Psalm 138
Isaiah 51.1-6
Romans 11.33-36
Matthew 16.13-20
Sprawled on the living room floor, her crayons arrayed around her, a little girl draws furiously. "What are you drawing?" her father asks. "I'm drawing a picture of God." Her father jovially responds: "You can't draw a picture of God! No one knows what he looks like!" But she says, "They will I when I get through."
This morning's story from the gospel of Matthew is about a man who sees God. Jesus asks his disciples who they think he is. But his question is indirect. Not "Do you finally see who I am?" but "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?" As though he's soliciting their take on how the mobs of people that have been following him around Galilee are understanding his ministry. But surely Jesus is vastly more perceptive than his obtuse disciples. He has a better sense than they do of how the crowds are responding to his preaching and healing. He's not asking to get the disciples' views on the public's reaction. He's putting a crucial question to them.
"Some say you're John the Baptist, but others say you're Elijah, and still others say you're Jeremiah or one of the prophets." Right off you suspect that they're not just reporting what other people think. They're cautiously batting around the possibilities themselves. Maybe they're afraid they'll say the wrong thing and look foolish. Probably they're waiting for some clue from Jesus so they know what he wants them to say. Their diffidence makes it plain that despite being his disciples, they have no clear idea who this Jesus really is or what he is doing. Except for the famously impetuous Peter. He blurts out "you are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God!" I can't imagine Peter already having this idea and keeping quiet about it. Instead I think it must have been that things suddenly crystallize for him when Jesus asks the question. I imagine him not even hearing the other disciple's goofy speculations. At that moment the pieces fall into place. The picture suddenly comes into focus. There can be only one answer. This disciple finally sees who Jesus is. The others have seen Jesus. They've witnessed the miracles and listened to the teachings. But only now does one of them see Jesus as the Christ. Like most people then, and like most people now, the disciples think they have a pretty good idea what God is like. Like most people then, and like most people now, they're getting him wrong. They try to fit him into their conventionally pious religious categories. They try to make of this utterly singular Jesus one more prophet, a returned Jeremiah, a recycled John the Baptist. No matter what they see and hear they just can't get it. But the hidden God shows himself to one of them. Peter sees Jesus as God's Son, the Messiah.
But what has Peter confessed? What does it mean that Jesus is the Christ? I once heard someone say that he had grown up thinking that "Christ" was Jesus' surname, that Jesus Christ was the eldest son of Mary Christ and Joseph Christ. But of course when we say that Jesus is the Christ we're using a title, not a name. Historically, in the religion of the people of Israel, the Christ is God's anointed, the Messiah, the one specially selected and sent by God to deliver his people. But there were in Jesus' time lots of different ideas about what the Old Testament promises of a Messiah amounted to. The people of Israel lived in hope, but it wasn't exactly clear just who, or what, they were waiting for. Peter sees Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ, and as he does so he's beginning to see what that means. He's seeing something about how God will act on behalf of people, something that can't be clearly seen until Jesus himself is there.
To call Jesus Christ the way Peter did is to acknowledge Jesus as God himself with us, taking action on for us. I love Bishop Epting's phrase: he refers to Jesus as "the human face of God." He's saying that Jesus is uniquely authoritative, the one who shows us what God is like. Crucially, though, he's pointing beyond that to the fact that, in some way beyond our understanding or imagining, this man Jesus truly is the God who is with us, acting to help, heal and save us. This is the confession that Jesus' question pulls out of Peter. This is the confession that makes us what we are. Sometimes this can get pushed out of view, forgotten or even lost. But without it we have no real reason to be here this morning. A Christianity that gets too interested in other things, no matter how good and important they are, misses the point.
Jesus responds to Peter's confession with the controversial "You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church." The rock to which Jesus refers is Peter's vision of God truly and powerfully present in Jesus. Jesus doesn't elevate Peter to the top of an ecclesiastical hierarchy. He identifies Peter's confession, the truth about Jesus, as the solid foundation for Christian faith. Earlier in Matthew's gospel we hear Jesus contrasting the wise person, who builds his house on a rock, with the foolish person, who builds on sand. The rains fall, the floods come, and the wind blows. The house built on the sand is destroyed but the house built on the rock survives. There Jesus explicitly tells us that 'to build on the rock' is to hear and act on what Jesus himself has to say. The rock is the good news of God in Christ.
An Indian wise man, not a Christian, once said "Christianity is seeing Christ. The rest is just talk." In its place, that 'rest that's just talk' can be pretty significant. Still, I think that, looking at our faith from the outside, he sees clearly what we sometimes lose sight of. Our confession is Peter's confession; if not, it's just talk.
Left to our own devices and desires we invent a God of condemnation and control, we will try to placate him, to justify ourselves, and we will in the end make ourselves in his image, condemning and controlling, fearing all things living and free, and loving power. That, for now, is the human way. But it does not have to be and it will not always be. For God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. To see the face of God in Jesus is to see the face of limitless love. We see God doing whatever it takes to save us, God committed to us despite ourselves, loving us unconditionally with a powerful love that accepts us as we are and goes on to change us.
Jesus asked his disciples about who people in general were saying he is. Instead of answering that question Peter answers the right question: Who do I think Jesus is? It's easy to forget the shock Peter must have felt when he saw who Jesus is. In the natural course of things it becomes easy and familiar, so we don't feel the scandalous weight of Peter's claim that he was seeing God, seeing God in the flesh, God putting himself, in our place, on the receiving end of all the pain and despised weakness, obstinate sin and obdurate stupidity of our human condition. It was really a pretty disreputable thing to say about God. Of the disciples, only Peter was uncouth enough to come up with it.
Flannery O'Connor wrote a short story called Parker's Back about a man who awakens from a drunken binge with a tattoo of God on his back. Hanging out with lowlifes in bars and pool halls he takes off his shirt, they see the tattoo, and fights ensue: "We don't want him in here! Get the hell out of here!" But none of the respectable Christians see anything special about his tattoo. They know better: you can't have a tattoo of God. You can't see God. God can't be associated with anything as lowly as that. Peter would have known better. The only way to see God is to see him as he freely chooses to be seen, to see him as he chooses to be: giving up his power in order to make himself one with the powerless, giving up his glory to save the ignoble, giving up his life to bring life to the dying. The only way to see God is to see Jesus the Christ.