One Flock, One Shepherd (Good Shepherd Sunday; Easter 4B)

One Flock, One Shepherd

Easter 4B
29 April 2012; 8:00 a.m. Said Mass and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Homily Delivered by the Rev. Dr. Anthony A. Hutchinson 

at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon
Acts 4:5-12; Psalm 23; 1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18 

“The day after they had arrested Peter and John for teaching about Jesus and the resurrection, the rulers, elders, and scribes assembled in Jerusalem, with Annas the high priest, Caiaphas, John, and Alexander, and all who were of the high-priestly family. When they had made the prisoners stand in their midst, they inquired, "By what power or by what name did you do this?" Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, "Rulers of the people and elders, if we are questioned today because of a good deed done to someone who was sick and are asked how this man has been healed, let it be known to all of you, and to all the people of Israel, that this man is standing before you in good health by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead. This Jesus is ‘the stone that was rejected by you, the builders; it has become the cornerstone.’ There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.” (Acts 4:5-12) 

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

We have been having a lot of funerals here at Trinity in the last weeks.  At a couple of them we have used as the Gospel reading the passage from John 14, where Jesus says that in his Father’s House there are many way stations.  The passage is warm, reassuring, and comforting.  It ends with Jesus saying, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life: no one comes to the Father, except by me” (John14: 6).   One of the deacons asked me somewhat abashedly if she could read the Gospel but end the reading before that last half-verse, “no one comes to the Father except by me.”  “It might be offensive to some of the visiting bereaved, who might not be Christians.” 

She asked as if she were afraid my response might be “But this is the BIBLE we are talking about here, and I’ll not have a verse of GOD’S WORD edited out because it might be offensive to those who are going to destruction anyway!”  But she asked it anyway, because she knew that I am no fundamentalist, and believe that in order to be understood, God’s word on occasion needs to be reframed or even rephrased. 

Today’s Gospel reading, shares the same problem.  “I am the Good Shepherd” Jesus says, not “a good shepherd.”  And he adds, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.”  Likewise, in the Acts reading, St. Peter ends his short speech on Christ being the stone once rejected but now made head cornerstone by saying, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.”

We here at Trinity Church glory in the fact that we are inclusive.  One of our core values is hospitality.   We believe that inclusiveness and hospitality are what God calls us to.   We believe that because of what scripture teaches us. 
During the life of Jesus, everyone knew that one of the great images of the Hebrew scripture for God’s saving act at the end of time was that of a great banquet. Even though there were plenty of passages that said, like Isaiah 25:7, that this banquet would be for people of all nations, many of the religious teachers around Jesus taught that this would be an exclusive event limited to a few of God’s chosen only.

Jesus replies to such a stingy image of God with parables. He points to the weather and says that God gives his rain and sunshine to both good and bad people alike (Matt. 5:45). He says this tells us about God’s love for all and should be a model for us in how we treat others. Jesus points to families and notes that when children ask for bread to eat, parents do not give them stones, or when they ask for an egg to eat, do not give them a scorpion. “If even average parents try to give their children good things, how much more generous will God be?” (Matt. 7:9-10; Luke 11:11-13)

Jesus’ actions matched his words. He regularly ate and drank with people that his religion told him would make him unclean. He had dinner parties with drunkards and prostitutes, much to the horror of Jesus’ “righteous” opponents. “It is the sick who need a doctor,” he would say, “not healthy people.” (Matt. 9:12)

But not everyone wanted a God as generous as the one Jesus described. They would quote scriptures that “proved” God was picky and exclusive. Jesus would reply by quoting other scriptures, where God looked more loving. 

Jesus reserved his deepest anger for people he accused of “refusing to enter God’s door, and also barring the way to others” (Matt 23:13). He told other parables to explain why it was that despite God’s overwhelming goodness and generosity, some people were right with God and others were not.  The ones who were not truly thankful for God’s generosity, and were not likewise generous to others, were the butt of such parables (Luke 18:10-14).

