Proper 16 Year A

Preached at Christ Episcopal Church

Alameda, California, 8/24/08                                 

Br. Christopher-Paul Parker SSF

Who Do You Say That I Am?

+In the holy name of God, who is one

eternal and undivided Trinity.  Amen.

Who is Jesus?  There are quite a few to choose from these days.  Do you prefer Jesus the stoic philosopher who preaches a solid humanist ethic of respect for others?  Or do you prefer the triumphalist Jesus who harrows hell and then ascends to heaven clad in a Roman toga?  Do you believe in the intensely personal lord and savior of the evangelical tradition?  The cosmic, star-walking Jesus of Teilhard de Chardin?  The proto-monastic Essene concerned with purity rituals and the end times?  The sword-wielding Christ of Revelation?  I was browsing through a religious supplies catalogue recently and came on a Jesus playing soccer in cleats, or would you rather hang with the one who shoots hoops?  Perhaps you prefer the safely effeminate Jesus of Warner Sallman's famous 1941 portrait, the one you wouldn't mind having your daughter, or, I suppose today, your son, date?  Who do you say that Jesus is?

    Each of the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke answers this question a little differently.  For Mark, Jesus is the rabbi, the teacher come to lead Israel back into a covenant relationship with God.  Matthew and Luke build on Mark's portrait.  For Matthew, Jesus is the second Moses who fulfills the law and the prophets.  For Luke, Jesus is the prophet of social justice who mingles with untouchables and challenges his society's social and religious taboos.  In today's reading, Peter recognizes Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah or anointed one of God, but he adds something only found in Matthew.  He calls Jesus the Son of the living God: Jesus is more than a teacher, rabbi, prophet, or priest.  And he's either more than the messiah or not even the messiah, if by 'messiah' we mean the man first-century zealots believed would expel the occupying Roman forces and restore the Davidic monarchy to power.  For Matthew, Jesus is indeed a man, but he also partakes in the life of God in a way that others don't.  What this means isn't always clear - there's considerable scholarly debate over what the titles "Son of Man" and "Son of God" mean.  Do they, for instance, reveal Jesus as a man like Moses, chosen from among many to do God's particular will, or are they supposed to identify Jesus as a supernatural being?

    It's easy to get bogged down in abstruse critical and theological speculation about what the scriptures mean when they discuss Jesus' identity, and while that's fine for scholars and professional theologians, it doesn't do much for the rest of us.  We have to decide not only who Jesus was as an historical figure, but also who he remains today as the savior, the second person of the Trinity, and the reason we're here this morning.  When the apostles tell Jesus that some think he's Elijah, whose second coming would kick off the end times, or Jeremiah, who prophesized the fall of Jerusalem and the hardships of the Babylonian exile, they are casting Jesus in the traditional roles and expectations of their day.  They, and the people they come from, see Jesus not for who he is, but as what they want him to be.  It's only Peter, granted a moment of divine insight, who recognizes Jesus as the son of the living God, as someone who far exceeds contemporary expectations - who, indeed turns all of those expectations on their heads.  Jesus isn't a Socratic sage or an Old Testament prophet.  He's not the belligerent descendant of David come to take back his throne by force.  He's not the prophet come to announce God's judgment on a sinful world. He's something other than all these expectations.  And this something other is, for his followers, literally unbelievable.  He is the messiah, yes, but the messiah who has come to die with and for his people.  

    I'm now going to exercise my prerogative as guest preacher and skip ahead a bit to next week's gospel.  A bare three lines after Peter names Jesus as the Christ, Jesus calls Peter "Satan" and "a stumbling block" for opposing Jesus' plan to travel to Jerusalem where he will meet his death.  This is, of course, absurd.  No messiah in his right mind would willingly choose death, much less the grotesque death Jesus will experience at the hands of the Romans.  Crucifixion was an act of state-condoned and state-enacted torture.  It was deliberately slow and agonizing, and it was reserved for murderers, traitors, and anyone seen to pose a threat to the stability of the Roman occupation.  No doubt the Romans felt that national security interests outweighed the heinous nature of the act, but both the Romans and the Jewish authorities knew that crucifixion existed for one purpose: as an instrument of terror wielded by the state as a sign of its absolute power.  We do neither history nor Jesus justice by over-spiritualizing or sentimentalizing the crucifixion.  Crucifixion was a common practice in antiquity.  Appian of Alexandria tells of the 6000 followers of Spartacus crucified along the Appian Way (named for Appius Claudius Caecus) in 71 BC, and Josephus describes how Roman soldiers amused themselves by nailing up Jews in various positions during the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD.  We often prettify the crucifixion by stylizing it, giving Jesus a look of meek suffering, restraining the flow of blood, and modestly covering his genitals with an artfully draped linen cloth.  It takes a great deal of honesty to think of the crucifixion as it was: a beaten and naked man hanging from the spikes piercing his flesh while his blood pooled in the dust at the foot of the cross.  Whoever else Jesus may be, he was, and is, this man who suffered because God so loved the world that he couldn't help sharing the fullness of human pain.

