Reading: Matthew 16:13-20
The story this morning is one that appears in some version in three of the four Gospels, and it’s one that is necessarily retold in every age and generation and congregation of the church, including ours. It’s a story about the followers of Jesus confessing him to be messiah – the person of God who brings healing and salvation to the world, and about Jesus helping them to understand and not to misunderstand what that means.
This is the Matthew version of the story – Matthew 16:13-20, and there are two names or titles of special mythological persons that appear in it, in the conversation between Jesus and his followers.
One is “the Son of Man” who was a figure in Jewish mythology who it was thought will appear at the end of time, to reveal and bring to fulfilment God’s perfect will for humanity and for the Earth, and thus bring an end to history and a beginning to paradise.
The other is “the Messiah, the Son of the living God” who also was a figure in Jewish theology, a Holy One coming directly from God into history to bring healing, freedom and peace to all the world. It’s interesting that in the Roman Empire a certain cult grew up that saw the Emperor – th Caesar, was this person and to be worshipped and obeyed as such.
So … here’s the story:
Jesus went to the territory near the town of Caesarea Philippi, [a Roman administrative centre] where he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man [-- the one who will wrap everything up for good] is?”
“Some say John the Baptist,” they answered. “Others say Elijah, while others say Jeremiah or some other prophet.”
“What about you?” he asked them. “Who do you say I am?” [An interesting shift in focus…]
Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” [the one who comes into out history with God’s way of healing the world]
“Good for you, Simon son of John!” answered Jesus. “For this truth did not come to you from any human being, but it was given to you directly by my Father in heaven. And so I tell you, Peter: you are a rock [named after “petros,” the Roman word for “rock”], and on this rock foundation I will build my church, and not even death will be able to overcome it. I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of heaven; what you prohibit on earth will be prohibited in heaven, and what you permit on earth will be permitted in heaven.”
Then Jesus ordered his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah. [Interesting!]
Meditation
We’re still in a pandemic. Around the world we’re in various stages of re-opening, with having to re-close always lurking as a possibility around the next corner. The old normal is no more. The new normal is still mostly a matter of discussion and dream. In the meantime, we wonder what to make of the pieces of what we used to have and used to do.
In this situation I see three things in this story of Jesus the messiah.
One is that we do not need the world to be in order, and we do not need to be in control or in power or even have power, to be church as Jesus calls us to be church, and to be effective servants of God’s salvation in the world.
By the time this story of Jesus the messiah was remembered, retold, and written down as part of the Gospel of God’s kingdom – sometime near the end of the first century of the Christian Era, the world had changed a lot from the way it had been when the events and the conversation in the story first took place.
The old normal of the city of Jerusalem as the centre of Jewish life – the Jewish court a symbolic counterbalance to the power of Rome, and the Temple in Jerusalem the people’s way of staying connected to their God – was gone. In 70 C.E., about a generation after Jesus, Rome had had enough of the persistent, troublesome rebelliousness of the Jewish people and the ineffectiveness of the local authorities to keep the peace, and they sent the army in, in full force. Shock and awe they might have called it.
The city of Jerusalem was over-run. The Jewish king was deposed. The Temple was attacked and destroyed – not one stone left on another. And on the hill of Masada, where the last remaining rebels were held trapped for weeks and cruelly murdered, Rome brought the old normal for the Jewish people to an end.
From that moment on, the people had no living centre. Their new normal was a long, vulnerable dispersion as a people scattered like ashes and broken remnants across the face of the earth.
It’s in this situation that the Christian community remembers and starts to retell and write down stories like the one this morning about Jesus the Messiah. And in the Matthew version the story takes place not in the Temple, not in a synagogue in some Jewish village, not even in the safety of a Jewish home – but out on the road, in the open, in the very shadow of Caesarea Philippi, an administrative centre of the alien power that has invaded and, in hindsight, is about the destroy all that they have counted on to preserve their identity as God’s people in the world.
And what the story is saying is that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what normal you find yourself in – old, new, or in-between. It doesn’t matter if your city, your temple, your king and your kingdom are intact and giving structure to your lives, or if they’re gone and taken from you. It doesn’t matter if you have a safe place in the world you can call your own and be in charge of, or if you’re out on the road, in the open, on a long, hard way from what was to whatever will be. It doesn’t matter because Jesus is the messiah, son of the living God, and he is really quite portable and thoroughly adaptable.
It’s he who enters our history with God’s way of healing for all, calls us to be part of it, and – this is the second thing – that way that he shows us is the way of sacrifice for others.
The disciples and followers of Jesus always have always had a hard time accepting this. We long to turn Jesus into a new kind of conquering hero, a new style of emperor or king, someone who will take control of things on behalf of God and God’s people and have the power to help us find and enjoy a comfortable new normal.
But Jesus always resists our nudges in that direction, and tells us instead to get back into line behind him in the way he is showing to be the way of true healing for all – the way of self-giving sacrifice, no matter what kind of normal and what kind of world we are in.
Mitch Albom, almost 20 years ago wrote a delightfully insightful little book called the five people you meet in heaven, in which he tells the story of an old man named Eddie who dies tragically after doubting for years that his life has had any meaning, and is met in heaven by five people from different parts of his life who teach him five lessons – one each, about what gave his life more meaning than he ever imagined or understood.
The second of the lessons is sacrifice, and it’s taught to him by someone he knows only as “Captain” – the captain of the small army troop that he fought in, in WW2.
“Sacrifice,” the Captain said [when he met him in heaven]. “You made one. I made one. We all make them. But you were angry over yours. You kept thinking about what you lost.
“You didn’t get it. Sacrifice is a part of life. It’s supposed to be. It’s not something to regret. It’s something to aspire to. Little sacrifices. Big sacrifices. A mother works so her son can go to school. A daughter moves home to take care of her sick father.
“A man goes to war …”
He stopped for a moment and looked off into the cloudy gray sky.
“Rabozzo [one of their troop who was killed while they were overseas] didn’t die for nothing, you know. He sacrificed for his country, and his family knew it, and his kid brother went on to be a good soldier and a great man because he was inspired by it.
“I didn’t die for nothing, either. That night, we might all have driven over that land mine that I stepped on [when I walked ahead of the jeep you guys were in]. Then the four us would have been gone.”
Eddie shook his head. “But you…” He lowered his voice. “You lost your life.”
The Captain smacked his tongue on his teeth. “That’s the thing. Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you’re not really losing it. You’re just passing it on to someone else.”
Greater love, Jesus says, has no one than to give their life – their time, energy, love, possessions, security, for and maybe to another. In big ways, sometimes. In a hundred little ways, all the time.
And the third thing?
This is not something just to talk about, Jesus says. Don’t go just telling them I’m the messiah. Don’t just be preaching about me and trying to convince people to believe things about me.
Rather, go show them. Live it out. Just do it. Sacrifice. Give yourself in big and little ways for the well-being of others. Let go possession for the sake of sharing and passing on. Even when you don’t want to.
Any of you can do it, he says. Each of us does it all the time. In areas of our life and in ways of loving and caring for others that we may not even imagine are meaningful at all. That maybe someone in heaven – one of our five people, will help us understand and appreciate in hindsight.
And let that be enough. You can do it without even talking about it – without even talking about me, he says. Just doing it is enough for me to know you are my disciple and friend. Enough too for others to know that God is with them, and is there for them no matter what.
And isn’t that what it takes for God’s healing to enter the stream of history through any of us and all of us, for the messiah to be present, no matter what the old or new or in-between normal is in which we find ourselves?
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