It is no accident that Matthew today has Jesus and his disciples entering Caesaria Philippi. This was a city that the family of Herod took and named after the emperor (Caesaria) and after themselves (Philippi, after Philip). Caesaria Philippi, not to be confused with Caesaria Maritima, the seat of Pontius Pilate. This Caesaria is no Jewish town, though--it was filled with Pagan temples and associated with the Greek god Pan. Physically, therefore, the disciples in Jesus are moving into gentile territory dedicated to empire, one that recalls the collusion between Rome and her client puppet rulers who carried out her bidding in the name of the Roman Empire. The setting is going to be very important over the next two weeks especially in our revised common lectionary as Jesus asked the disciples who he is and then tries to make them understand what that means.
Then we have this week’s gospel. Jesus turns to the disciples and asks them who they think he is. In answer to Jesus’s question, there are a couple of suggestions offered by his followers: John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, or some other prophet from olden days. After these many possibilities, Peter, boldly gives the answer: Jesus is the Messiah! And standing there in a gentile town, that pronouncement is revolutionary, indeed.
One of the titles of the Caesars while they ruled was “son of god”-- and it is on this soil that Peter declares Jesus to be “the Messiah, the son of the living God.” In doing so the conflict becomes stark and subversive. Jesus is first declared as Messiah by his disciples in a region that is devoted through the obedience to a rival claimant to divinity and power. In naming Jesus Messiah, the disciples probably framed expectations about what Jesus would then do in political and possibly even military terms.
Jesus was already aware that people were saying he was the Messiah. But it only after Peter’s declaration that he uses the term about himself in Matthew’s gospel. Peter can state WHO Jesus is, but then immediately gets wrong what exactly that means. And in order for that to become more clear, stay tuned for NEXT week’s gospel reading, when Peter will go from hero to zero within five seconds. Being able to rattle off the right answer to the question Jesus puts before us can actually lead us into thinking that our work is done once we HAVE the answer. It can also lead us to believe that we’ve got Jesus all figured out—that we have, in education-speak, achieved mastery over this question.
Oooh, is that a mistake! That can lead us to attempt to domesticate Jesus, to try to place him in a box limited by our own understanding. And when we do that to the Son of God, we do that to God the Father and God the Holy Spirit as well, and the next thing you know, you’ve got head – bobbing hipster televangelists urging us just to recite a magic formula inviting Jesus as a personal savior to keep us out of hell. But meanwhile, Jesus, don’t disturb our lives too much, okay?
Jesus can NOT be tamed. I am reminded of that scene in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe in which the children, having travelled through the wardrobe to the land of Narnia, try to learn more about the great hero of the land and Christ-figure, Aslan the Lion,. Aslan is the rightful ruler of Narnia before the wicked White Witch has taken over and thrown the land into a perpetual winter. Mr. Beaver takes the children in and shelters them, and begins answering their questions about who Aslan is. The scene runs like this:
Mr. Beaver said, “Aslan is a lion-- the Lion, the great Lion. “
“Ooh,” said Susan. “I'd thought he was a man. Is he --quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”
“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver… “Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the king, I tell you… He’s wild, you know. Not like a tame lion.”
And yet we keep trying to tame Jesus and fit him into boxes so that too often he can align with our own prejudices and preferences. And in asking all of us that question again today, there are two things I think we can remember.
First, regardless of all the creeds we repeat, which sometimes roll over the surfaces of our conscious minds like a river over a rock, never being absorbed or taken in but molding us only slowly over time, it is up to us to engage deeply with the question of who Jesus is and how we understand what that means in our lives. For lots of folks, the knee-jerk response is inwardly focused—he’s the Savior who will save our souls from eternal torment.
The second thing to remember is that discipleship is not inwardly-focused. It is outwardly focused. But Jesus gathers a community around him not so that they can always stay together but so they can go out into the world proclaiming the good news—and that good news is about release for the captives, justice for the oppressed, and bread for the hungry. And remember Jesus puts us, as his disciples in charge of the making sure everyone is fed part as we have discussed previously, because Jesus trusts us that much with the power of our own ministry in his name. That’s one reason why we need to engage deeply and personally with who Jesus is as Messiah and what that means in our lives.
Jesus’s question is NOT just a question to which we flip off an answer, as you will see in NEXT week’s gospel reading. Just being able to say the right words is not enough. Rather, Jesus’s question calls into LIVING into the answer—in showing with oiur words and our deeds why Jesus as Messiah and Son of God matters right here and right now. How Jesus being Messiah and Son of God transforms our expectations about what our lives mean to each other, transforms those relationship from transactional --from looking at what we can “get” from the persons we encounter, to transformative—to engaging with Jesus’s identity as the BEGINNING of the journey of faith, not the end.