    But this isn't, thanks be to God, the whole of Jesus.  This is also the Jesus who loves us so much that he bursts the bonds of death on the third day.  This is the Jesus, son of the living God, who is so intimately a part of the divine life that his own life cannot be quenched because it's his gift to us, his beloved.  This is the Jesus who gives us the Church as the Body of Christ so that we may have hope in this life and glory in the next.  This is the Jesus whom we meet in the most blessed sacrament of the altar, the constant and freely chosen self-giving that bridges the otherwise infinite gap between us and God.

    And it's this notion of freedom that helps me understand the last puzzling aspect of today's gospel.  Having named Peter the rock of his church, Jesus then "sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah."  These lines are Matthew's version of what scholars call the messianic secret.  The idea behind the messianic secret is that the people around Jesus can only understand who he truly is after he has died on the cross.  He is the suffering servant whose death upends all of the preconceptions about the messiah and shows his followers that their lives must be radically reimagined in the light of his.  This is a good and orthodox reading of scripture, but for me, there's something else here too.  

    As a child, I always wondered why Jesus, being fully divine as well as fully human, didn't simply appear in glory and fix things.  I knew that if I had Jesus' power, things would be very different.  I couldn't understand why Jesus would fool around with signs and miracles, and I really couldn't understand why he put himself through so much suffering.  As I've grown older, though, I've come to realize that the one thing that Jesus comes to challenge is power: the power of wealth, of privilege, of violence, even the power of tradition as old as the law of Moses.  And the one thing that would thwart Jesus as the messiah would be the power his followers wished upon him as they eagerly expected him to live up to their hopes.  If a military messiah were good, how much better would a divine messiah arriving in clouds of glory with legions of seraphim and cherubim at his feet be?  We get something like this at the Transfiguration, when Jesus' divine reality breaks through momentarily into our own as he stands on Mt. Tabor.  But you'll remember that the disciples are so stunned by the divine that Jesus has to nudge them out of their stupor with the words "stand up, do not be afraid" (Matt 17:8).  And here is, I think, the key to Jesus' order of silence.  At least for me, salvation has little value if I don't work for it.  God has given us the great gift of being free and of co-creating our salvation with him.  If Jesus were to appear in his full divinity, who could choose other than to believe?  Who wouldn't be stunned into silent assent at the sight of God's glory?  And if you have no choice but to believe, of what value is your faith?  God could, I suppose, choose to hand us our salvation in a platter, with no effort and little thought required on our part, but how meaningful would salvation then be?  And what kind of relationship would we have with our savior?  The miracle of the Incarnation is that God becomes fully human in the person of Jesus Christ and thus shares our humanity all the way down to the intimacies of bread and wine, bone and blood.  If we weren't free to choose God, if we weren't free to turn away from God, to reject him and even kill him, how could we in any meaningful way choose to turn toward God and say "my God and my all"?  

    Three years ago while I was still teaching at a university in Chicago, I began to take Jesus' question, "Who do you say that I am?" seriously.  That decision has led me in directions I never expected and wouldn't have had the courage otherwise to choose.  I ask myself every day who I believe Jesus to be, because that question lies at the heart of my faith and of my vocation as a Franciscan.  It's the most important question any Christian can ask, and how we decide to answer it depends on whether or not we're willing to see Jesus, not as we wish him to be, but as he is, the one who calls each of us into the mystery of faith and the hope of everlasting life along the path he has, through his loving suffering, opened to all.  My brothers and sisters, I don't know how you will choose to answer Jesus' question, but I tell you now that Jesus is here with us today as surely as he was in Mary's womb, as surely as he was in the manger, as surely as he was in Jerusalem for the Passover, as surely as he was on Golgotha, and as surely as he was on the road to Emmaus.  My prayer for you today is that as you come to the altar to share in the Eucharist, you ask it of yourself, with faith that the loving God who gives us himself in the bread and wine gives himself to and for you.  Amen.