Fr. Troy Beecham
Sermon, Proper 16 A, 2023
Matthew 16:13-20
“When Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah. “
In this morning’s Gospel reading, Jesus continues his ministry in Gentile territory. As we saw in last Sunday’s Gospel reading, Jesus extended his ministry beyond the Jewish people, and beyond Jewish ideas of who was loved by God and was acceptable as a companion (literally, one with whom you share bread). Jesus was willing to face rejection from his own people in order to teach them, and to teach the Gentiles, that the love of God is not constrained by our ethnic, socio-economic, linguistic filters, or any other filter that we might use to decide who God loves. Jesus later summarizes this by saying, “Do not judge others, for the measure that you use will be used against you”, referring to the Day of Judgment, when God, the only true judge, will call each of us before his throne to account for our lives. St. Paul extends the idea later by saying that we should not even judge ourselves, because our systems of judgment are all irreparably flawed, mostly by self-interest.
This does not translate into a loose interpretation of Jesus saying that all beliefs and behaviors are “ok” with God simply because God loves us where we are when we find him. The opposite is true; Jesus always said to a sinner who had either been rescued by him or who became his disciple “Go and sin no more”. Conversion of life is not a requirement of salvation. Not at all. Salvation is the free gift of God to all who place their trust in him. Conversion of life is, however, the sure sign that we have indeed become vessels of the Holy Spirit of God, who produces in us the “fruits of repentance”, which are love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
The teaching of Jesus that God loved all people was difficult for the Jewish religious leaders of the day, and for most Jewish folks, including his disciples, who were only interested in the salvation of the Jewish people. That Jesus regularly required his disciples to travel with him outside of Jewish territory and to become companions of unclean Gentiles was a tremendous strain upon their fidelity to him, even as much as they were in awe of him and the power of God at work in him. But Jesus is unrelenting in his requirement that all who would be his disciples must grow to love as greatly as he loves, and so in this Gospel reading, Jesus takes his disciples to a true ‘den of iniquity’, to the pagan Roman city of Caesarea Philippi.
Caesarea Philippi was a regional Roman trading hub, located along major trade routes that connected sea trade from Caesarea Maritima to the inland cities across the region. One of the distinguishing physical features of the city was a massive grotto and cave system, which every ancient culture considered to be the gateway to the underworld, literally called the Gates of Hades (Hell). In earlier eras, when that region was occupied by the Canaanites and the Syro-Phoenicians, there was a shrine dedicated to Baal, a deity who demanded human sacrifice, especially the ritual murder of infants and children. After the conquest of Alexander the Great, the shrine was rededicated to the Greco-Roman fertility deity Pan (literally, ‘the one who is all’). The religion of Pan was primarily a religion of fertility, a religion that exalted sex, power, and wealth, and that included ritual orgies as worship of the deity. For faithful Jews, the association of the Gates of Hell with pagan, Gentile religion was an easy one.
In much the same way, it is easy for any of us to judge other peoples as being unclean, unworthy of God’s love, and worthy of destruction. Every people, every nation, every political party, every religion thrives, on some level, on the judgment of others ‘not like us’ and ‘dangerous to our way of life’. Human history is replete with examples of human wickedness perpetrated ‘for the good’ because of our human systems judgment. It is for this reason that Jesus is so clear that we must not judge each other because only God can judge. And the Day of Judgment is still on its way.
The entire history of the Jewish people as recorded in the Old Testament is the story of the faithfulness of God and of the Jewish people struggling to live as the covenant people of God, living according to the Torah rather than falling into living according to the beliefs and practices of the Gentile nations around them. The Prophets declared that the conquest of Israel and Judea some 600 years before the time of Jesus was because the Jewish people had repeatedly turned away from God to the worship of pagan deities and living lives that did not give witness to the covenant of God. The fact that Rome had conquered the Jews again brought up for them painful memories and even more painful questions about why had God seemed to abandoned them, again, and what would it take from them for God to save them from their oppressors. The summation of those questions had crystalized into expectations for the coming of the Messiah, the divinely anointed king and military leader who would drive out their enemies, restore their people’s freedom, and leave them unencumbered in their worship of God. As people living under occupation, it had become intensely important that the Jewish people lived visibly different lives from the Gentiles. Faithfulness to the Law and the Prophets had taken on an urgent intensity for the Jewish people.
With such an urgent, intense desire for redemption, the most important question for Jews during the time of Jesus was how to identify the Messiah. Jesus had recently warned his disciples about religious leaders who can foretell the weather but “cannot interpret the signs of the times”, and how they influence others with their flawed systems of judgment, leading them astray. This is the pressure cooker context of Jesus asking his disciples who the people, and who they, said he was. The Greek text shows that when Jesus asks the disciples, "Who do you say that I am?", the verb is in the imperfect, noting a repeated action. Jesus continually asks and continues to this day to ask: “Who do you say that I am?” The answers provided by the disciples are interesting. The people, which seems to mean Jew and Gentile alike, are unclear, but they are certain that at the least he is a prophet, a miracle worker. And so many people today, even many who call themselves Christians, are happy to consider Jesus a prophet, a miracle worker, a great teacher. But Jesus is clear that such simple ‘belief’ is not enough because it falls utterly short of the staggering Truth: Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God.
The implications for calling Jesus the Messiah are deep, and conflicted. In the Old Testament, kings and prophets, and even the High Priest, were all anointed when they assumed their office. The Hebrew word for ‘anointed’ is mashiach - messiah. Each of these offices were in their own small way individual parts of a whole that was expected of the true Messiah who would come at the end of time and usher in the Day of Judgment. So when Simon declares that Jesus is that very Messiah, and the Son of God, he is both giving words to the revelation of God and to the complicated hopes of his people. Such a revelation must surely be shouted from the rooftops! People have often wondered why Jesus then says, “Tell no one that I am the Messiah, the Son of God.” This was the greatest revelation in human history! This was the news that the Jewish people so desperately wanted to hear! Why keep it quiet?!?
