Who do YOU say that I am?
Thumbnail: “The Denial of Peter” by Gerard Seghers (1591-1651); in the public domain
Link to video: https://www.facebook.com/stlukesferndale.org/videos/743091266489713
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
August 23, 2020—Proper 16A
Romans 12:1-8; Matthew 16:13-20
“Who do people say that I am?” It’s the easier of the two questions, clearly. It’s fairly simple to talk about what other people think, to describe how they might understand or misunderstand the person of Jesus. I can make them sound ridiculous or simplistic, if I want to. Then again, I could end up sounding wistful, as though they have perhaps seen or experienced something I long for.
Whatever I feel, it’s a potential distraction to the next question, the one that Jesus seems far more concerned with: “Who do YOU say that I am?”
Peter leaps forward with “You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God!” Which earns him praise this week, but next week we’ll see him rebuked, when he expresses horror at the idea that the Messiah must suffer and die.
Apparently, what we MEAN when we say words like “Messiah” and “salvation” is not quite so simple. What are we being saved from? What are we being ushered into? Our understanding of these things will change and grow, as we encounter Jesus in different ways and at different points in our lives.
You see, I don’t think the rebuke that is coming for Peter next week actually undoes the praise that has come this week. The Church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord. But we will never have a perfect bead on what that means. Like Peter, we get it, and we totally don’t get it.
That paradox, that open question, is part of the deal. It’s an uncomfortable part of the deal, for those who want concrete answers about what it is and what it isn’t. But it’s what the gospels point us toward: As writer Debie Thomas notes, Jesus (with all his wordplay and his parables and his endless patience with bumbling disciples) seems to agree with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, when he “encouraged his protégé to sit with what he doesn’t know, and trust that the questions themselves have great value. ‘Be patient,’ he wrote, ‘toward all that is unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. … Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.’”[i]
Who do you say that Jesus is? If you say that he is the Messiah, what do you mean by that, and will that understanding hold up longer than Peter’s does? What are you being saved from? What are you being saved for? And how does Jesus do it, how do you know that he will do it, why do you trust that he has the power to do it?
These are just some of the questions that need to be loved and lived, so that you continue to live into the answer, into the response, into the relationship with Jesus that lies at the heart of our faith.
Who is Jesus? We affirm our beliefs with ancient words that come out of a specific culture and way of thinking, but we understand it through our own life and experience. Peter certainly did, both before this declaration on the road, and then after the rebuke, through the trial and the crucifixion, through the fear and the hiding, through the resurrection and the commissioning and the preaching and the infighting and the persecution. Through it all, Jesus met him and called him and healed him and strengthened him and challenged him.
As Thomas notes, it’s stunning to think of all the answers Peter must have lived into “as time went on — answers he never could have articulated in the early years of discipleship.”
“Who do you say that I am?” For Peter, Jesus was the one who found him in a fishing boat and gave him a new vocation. Where were you when you first heard Jesus call you to something new?
Jesus was the one who healed Peter’s mother-in-law. Do you long to feel that touch? Have you experienced the joy of a return to health, a restoration of strength?
Jesus was the one who said to Peter, “Yes, walk on water," calling him to dare and try something unimaginable. Jesus was also the one who caught him before he drowned. What has the Messiah dared YOU to do, encouraging you to go beyond what you thought you were capable of? And has he ever caught you, somehow, at a moment when you feared you might go under?
Jesus was the one who washed Peter’s feet while he squirmed in shame. And he’s the one who told Peter he would be a coward on the very night Jesus needed him to be brave. What’s the worst thing Jesus knows about you? Does it make you want to run and hide? Does it make you fear that Jesus wants to turn and run from you? Can you begin to imagine that he might someday meet you on the beach, as he did with Peter, to feed you breakfast and speak love and fresh purpose into your humiliation?
Who do you say that Jesus is?
Jesus was the one who gave Peter the courage to preach to three thousand people on Pentecost, and the one who taught him not to call unclean what God had pronounced clean. He’s the one who stayed by Peter’s side through insults, beatings, and imprisonments, and he’s the one Peter followed into martyrdom. Messiah, for Peter, came to mean challenge, insight and transformation, as well as the source of bravery and strength. Messiah was the one who was always with him, to the very end. In his life and growth and work; but just as truly in his mistakes and trials, his suffering and his death.[ii]
Who do you say that Jesus is? And if you say that He’s the Messiah, what does that mean to you, when it actually becomes real in your life? What has he saved you from? What has he saved you for? These are the questions he wants you to ponder, to live into, to come to love deeply, as though they are life itself. Because, of course, they are.
May you never stop living into the questions, my friends, and may you never stop being surprised by Jesus when he meets you. May it be so, Amen.
[i] Debie Thomas, https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2724-but-what-do-you-think, quoting Rainer Maria Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet
[ii] Images from Peter’s life in the preceding paragraphs are taken from Debie Thomas, op cit.