As our reading from Romans reminds us, I am convinced that Jesus’s question is a question for each and every one of us. Right now. Who do we say Jesus is? Not just with our words, or our repetition of creeds, but as self-avowed Christians, in our everyday lives? And does our answer align with Jesus’s own testimony as recorded in scripture and in tradition? Actions, as they say, speak louder than words.
Even while we acknowledge that we certainly are not perfect, and everybody has bad days, nonetheless, overall, do we ourselves strive to embody the healing, reconciling, forgiving, compassionate, resilient heart of Jesus? Even as we proclaim our allegiance with Christianity, do we forget that the greater allegiance is to Jesus? You know, the Jesus who showed us that there is always hope. The Jesus that called on us more than anything to love our neighbor rather than look down on them and condemn them?
So today, there are two things I want to ask you to do. First, I ask you to come up with a sentence or two about who Jesus is to you. And since I would never ask you to do what I would not do myself, let me take that challenge upon myself for just a moment. (1)
To confess Jesus as Messiah and Lord means to me that Jesus shows that living life according to love and healing is our highest calling even when it puts our comfort at risk, and forces us not to turn away but to share in the work of justice for the sake of others as well as of myself. It means looking with eyes of love and compassion on the brokenness in the world and the brokenness of people, remembering the grace that has seen us through our own difficulties and demons and extending that grace to those who bear invisible burdens we cannot see.
And maybe that doesn’t sound like such good news to some, at least at first. But, go deeper into your experience, and you can see that a life lives only for one’s self is really no life at all. Jesus promises us life, and life abundant at that, through the community and fellowship we are drawn to with God, and with each other.
The reminder that God has revealed to Peter what Peter himself could never have sussed out on his own is a bright promise for all of us, especially as the COVID-19 pandemic stretches on and as we all weary of being apart from each other. To put it succinctly, even while our worship remains separated by space, as my friends in the United Church of Christ say, “God is still speaking.” God’s revelation is ongoing in our time right now.
God is right alongside us, sustaining us in faith, urging us to use our God-given intelligence and wisdom to not let down our guard—and certainly not to take risks and chances with each others’ lives on the gamble that God will protect us, as we discussed last week. The knowledge of who Jesus is is the beginning of our journey of faith, NOT the end. Our knowledge of who Jesus is expands our notions of worship to go from what we do IN church on Sunday to what we show the world by our words and our deeds and our attitudes throughout the week.
As our reading from Paul reminds us, though, through our faith in Christ, we are called to transform our thinking and our way of life, so that what is pleasing to God is more important to us than the values of this world, to go from WORSHIP as a moment to WORSHIP as the sum meaning of our lives. To worship of God as not being just a rite, but to being a way of knowing and living.
When we worship, we unite the bodily and the spiritual. We spend precious time of our lives within the liturgy, and the liturgy can only exist with the work of the people. And the work of the people BEGINS here, but must go out into the world. The way we live is our most important act of worship—beyond all the things we do together here in normal times. And I don’t know about you, but I take great comfort from that, in this continuing time of COVID that keeps us physically separated. We still have Jesus. We still have each other. We still are called to EMBODY our faith as Jesus did, led by his example.
Our bodies and the way we use them and where we place them are a living witness to God and our understanding of God. We offer our entire self to God—all of us—as a “living sacrifice,” and that in itself is indeed counter to the norms and standards of the world. This is not a sacrifice of dead animals, as was common during biblical times. This is a “living” sacrifice, and of course sacrifice means both “to make holy” and “to give something up.” From the time we give ourselves to God, our lives change by this very real commitment. But what do we give up? Only that which would not be “good and acceptable and perfect.” As the body of Christ, our community is described by Paul as an alternative to the world, not conforming to it.
Beyond the shelter of the doors of the church, worship as daily living is a generous, mindful sacrifice in the very best sense of that word. It's a worthy response to the grace of a God who offers us all that we are in the first place. Our lives, from our impulses to our actions, become a fully-realized testimony to the ethic of compassion and healing which lies at the heart of Jesus’s message. And Jesus’s message starts with that insistent question: WHO do YOU say that I am?
I call upon you to actually spend some time this week thinking about that answer and what it means to your life. And then, I ask you to spend the coming week seeing how that confession shapes your life in the next few days.
Amen.
Preached at the 10:30 online service at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, on August 23, 2020.
Readings:
Citations:
1) My thanks to David Lose for suggesting this train of thought here.
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