a lawless blog

Comment on Matthew 16:13-20 for 21st Sunday

Without taking anything from Judith's reflection, I would like to view this gospel passage together with next Sunday's selection. If we look at them as two parts of a whole we can interpret the first part from what follows in the second part.

Matthew 16:13-27

Part I

When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”

“But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Then he ordered his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.

Part II

From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.

Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. “Never, Lord!” he said. “This shall never happen to you!”

Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.

"What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what they have done. (NIV)

Part II begins: "From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer..." Unfortunately the Lectionary omits the opening phrase "From that time on" but it is essential to understand that this significant moment was a turning point in Jeshua's journey. So far he has taught his disciples the fundamentals of the kingdom of God and provided signs to authenticate his teaching.

It is time to move on but first he needs to know how much they have grasped of all this.

If we were to go back and read Chapter 11 again we would see that John the Baptist sent messengers to ask is he 'the one who is to come?' In reply Jeshua referred John to the signs he had worked. The question now is whether his disciples have come as far as John, or are they still in two minds, like everyone else, on the question of his identity and mission.

The pharisees are testing him at every opportunity. Are his close disciples learning anything? Before he can take them further, they must reach the point of recognising who he is for everything is built on acknowledging that Jeshua is the Messiah. Without this the disciples would be just another group enthralled by another guru.

In the Jewish mind there had formed, through a thousand years of reflection, teaching, prophecy, triumph and despair, this fundamental conviction that one day a Someone, an Anointed of YHWH, would appear among them to put things right once and for all. This will be the definitive intervention of their Lord who had called them from slavery, established them as a people, taught them, punished them, restored them and still cares for them.

Now, in this unlikely place, the unlikely spokesman for this motley group of disciples speaks for them all and openly declares their conviction that this improbable man Jeshua from Nazareth, Joseph's son, is that expected one.

They say Christianity is hard to believe. If you have a god who fits your expectations it is virtually impossible, but if you're open to a mysterious God who would gently and with subtle nudges lead his creation towards ever deeper growth, then it is not only believable but it is as attractive as it is intriguing - that one like us, a common man, would be anointed to reveal the Father Creator God active in every least step of our development, even in the setbacks.

The cosmos is on a long, long journey, evolving towards awareness. Awareness seeps in silently like the dawn light on an overcast winter's day, but over eons of time. Day by day, year by year, we are becoming aware of issues that are crucial for our development, and we wonder why we didn't see this ages ago. We rejoice at every tiny step, and we change our ways to be in accordance with this new level of understanding. And all the while our Father watches over us with divine patience.

* * * * *

Getting back to Matthew 16

Today Caesaria Philippi is called Banias which is a corruption of the ancient Greek name Paneas - after the nature god Pan. With its shrines and palaces it is perhaps the most secular city Jeshua ever visited, an ancient place of animist nature-worship and now a summer retreat for wealthy Greeks and Romans. Philip had made it his administrative capital, naming the town more as a boast of his Roman patronage than as a tribute to the Roman emperor-god. The spring bubbling from the rocks is a major source of the Jordan.

When Jeshua asked the disciples what people generally were saying about him they gave him a wide-ranging list - John, Isaiah, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets. The disciplined brevity of the gospel text takes us straight to the core of the dramatic moment: Jeshua turned to face the group and put the question directly to them: "But you, who do you say I am?" Everything hinges on their answer. If they had no better insight than the rest he might need to let them go and try to assemble another team. Had he wasted the past two years?

If we stand and watch the group we might see their discomfort under scrutiny, their shy uncertainty and their lingering doubts. We will see them hesitate, glancing to one another, each wanting someone else to speak just to break the tension. Perhaps Peter coughs a small nervous cough and all eyes turn to him, some silently encouraging him with a nod: "Go on, Peter. Say it." Peter lifts his head and looks Jeshua in the eye, and blurts out: "We think you're the Messiah!"