When Jesus described what he believed the dividing line on the Last Day will be between those who stand and dwell with God and those who do not, he said that it was whether people had been hospitable, and whether they had cared for the marginalized  (Matthew 5: 35-40). 

So inclusiveness and hospitality are core to the Gospel, not just affectations of Trinity Ashland.   

What, then, are we to make of the verses of the New Testament that seem exclusionary? 

Here in post-modern America, with its wide diversity of religious and non-religious traditions, it is always a temptation to simply ignore these verses or deny that they hold any truth or value.   In a landscape of radical diversity, all religious options seem equally valid, valuable, and true, with the exception of views that exclude or subordinate others, or claim unique truth or authenticity.   This often finds expression in a consumer’s approach to religious belief:  pick and choose those things of religion—any religion—that appeal to you, that suit you, and moosh them all together into your particular faith.  “I’m spiritual but not religious” is a common tag line of such boutique faith.  A little bit of Christianity, of Buddhism, of mystic Islam or Judaism, stripped of their authoritative claims or difficult doctrines, of their craziness, and you can arrive at a pleasant blend all your own, like some customized pipe tobacco or drug stash.

To those who might find boutique religion attractive, it is important to remember wise words from the Dalai Lama.  He says that if you take a little of this faith and mix it with a little of that one, you have neither the one nor the other and cannot be properly formed by either. You never will sink your roots deeply enough into a single tradition to truly grow and mature spiritually.  It is only when you sink your roots deep, with an open heart and mind, and acquire some spiritual maturity that you can “branch out” and truly enjoy the fruits of another tradition.  “If you are Christian it is better to develop spiritually within your religion and be a genuine, good Christian. If you are a Buddhist, be a genuine Buddhist.” (H.H. the Dalai Lama, The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus, p. 46).

Historically, the Church has read these verses and taught that Christ is the sole savior.  This usually entails claims that other faiths are deficient, and are only true or valid in the degree that they copy or agree with elements of Christian faith.  The most exclusionary form of this for the Roman Church has been the doctrine of extra ecclesiam nulla salus (“outside of the Church, there is no salvation”).   Protestants have their own form of the doctrine, based on Romans 10:9.  Paul’s “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” in this view becomes, “unless you declare this with your mouth and believe this in your heart, you will not be saved.   

But this exclusionary doctrine has undergone a great shift in the last 40 years, primarily due to the work of Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner, who developed the doctrine of the Anonymous Christian.   The idea is that a person can live in God’s grace and attain salvation through Jesus even outside explicitly constituted or stated Christianity.  If a person, say a Buddhist nun or a Muslim imam, tries to do the right thing, be right with whatever God they conceive of, and follow his or her conscience, that person might be considered an anonymous Christian and be saved through Jesus’ victory over death and sin.  They would not have to explicitly accept Jesus or Christianity, or might even, because of circumstances and constraints, have rejected these explicitly.  But God’s universal salvific will and the greatness of God’s grace would save them too. 

The idea of the Anonymous Christian was promulgated as official Roman Catholic doctrine in the documents of the Second Vatican Council. 

The idea is also found among Protestants. The final book of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, The Last Battle, has the character Emeth, a Calormene prince who had fought against Aslan and Narnia and served his own god, Tash.  He has done his best to live uprightly within the traditions he as raised in.  In the end, Aslan receives him as one of his own with these words, “I and [Tash] are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him.^”  

The doctrine is also found in our Prayer Book, where we pray, “Remember all who died in the peace of Christ, and those whose faith is known to you alone; bring them into the place of eternal joy and light” (p. 375).

Some have criticized this effort at Christian inclusivity saying that it is condescending.  “I’m Jewish, thank you very much, and do not want to become Christian, even anonymously” expresses the idea.  These critics say that a tradition is truly inclusive only when it recognizes that other traditions have truly separate paths and confesses that these too are valid, without need for any “anonymous” adoption into our tradition.  