Jesus commands them to tell no one because of their complicated ideas and hopes about who the Messiah is and who God is. Right up until the crucifixion of Jesus, the disciples were all excited about Jesus being the Messiah, a military leader who would defeat their enemies and restore national sovereignty. Their hearts and minds were filled with generations of hope that inevitably required the deaths of their enemies and ended in their investiture with power and authority. How many times did Jesus rebuke his disciples for arguing who would be the greatest in the kingdom of God? For them, and, if we’re honest, for we ourselves, to say that God was on their side meant that God was going to destroy all the people who they hated, for certainly God shares all of our judgments against our enemies! Surely God justifies all of our violence because we are on the side of justice!, says our sinful hears.
The Jewish people of the 1st century AD, as equally as we today, had very earthly hopes: they all wanted an end to the crushing oppression of the Roman Empire. Each internal group understood this happening in different ways, but ultimately they agreed that it was for the same reason. The long-expected Messiah was destined to overthrow Rome and put them on the top of the smoking pile of rubble, because rubble is always the only thing left when humans make war against each other. As N.T. Wright puts it, no first century Jew would have said: "I want the Messiah to come, die in a humiliating fashion, be resurrected and then promise us that if we follow him, we will die and then enter into a non-earthly eternity with God that will include lots of non-Jews.", and "Everyone knew that a crucified Messiah was a failed Messiah." The Messiah was to bring about the new reign of God on earth, not die as a victim of the intersection of empire and temple.
But that is the Messiah that God had intended all along, as Jesus so patiently tried to teach them. And the disciples were left with crushed hopes and dreams at his crucifixion, and their trust in God was broken. How often do we experience the same desolation when God fails to act in ways that we expect? And even knowing this, Jesus says to the disciples, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” I want to avoid the dispute about papal authority as much as I can do. The Greek text “I will give you” is in the plural, meaning that Jesus gives to all of the disciples, not just the 12 apostles, but to all who believe that he is the Son of God, the authority to bind and loose, not just Peter alone. So, what may we make of this contentious statement of Jesus?
In rabbinic traditions, the use of the terms “bind” and “loose”, or “oblige” and “permit”, have to do with the authority of the leader of the community to declare what is permissible or not in the believing community. Jesus confers authority to all the disciples to modify the still primarily Jewish Christian community's stance toward the Law, thus opening the way for Gentiles to be considered full members of the Church. At the time when Jesus commands them to “Tell no one”, such inclusion was still not accepted or understood by the disciples. That would only come later, after the Resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit. Matthew is here writing in retrospect to support the disciples authority to declare that eating with Gentiles, and by extension other non-observances of the Law, is acceptable where it is in accordance with the teaching, example, and commandments of Jesus to love as greatly as he loved. Even then, the matter was not settled for the Jewish disciples of Jesus for decades.
This came to the fore in the dispute over Peter's decision to visit to the Gentile Cornelius and to eat non-kosher, unclean food, and then to baptize him and his entire family without requiring first that they become Jewish. The report in Acts 11:2b-3: “the circumcised believers criticized [Peter], saying, ‘Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?’” Peter's initial response is predicated on the authority given by Jesus to his true disciples to determine that the Law was no longer binding on either Jewish or Gentile Christians. The matter was clearly not settled, as we see from the convening of the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15, c. 45 CE). In the Acts account, Peter continues to speak from the position of the authority conferred by Jesus, even though he was once rebuked by Paul for temporarily giving in to the pressure of those who still believed that the Mosaic Law was binding. Although the ultimate decision of the Council still required abstention from blood, from strangled animals, and from food sacrificed to idols, within a few generations all requirements from the Mosaic Law were abandoned.
What are we to make of these things in our own times, my friends? What are the new laws that we have created in our own image to determine who is acceptable and who is deplorable, who has privilege and who’s privilege must be burned down? How are our modern equivalents: critical theory, intersectional theory, the profound evil of Marxist/socialist/fascist philosophy that is becoming increasingly accepted in our nation, corporate/crony capitalism, the great evil of abortion, the profound confusion of sexuality and the mutilation of our bodies - even parents doing it to their children!, to try to change the perception of our God given biological sex, our government increasingly becoming tyrannical, and so many others? Who has the authority to say which of these are obliged and permitted, to bind or to loose? Any true disciple, and any true Church, has that authority, based on the Scriptures. And we are called to bind these great evils in the name of Jesus!
Even so, we still have to examine ourselves, and ask God to reveal to us if we any different from the disciples as they were in this morning’s Gospel reading. Is Jesus telling me or you to not tell anyone that he is the Messiah? Are we still so filled with our ideas of justice, who has the right to exercise power over others, who should be excluded, and who is a human worthy of protection and love. What parts of our lives have still to be sanctified before our claims to be disciples of Jesus are credible? How much does the Church have to repent, and what must we reject as being non-Biblical in our ecclesiastical life and return to Jesus as he is revealed in the Holy Scriptures? How much does our proclamation that Jesus is the Son of God still reflect our cultural prejudices and false beliefs? Who, looking at the Church, looking at me or you, can see anything of the Resurrected Savior who loves us all without judgment in us? These are weighty and essential questions for us to ask of ourselves and the Church. May God enlighten the eyes of our hearts that we might see the Truth and be transformed by the Holy Spirit that we might be bearers of that Truth, the Truth who is Jesus.
Grant, O merciful God, that your Church, being gathered together in unity by your Holy Spirit, may show forth your power among all peoples, to the glory of your Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever.
Amen.