Jeshua was absolutely over the moon. He was thrilled. His disciples had advanced past the hard-headed logic of daily life, and past the narrow agnostic scepticism that needs to be sure in human terms that you're not fooling yourself. They had reached a point of inner conviction that would not be denied or repressed. You are the Messiah. You're the one our people have been waiting for over centuries; the one whose coming had been hinted at from time immemorial; the one who was the liberator promised by the greatest prophets time and time again. You are the One.

Jeshua knew from his own experience that this conviction came from God. He had wondered, himself, for years, and found that no amount of thinking, reasoning, researching could give him certainty one way or the other as to his purpose in life. Like every other human being he had asked himself: Who am I? But slowly there had come an awareness that brought with it a confidence, deep and strong enough to dispel his fear of self-deception.

Stage by stage, as the role of the Messiah foretold by the prophets became clear to him, he learned to accept his mission. There was something about the experience that might be similar to what he imagined a young man would feel in choosing a partner for marriage, for life. There was a sureness and a promise in it that made sense of the pledge "for better and for worse, through good times and bad, in sickness and in health" until death should work its final fulfilling. And all this steeped in a deep, deep peace.

For the twelve it was a mammoth step. Not one demurred. Not one muttered furtively that Peter had overspoken his role. There was relief that it was out at last, the more so as their most secret hope is confirmed. They are all in agreement. No one voices a doubt or reservation, and Jeshua himself doesn't back away from the title. He agrees too. He knows that he is the one.

Dreams of greatness flood their minds, of daring deeds and danger, of tough ruthless fighting, of victories that would humiliate Roman occupiers, of a nation restored and proud. We will be free again, and Jeshua is the one to make it happen with a little help from us. We've seen the things he can do. He's got God on his side for sure. Nothing can stop him. Nothing can stop us now.

But Jeshua had other things to teach, another side of the picture to set out before them. The path is about to take an unexpected turn. The gospel accounts are crisp and cold in listing the horrors that await him in Jerusalem. Peter's reaction is abrupt and uncensored. The picture Jeshua sketches does not fit their expectations of a revolutionary leader who would inspire fighters so fierce that iron-clad Romans would flee before them.

Later on the scriptures will be a little more circumspect. Luke will describe the risen Jeshua meeting up with two of them on the road to Emmaus and tell how he interpreted to them the things about himself that are found in all the scriptures , beginning with Moses and going through all the prophets. We might wish Matthew had taken a little more time to tell us of the trouble they all had in accepting this new version of the Messiah as the suffering servant of Isaiah, the disillusioned prophet of Jeremiah, even the inarticulate Moses at the very beginning of the Exodus saga.

But at this point Matthew wants to tell of the way Jeshua responded with delight, using even Peter's name as a stepping stone to talk of founding a community on the solid rock of this conviction, shared by them all, that this is God's work. It is the Father's definitive intervention in human affairs. Jeshua is no longer alone; he has twelve mates who believe in him.

The Messiah as the Suffering Servant will be the subject of our reflections for the 22nd Sunday. Part II will be posted on Thursday.

Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time

August 30 2020

Jeremiah 20:7-9

You duped me, O LORD, and I let myself be duped;
you were too strong for me, and you triumphed.
All the day I am an object of laughter;
everyone mocks me.

Whenever I speak, I must cry out,
violence and outrage is my message;
the word of the LORD has brought me
derision and reproach all the day.

I say to myself, I will not mention him,
I will speak in his name no more.
But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart,
imprisoned in my bones;
I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure it.

Psalm 63

R. (2b) My soul is thirsting for you, O Lord my God.
O God, you are my God whom I seek;
for you my flesh pines and my soul thirsts
like the earth, parched, lifeless and without water.
R. My soul is thirsting for you, O Lord my God.
Thus have I gazed toward you in the sanctuary
to see your power and your glory,
For your kindness is a greater good than life;
my lips shall glorify you.
R. My soul is thirsting for you, O Lord my God.
Thus will I bless you while I live;
lifting up my hands, I will call upon your name.
As with the riches of a banquet shall my soul be satisfied,
and with exultant lips my mouth shall praise you.
R. My soul is thirsting for you, O Lord my God.
You are my help,
and in the shadow of your wings I shout for joy.
My soul clings fast to you;
your right hand upholds me.
R. My soul is thirsting for you, O Lord my God.