There is, however, a prior issue here.  The verses that Christians use to endorse exclusivist claims, when examined carefully, don’t actually teach the doctrine of exclusive, brand-conscious religious truth.  They are concerned, rather, with something else.    Remember that Paul in Romans did not write, “if you don’t confess and believe, you won’t be saved.” 

Take also the verse at the end of today’s Acts reading: “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.”  That phrasing should strike you as odd if indeed what Peter had meant to say was “there is no other name by which we can be saved.”  The problem is starker in the Greek of the passage, which says “by which it is necessary for us to be saved.”  The context of the verse provides the clue necessary for us to see what it is actually trying to say:  Peter is answering the authorities’ question of how, or under whose authority (“by whose name”) he has performed a miracle.  In verse 9, Peter says he is explaining “how this man has been healed.”  The word healed translates the verb sosthenai, “to be saved,” the same verb he uses when he says “there is only one name given under heaven by which we must be saved.”    The logic of the argument in the passage requires that the verses in question mean something like this: It is through Jesus’ name that we healed this man.  Such healing does not come from just anywhere.  For Jesus is the only one God has ever raised from the dead.  Thus, if you use his name, you just have to be healed. You can’t say that about any other name that I know of.” 

Similarly, when Jesus in John says “I am the Good Shepherd, … and there will be one flock and one shepherd,” this is more an affirmation of the reliability of Jesus and an exuberant expression of how good this is, not how deficient others might be.  Though the text contrasts this model shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep with other “hireling” false shepherds, it chooses the Greek word for “one” that means “one among many” (heis) rather than the Greek word for “one and only one” (monos).   

We often lose the point of the image of the model shepherd:  shepherds, to be effective, need to establish a caring relationship with their sheep, being attentive to their various wanderings, bad choice of plants to eat, and the first signs of sickness.   It is the quality of the relationship with Jesus experienced by the believer that is at heart of the Good Shepherd image, and lies behind all the passages that might be construed as exclusionary. 

This is why we should not ignore these verses or believe they have nothing to teach us. 

We who have experienced the joy and sweetness of being shepherded by Jesus are bound by the quality of that experience of faith to share it with others.  But this is sharing, not sales promotion or brow beating, and must be based in the joy of our experience and our love for others, not some silly and misdirected fear that somehow they won’t be saved or blessed by God if they aren’t like us.   And this joyful sharing to which our experience and God calls us can only be cheapened if it is linked to a looking down our noses at the experience and faith of others as deficient or inadequate.   

Bishop and theologian Krister Stendahl once said that Christ calls us Christians to be the kind of people that others want to be around, not to constantly harp at others to become like us.  We must so show the joy of the good news that others will wonder at and want what we have, whether in their own tradition or by adopting ours.   

St. Francis said that we should preach the Gospel at all times and in all places, and only occasionally open our mouths to do so.   

That is why I told the deacon to go ahead and not use that half verse.  “I am the way, the life and the truth” was sufficient for our purposes at the funerals, and “no one comes to the Father except by me” raised far too many questions with little time to answer them. I happen to agree that it is almost inconceivable to experience God as Father in as an intensely personal way as Christians do apart from a faith in Christ as the Son of God.  But that does not mean that God is not at work in other faiths. 

May the love of the Good Shepherd, the power of this Jesus who calls us into relationship both with him and with those who differ from us, help us be the more respectful of others, and more intent listeners when their stories diverge from ours.

In the name of Christ, Amen.   

Beyond Winning and Losing (Proper 17A)

Beyond Winning and Losing

28 August 2011

Proper 17A

Beijing China

Exodus 3:1-15; Psalm 105:1-6, 23-26, 45c; Romans 12:9-13; Matthew 16:21-28

From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life? “For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.” (Matt 16:21-28)

God, breathe into us a desire to change—
take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

A few years ago, I had a conversation with a friend in Washington DC about baseball.  I had become a great lover of the Baltimore Orioles and going to Camden Yards for a lazy afternoon watching and cheering, and, well, what later was to come to be called “just chilling.”  My friend, though from the DC area, hated the O’s and was a loud supporter of their arch-rivals, the New York Yankees.  “How can you love the Yankees,” I said.  “Anticipating my next line, he replied, “The best team money can buy.  Okay, Okay.  But I like to go with the winner.  And the Yanks win more than anybody else.” 

