. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Most of the time, however, God is more subtle, inscrutable, always engaging us, always, always communicating, but not so directly as in the case of Shebna. As St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, discovered for himself and then passed on to others, the question is, really, are we listening for that divine communication in our lives? Are we primed and open to hear what God is trying to tell us?

In today's gospel, Jesus asks his closest disciples, who do you say that I am? This is a key passage for the divine revelation about Jesus.

When Peter, a.k.a. Simon, son of Jonah, makes his bold declaration that Jesus is the Son of God, Jesus tells him, flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father. So Jesus, a better than average spiritual director, I'd say, confirms that Peter's confession of faith is not just a lucky guess or brown -nosing. Rather, God has revealed this shocking truth to the fisherman from Capernaum, who has laid aside his nets and followed the unknown teacher from Nazareth.

In their intervening weeks and months, he's been paying attention to Jesus and to God's Spirit, alive and at work in him, just as the Spirit is alive and constantly at work in us.

He reveals to Peter's heart the truth of who Jesus is, where and whom he really comes from, and what he is here to do. That is, in order that Jesus is the Messiah, come from heaven, sent by God the Father, to establish the reign of that Heavenly Father here on earth.

If that same truth is not being confirmed for you, for all of us, all the time, in some way, and if it's not clear what we're supposed to do with that information, then I propose to you that we are not paying attention, at least not to God.

As in real estate investment, so with spiritual seeking. The process of noticing and discerning often comes down to location, location, location.

Today, Jesus and his disciples are in the neighborhood of Caesarea Philippi, a Greco-Roman city only about 25 miles from the Jewish towns of Galilee. We hear the name, you know, of this city several times in the Gospels. Caesarea Philippi was a center of pagan worship, infamous, really, for the Jews. Before the people there worshipped the Greek god Pan, they had worshipped the Canaanite deity Baal. In past times, the faithless Israelite king, Jeroboam, had built a sanctuary nearby in honor of Baal, which angered God.

This was the land of the so-called lost tribes of Israel, the ones who had assimilated into the melting pot of their pagan neighbors and essentially disappeared. A cave just outside Caesarea Philippi was understood to be the gate to the underworld. And in Jesus' time, the cultic activity of the pagan worshippers there must have shocked his provincial disciples. Let's just say it involved goats, and they weren't playing bingo.

So the location of Simon's emphatic declaration of faith is significant. The disciples experience there there, in that polytheistic environment, frames the revelation and God's intended message. In an environment of promiscuous spiritual practice and religious confusion. Jesus asks the question, who do people say that I am?

Now, his Jewish friends would never confuse him with Pan or any other Greek god. Deeply grounded in the Jewish scriptures, they reply, well, that some people identify him with one of the prophets, including the most recent one, John the Baptist. That's the word on the street, anyway.

Okay, yeah, but who do you say that I am? He asks. Surrounded here by any number of supposed divinities, what does your experience, all this time that you've spent with me, watching and listening, paying attention, what does it reveal?

Simon, son of Jonah, is not confused. Now, he doesn't completely understand, as we see in the verses just after this passage. But based on his experience, God's revelation is very, very clear. You, he says, are the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God.

Recognizing genuine revelation, when he hears it, Jesus then proclaims, You are Peter, and on this rock, as you know, the name Peter comes from the Greek word for rock, On this rock, I will build my church.

Location, location, location. And the gates of the netherworld, that is, this religious practice that we see here, the blindness to God's truth, none of this spiritual confusion or religious abomination shall prevail against the church I desire, against the reign of God that I have come to establish, A reign of love, mercy, and forgiveness.

But with Revelation comes a mission. Here, one given to Peter, and by extension, to all the disciples, to go forth and proclaim this reign, or kingdom, to build up this church based on the values they heard from Jesus' own lips in the Sermon on the Mount. Care for the poor, the forgotten, the lonely, the grieving, peace, goodness.

So, I come back to my original question to you. What has the Heavenly Father revealed to you lately? Considering your own experience, your location, that is, the relationships that structure your life, your preoccupations and interests? In the year of our Lord, 2026, what is God saying to you?

Remember, God is always communicating with us. We just don't always notice.

If you are new to Yale, there are bound to be all kinds of things moving in your heart. I can probably guess some of them, but not all. It depends not just on where you are now, but where you've been, and even where you think you're going.

Where's the noise in your life? Where's the challenge? What thoughts just won't leave you alone? Where do you feel yourself, your best self, that is, the person you truly want to be for those you love? Where do you feel drawn? Where do you experience gratitude? Where do you experience a momentary slackening of anxiety or fear? Conversely, what causes your anxiety or fear to spike? Or feelings of resentment, selfishness, or cynicism to surge?

God's communication is not always completely clear, our internal spiritual Wi-Fi is sometimes glitchy, but God doesn't play tricks on us. The fact that God remains present is a clarifying revelation for us all, and revelation comes with a mission. As it did with Peter on this rock, I will build my church. For the rest of us, the mission is some share in the building up of the kingdom against the hellish gates of injustice, bigotry, and fear of a church that is it's a building up of the church that is recognizably Christ's own.

Listen for what God is revealing to you and what God might want you to do about it.