Romans 12:1-2

I urge you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God,
to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice,
holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship.
Do not conform yourselves to this age
but be transformed by the renewal of your mind,
that you may discern what is the will of God,
what is good and pleasing and perfect.

Matthew 16:13-27

Part I

“But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

Part II

Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. “Never, Lord!” he said. “This shall never happen to you!”

Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

As explained in a comment on last Sunday's gospel passage [LINK] the gospel text for today is the other part of a whole. Having been reassured that the disciples recognised him as the Messiah, Jeshua can now begin to teach them something they had never dreampt of, that the role of the Messiah was not one of warfare and glorious victory but of submission to injustice, even to death, leaving to God the outcome in a resurrection. It is God's victory, one that humankind will never experience in this world, but in a new life beyond.

We need to remember that the gospels are catechetical texts. Matthew says from that time on Jeshua began to explain about the suffering servant. That point marked the start of a new phase of his teaching, in which he introduced them to the real Messiah, one very different from what they expected.

It will be a lengthy education for them as for us. No doubt it is based largely on the writings of Isaiah and Jeremiah (see first reading above). It is a shame that Christians over many centuries have focused more on trite theological formulations than on this traditional Jewish story-telling method, with all its complexity and mystery inviting us to search for meanings as we slowly glean insight into what is in the last analysis inexplicable. It is impossible to explain why the saviour should have to suffer. It's a crazy idea.

Peter's reaction is not a one-off outburst. It echoes down the centuries. It belongs to us all, so incomprehensible is the idea of a Messiah-Saviour as a Suffering Servant. It is contrary to every sense of rightness we have. It's not right that a good man should die for sinners. It's not right that a conquering hero should be executed as a filthy criminal. It's not right that liberation should come through arrest, imprisonment, illegal trial by a religious court held in the secret hours of the night, show trial before the Governor, disgusting brutality of Roman soldiers and the unspeakable shame of crucifixion. It's not right that the one who is made 'holy' by anointing from the All Holy One would make us 'holy' by taking our sins upon himself and in that, suffering the worst we can do to anyone.

It takes some explaining. Perhaps that's why the gospels, at this point, settle for a cold list of indignities and tortures. In fact nowhere in the whole of revelation is it explained exactly how the suffering Messiah works our salvation. This has left open the way for many theories: redemption - a price to be paid; satisfaction - demands of justice to be fulfilled; substitution - an innocent lamb killed instead of us, as a token; and the theory that has held sway since Trent, a pleasing sacrifice of willing obedience to the Father's strange and incomprehensible demands for gifts of love that cost his children and his only Son immense and endless pain.

Each of these explanations makes sense as far as it goes, but today we are sensitive to their shortcomings, seeming to reduce the work of salvation to a legal process or even mere payment of a ransom, with the god cast as an exacting tyrant.

No explanation makes sense. Over a lifetime of wondering, testing these theories, adopting them and then rejecting them, I come finally to see that it's just the way life is. Life itself steadily evolves as each stage reaches a point of failure, is corrupted, and dies. Remarkably the most vital source of energy for the new phase lies in the rotting flesh of the preceding one. The energy for new birth and growth is in the manure, the detritus, the composted waste of plant and animal.

This means that the divine energy of Life is in the corruption process. From that which rots away new life is nourished. God is also in the corruption.

Can we say that the same applies, metaphorically, to the human experience?

Take for example this evil plague that has already taken more than 800,000 victims. It invisibly permeates society, trapping the unwary by slipping silently from another, in a touch or in a breath of air. The donor person may be totally unaware of their hosting this voracious predator. We feel betrayed by nature's stealth. Where is God in this?