Go with the winner.  It is a common strategy for  enhancing our power and making ourselves feel good.  When I was growing up, there was a song that summed it up pretty well, “I’m in with the in crowd.  I go where the in-crowd goes.  I’m in with the in-crowd, and I know what the in-crowd knows.”    If you want to get ahead in this world, go with the winner. 

Today’s Gospel reading from St. Matthew tells the story of what happens just after Peter first tells Jesus that he believes that he is the Messiah.   Matthew has interposed the “you are Peter and upon this rock” episode we discussed last week between the confession and today’s reading.  But in Mark’s Gospel, Matthew’s source here, immediately after the confession Jesus and Peter have a little set-to.  And it’s all about Peter wanting to be in with the in-crowd, wanting to go with the winner. 

You see, Peter has confessed Jesus as Messiah and Son of God based on what God has told him in his heart.  But he thinks that this means that Jesus is going to quickly fix this upside-down world, punish the bad guys, and make it a great thing to be one of God’s chosen, the ultimate in-crowd.  He thinks Jesus is a winner, and he is going with the winner. 

But Jesus says, “You got the part about who I am right.  But not what it means." Jesus says, “Messiah doesn’t mean conquering hero in the sense you think it does.  What it does mean is this: I am going to have to go to Jerusalem, and there the authorities will torture and kill me.  But I still trust in God and know that there will be a final vindication of our hopes.  But don’t expect a military victory from your Messiah.  It’s not in the cards.  God has something else in mind though I can’t tell you what it is. All I know is that God will come through. But not in the magic way you think he will.’”

Peter reacts strongly:  “Messiah means anointed by God, and that means conquering hero.  Look it up in the Bible.  It means you are going to blast those Romans and those bad Jewish Leaders collaborating with them and oppressing the poor.  Come on, Jesus!  You’ve healed the sick, and raised the dead.  You’ve done marvels never seen.  That means God is with you.  Buck up, don’t be so pessimistic.  Have some faith.  You are Messiah and you win prevail.  You have super-powers, Jesus! That’s why I’m with you.  I’m going with the winner.” 

Jesus’ reply is biting: “Get away from me, Satan.”

He knows that Peter’s pep-talk is not in accord with reality or with what God wants. He must go to Jerusalem to bear witness of the Kingdom of God to the authorities, and he knows what this means. The powers that be will not let it go unchallenged. It is in their nature that they respond brutally to any challenge to their power. Accepting God’s will means accepting that, and in persevering in following God’s call despite what it means for him. To think or feel otherwise is a defection from God’s intent, and to argue for such opposition to God’s will.  So he says Peter is tempting him, just like a devil. (“If you are the Son of God, turn these stones into bread! Turn these oppressors and pagans into stone!”) 

Both Mark and Matthew tell this story.  Luke has deleted it, probably out of respect for Peter and a desire to not advertise that Jesus called the main leader of his disciples a “devil.” 

The Gospel of John, apparently had similar concerns as Luke.  Though the focus on leadership in the Fourth Gospel is usually on “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” at the distinct disadvantage of Simon Peter, and there is no scene specifically about a confession of Peter at Caesarea Philippi per se, the story in John 6 is told this way (John 6:67-71):  when many people following Jesus because of his marvelous works hear his discourse claiming to be the bread from heaven that they must eat, they leave in a huff.  Jesus asks the twelve “Will you also leave me?”  Speaking for the Twelve, Simon Peter replies, “Where would we go?  We know you have the words of eternal life.”  Jesus then replies, “Ah yes.  It was indeed I that chose you all, wasn’t it?  All the same, one of you is a devil!”  John adds, “He was talking about Simon Iscariot” (that is, Judas).  Where Luke has deleted the story as a scandal against the first of the Twelve, John says that the stories going around among early Christians about Jesus calling Simon a devil just after he confesses Jesus were about Simon Judas not Simon Peter!

