becoming people of trust and hope
Proper 16A | Matthew 16:13-20
What do you think this is: information gathering or a pop quiz? Jesus asks the disciples a couple of simple questions about who the people say he is and who the disciples say he is. Simple because they are pretty straightforward for someone paying attention. Straightforward for someone who is actively talking about Jesus to other people. Because, you know, they’re literally following him around. He’s right there.
Imagine the conversations.
“Tell me about your rabbi!”
“Well, he does this thing where he walks on water…”
We also know that the questions aren’t really that simple. They deal with identity. And theology. They don’t have two thousand years of tradition around Jesus’s identity to draw on, either. They have patterns and prophecy. Tradition. That’s it. Well, not only that. They also have hope and observation.
The Missing Context
There is a gap in the lectionary here, from last week. Remember the gospel was from the middle of chapter 15 and Jesus heals the Canaanite woman after she convinces him to. It is a surprising reading. From there, they travel and Jesus heals the multitudes a second time, this time four thousand people. And then they get in a boat, travel further down and when they come back to shore, Jesus is confronted by Pharisees who demand a sign. By now, we should be confident that Jesus is not going to be down for that request. He says these ominous words:
“A wicked and adulterous generation looks for a sign, but none will be given it except the sign of Jonah.”
What is that sign? I suspect it was the arrival of the prophet to Nineveh saying change or die.
Then Jesus tells the disciples to be wary of the yeast of the Pharisees and the Sadducees and they famously think he’s talking about bread and how they forgot to bring it with them, but they connect the dots eventually. Comedy gold, there!
Remember, context is always key. This talk of signs and identity and Jesus is enmeshed in what they believe. Who they think he is, and then, who they say he is.
The Mantle
When Peter responds with “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God,” I think most of us take this as the right answer. That this is what Jesus is looking for. Because we assume this is a test. But I don’t think it is. Nor do I think it is about data collection. I think Jesus is the rabbi who knows there are dozens of responses to that question. He wants to know what theirs is.
One of the reasons I think we read this like a right/wrong test is that Jesus seems to commend Peter, saying that he gets the keys to the kingdom like he just won a new car on The Price is Right. And tradition makes him the star pupil who would become the first bishop, the first pope. The brightest and best. Forgetting that he is the stand-in, the everyman.
He is not the king, but the people.
Alongside these supposed accolades is a more difficult hint toward Jesus’s feeling. “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah!” Jonah (Hebrew) is rendered as Jonas in Greek. It is also sometimes rendered as John, as it is in the Gospel of John. These are the only references to Peter and Andrew’s father.
Scholars seem to take this moment literally. Jonah is, given the translations, a common name. And it seems to comport with the Gospel of John, which names the father when the two disciples are introduced in chapter one.
This response, however, seems a bit uninspired. Especially given Jesus’s own words just verses before, when he evokes the “sign of Jonah.” This son of Jonah comes into this world bearing much the same sign: repent.
Then Jesus continues: “For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.” Hear it! It isn’t Peter who gets the answer right. It is about Peter’s relationship with God being such that he can channel God prophetically. And he, like Jonah, will no doubt carry the prophet’s mantle reluctantly.
The Responsibility
With Peter as Son of Jonah, the prophet bringing the good news to an evil city and turning them around, we might see Jesus’s words of support and affirmation to Peter as more than accolades. It isn’t proof of Peter’s superiority over humanity, but his subordination to God. And this throws into question all that tradition for the first several centuries did to raise the seat of Peter to one of greatness rather than one of devout service. It is, instead, something far more difficult. Common responsibility.
The keys aren’t to a kingdom on Earth, but the kingdom of heaven: God’s dream for creation. And this comes with a frightening responsibility: “whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” In other words, Jesus is telling Peter, you, blockhead, get to decide the fate of generations.
And so do we.
The Avoidance
It is easy to see why the church would seek to elevate Peter. And, for the same reason his peers probably did, too. It puts the responsibility on the shoulders of one dude. In this case, the one stupid enough to volunteer. The one with the propensity for speaking up, even when it is to put his foot in his mouth, as he will do in the very next verses. We like when someone else takes charge and then assumes the weight of the responsibility for the rest of us. And then, when they do a decent job? We commend them for it. Just as long as we don’t have to do it ourselves!
Then we come up with ways to protect the power not being held in our hands. It is why we defend royal lineage and fight over another’s right to become king. We see this in Star Wars discourse about the specialness of the Skywalker family, wanting to attribute special powers to bloodlines. And the church does the same with Peter’s seat in Rome, where the wisest have long competed for the honor of sitting in his chair for nearly two thousand years.
The question is not so much about the specialness of Peter or King Henry VIII or Luke Skywalker, but of how invested millions of people have been in maintaining the illusion of supremacy and virtue, elevating other people as a means of avoiding our responsibility together. A responsibility to knowing and sharing the grace of God.
The Reason
The fascinating conflict at the heart of this passage is that Jesus asks his disciples what the people say about him. The people being the crowds who follow, the strangers they meet, and the countless others who bring their loved ones to him for healing. He asks the disciples who these people say he is.
Then he asks the disciples who they say he is.
And finally, after Peter responds and Jesus commends, he tells them not to say to people who he is: “Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.”
Like the literal reading of “son of Jonah,” it is easier to explain away this command as part of Jesus’s plan than it is to confront the story itself. That Jesus hears the voice of God in Peter and knows that the disciples, let alone the crowds, just aren’t ready for it yet. And this, too, seems too important to explain away like it was about the mission then, as if it has no relevance to us: this avoiding and deferring generation.
There is a great reason not to tell the people he is the Messiah: because they have the wrong idea about messiahs! And honestly, telling people today that Jesus is the Messiah, or king, for example, isn’t any better! It’s not like people suddenly get the idea that Jesus’s love revolution is the obvious outgrowth of calling him a military general, a lord, or a scion.
The disciples have access to the truth by following him and opening themselves up to God. So much so that God’s voice echoes out of Peter’s mouth.
Signs and Sons
This moment happens when Jesus leads the disciples to Caesarea Philippi, a great Greek city, named after the emperor—a visible representation of empire. And it is after Jesus has warned the disciples of the disingenuous nature of the Pharisees and Sadducees who ask for signs when it is the disciples who didn’t just witness them, but participated in them. Who distributed the food to more than five thousand people and then again to more than four thousand.
Signs and sons don’t lead to greatness. Neither are these the paths of grace. This is a story of relationship and participation. Of people immersing themselves in the Way of Love so fully they can hardly perceive the voice of God because it so sounds like their own.
And like relationship, truth isn’t witnessed singularly, by one’s self, instantly. It develops with time, patience, and cooperation. We must work at the act of learning, to perceive and join into a practice that was not our own but one we adopt for the desire to change, to grow, to become better than we are.
This is why we read scripture over and over, together, in community, over and over, and we pray over and over, so that we engage with something that isn’t about us. That isn’t about our personal betterment or greatness—what any one of us can achieve—but about what we are called to do together, become together, as a people, as a community. The only way we can know that faith begins with relationship.
We, too, are sons and daughters of Jonah, compelled by God to speak to the greed and corruption of our generation. To connect with the grace of God. To love as God loves: this town, this neighborhood, this people.