At one level life is life, and nothing is that is not of God. At another level the physical realities are beside the point. We are most concerned about what this will do to the human family? What's it doing to families now, in our town, in our country, world-wide? How many bereaved. How many moments of joy missed in separation. How many relationships strained to breaking point, children alienated, parents victimising one another till divorce becomes the only way out.

What will be our response, as people? As educated, caring, spiritually-aware people who are called by this circumstance to grow up to a degree hardly imagined before. You don't have to be a prophet to see that either there will be a resurgence of human compassion not just in the suffering time but in the re-building time, of sharing and mateship and tolerance and supporting..., or there will be disastrous breakdown of social institutions and chaos that could well prove terminal.

We are a very advanced society in a global village. From selfishness a great leap forward is necessary or we return to the jungle, as they say. This is where God is! The God of this evolving universe is in this COVID corruption and in the challenge it presents to us. Where will we be? Where are we now?

God is with us in the set-back so that we will be with her, consciously and willingly, in the recovery.

* * * * *

This is the way life works, with trauma of conflict ending in death, and from that re-birth. At every moment we have a simple choice: to absorb in ourselves the stress of setback or defeat, or to react against it by inflicting hurt or pain on another.

We are forever asking whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them? [1]

Jeshua replies: "Whoever would save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life on my account will find it." ["on my account" i.e., in following the way I teach.]

To reduce the equation to its simplest form we could say: If to hurt the other is wrong, my only option is to absorb the pain in myself without retaliation.

In the wondrous hierarchy of Life we see each more complex order using the simpler form for nourishment. Death and re-birth are at the heart of the process. While many living things take flight to escape the hungry jaws of a predator, and they will fight back when cornered, the prevailing attitude is one of acceptance, but we are different. As awareness reaches higher levels with intelligence, your instinct for self preservation tends to devise ways of avoiding danger by eliminating the one coming against you. Spurred on by dangers we foresee, we devise ways to destroy the threatening one. Common sense says we survive by fighting and winning. Jeshua says we win Life by surrender to the process of defeat, suffering and dying.

Inevitably we see this degree of pacifism so defeatist as to be irresponsible. I think God sees it as the cosmos becoming conscious of its own pain in evolving towards the goal. We are the consciousness of the world. We have the ability to understand and to choose. Jeshua shows us that we can in fact choose to go along the most repulsive path willingly, with love, if that is the path that lies ahead of us. The goal, the prize, is what it makes of us. What kind of person may be forged in this fire? What character hammered into shape? What selfishness is refined out of a person who embraces their destiny in all its darkness, and through that finds life?

This demands a greatness of heart that would take your breath away if you ever saw someone actually do it. Oh, we see it in small things, and we glimpse it in some outstanding cases and they do take our breath away.

The way to freedom is the way of peaceful sharing and cooperation. What the Messiah illustrates in Jerusalem when he eventually falls into the hands of the priests, Paul spells out in detail:

Love is patient, is kind; love feels no envy; love is never perverse or proud, never insolent; does not claim its rights, cannot be provoked, does not brood over an injury; takes no pleasure in wrong-doing, but rejoices at the victory of truth; sustains, believes, hopes, endures, to the last. [2]

* * * * *

From the joy of recognising the Messiah in such an unlikely person as Jeshua of Nazareth to the hardest lessons of Life's demands, Matthew carries us forward with a quick and steady hand. We are all catechumens when we return again to delve into the teaching text in another attempt to unravel the threads of meaning.

PS To those who have persevered this far, thank you. And one final word: it makes no difference whether you call 'god' the Great Beyond, the Unknowable, the Mystery, the Quantum Leap or the Great Serpent (that galaxy we ridiculously call the milky way), what we have in Jeshua of Nazareth is relationship that is real, dynamic and personal, and in his death he leads us to a level of trust that we might never reach alone.