Anyway, in just a few verses in Matthew, Peter goes from being called the Rock of the Church to being called the Devil himself! 

How can this be? 

The fact that we find it incongruous and a little schizophrenic tells us about our own desire to “go with the winner.”  The question lying behind our discomfort at the contrast is this “Well, was Peter a winner or a loser?  Is he being praised here or condemned?  Is he good or is he bad?”   We are torn, like Peter who does not want his Messiah to be predicting his death by torture, between our expectation (Peter should be the Rock!) and the reality (Jesus calls him a devil!)

Then, as if to answer our unspoken questions, Jesus starts teaching his disciples this, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny themselves, take up their own cross, and follow me.”  The point is that we have to lose our desires, lose our preconceptions and expectations, lose ourselves if we are going to follow Jesus.

What Jesus means is something like “If you want to follow me, you must give up any claims you may think you have of owning yourself. You’ll have to stick your head in the hangman’s noose to follow me.”

Jesus is not praising suffering for suffering’s sake, and extolling the virtues of a stoic victim-hood, or worse, of a vicarious suffering for someone else’s wrongs. “This is my cross, and I’ll have to bear it” is the proverbial expression of the idea. Sometimes this wrong idea is actually used to encourage passivity and enabling behavior by the abused or the oppressed.

What Jesus is calling for is this: He wants those who wish to follow him to actually follow him: follow God’s call, work for God’s kingdom, announce the liberation of the captive, help the sick and the downtrodden—and do this even when we know that it may very well have a high personal price.

His declaration of his future as a suffering Messiah leads the way—just as he emptied himself and gave himself over to do God’s will, even if it spelled horror and disaster for him, so also must we. 

It was clear in Jesus' Palestine who the winners were:  the Roman Pagan occupiers and their Quisling darlings the Temple leadership and Jewish political leadership, the very ones who were oppressing “the poor” to whom Jesus was announcing the “Good news of the Kingdom.” 

Just as he had to give up his desire to “go with the winner,” and stick instead with the path God gave him to walk, so must we. 

Jesus forces us to transcend “winner” and “loser.”  To follow him, we have to stop worrying about results and who wins and who loses.  To follow him, we have only to focus on what God demands of us to do next. 

I get a little uncomfortable when people say, “have you accepted Jesus?” as if “accepting” Jesus made you a Christian.  Jesus doesn’t ask us to “accept” him, to make him part of our life and calculations. 

He demands that we let him take charge entirely.  And not worry about results. 


I also get uncomfortable when people preach the Gospel of Wealth, "if you do what God commands, God will bless you, and you will be heatlhy, wealthy, and happy."  This Polly-Anna take on the world seems too close to Peter's arguing for Jesus to man up and be a winner because God, the ultimate winner, will bless him and make his wishes come true.  It does not sound at all like the Way of the Cross Jesus says he is embarked on and which he calls us all to. 

The fact is, just as Martin Luther so well put it, the follower of Jesus is at the same time a winner and a loser, a righteous person and a sinner, Simul Justus et Peccator.  What really matters is our trust in God, our faith.  If we let it dictate our actions and our judgments, and we stop worrying about whether the results will be success or failure.  We are then on the risky path that Jesus trod. We are then in the life he calls us to. 

The difference between Jesus and Peter in this scene is this: Jesus is open to God and whatever God can throw at him, and trusts. Peter thinks he already knows what he can expect from God, and grasps at that expectation, to the point of getting upset when told that it just isn’t what God is going to do.  But God isn’t finished with Peter yet.  Peter will go on, Rock of the Church and Devil in the flesh, Simul Justus et Peccator, Simul Victor et Victus.   And on this Rock, God builds his Church: his congregation of losers who are winners, his gathering of misfit and messed-up saints, his poor who are rich, his last ones who are first.   They, like Jesus, just keep trying to follow God, come what may.  Like Peter, they do this even when they fail spectacularly.  They get up, pull up their socks,  and, keeping their eyes on Jesus, move ahead.   

Following Jesus means letting go, and letting God. It means doing the right thing even when counting the cost tells us it will be hard. It means stone cold clear assessment of what we face, and not putting on the rosy lenses of self-deception in order to work up a false sense of that all will be well when it won’t be. It means accepting that God’s plans may not be what we thought they were. But through this all, it means trusting God--beyond the limits of reason, beyond the limits of our experience, beyond the limits of our fear—because God’s basic nature is to love us unconditionally.

May we all learn to so trust in God.

In the name of Christ, Amen.

Upon the Rock, Against the Gates (Proper 16A)

Upon the Rock, Against the Gates

21 August 2011

Proper 16A

Beijing China

Exod. 1:8- 2:10; Psalm 124;  Rom. 12:1-8; Matt. 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.  Matt. 16:13-20

Today’s Gospel tells about Jesus giving Peter a new name and what are called “the keys of the kingdom.”  In popular imagination, that means Peter has become the doorkeeper of heaven:

Bill Gates dies.  When he gets to the Pearly Gates, there is a long line of people waiting to be interviewed by St. Peter before he’ll let them in.  He goes up to the front of the line and waits on the side close to St. Peter, who turns to him and asks him if there is anything he can do for him.  “I’m Bill Gates.  I was one of the richest men in the world and gave hundreds of millions of dollars for projects to help the disadvantaged and stop malaria.  Can’t you get me around this long, long line?”  St. Peter replies, “Oh no, no.  This is heaven’s door.  All are equal in the sight of God.  There are no favorites here, and certainly neither rich nor poor.  You must go and stand in the line and wait your turn like everybody else, Mr. Gates.”  After what seems an eternity, he is only half way up the line when from the rear comes a commotion, “Make way, make way for the Archbishop!”  At that a man in a cope and miter, attended by several fawning assistants, quickly goes to the head of the line, where St. Peter stops his current interview, talks to the Archbishop briefly, and then admits him without further ado.  Bill Gates asks the woman in front of him to hold his place in the line, and somewhat self-righteously goes back up to confront the Saint.  “Yes, Mr. Gates?” says Peter.  “I thought you said ‘there are no favorites here’ and ‘all are alike in the sight of God.’”  “Yes, that’s true, and your question is… ?”   “What about that guy in the funny hat with the gold shepherd’s crook?  He cut the line and you let him.  That’s not fair.”  St. Peter, with a look of sudden recognition on his face replies, shaking his head, “Oh no!  But he was an archbishop! It’s been a thousand years since we’ve had one of those get in up here!”

 

 
Despite the popular image of Peter as the heavenly doorkeeper, that image is not what today’s Gospel is about.  

The scene takes place in Gentile territory, near the city Caesarea Philippi,  or “Herod Philip’s City named for Augustus Caesar,” as opposed to Herod’s great capital, Caesarea Maritima, or “the City named for Caesar on the Coast.”  Philip’s Caesarea was in the foothills of Mount Hermon, a great peak in what we now call the Golan Heights.  It was originally called “Panea” or the City of Pan, and is now in Arabic called Banias.  

 A Greek Shepherd pursued by Pan, in a Red-figured Greek Vase.

It was a center of worship of the Greek god Pan, half man half goat.  Pan was a nature and fertility deity, usually represented in a state of sexual excitement and playing reed pipes.  The rituals associated with the cult involved drunken orgiastic rites on occasion using, well, ... goats.    The Temple of Pan was located at the mouth of a large cave from which then flowed a spring that was the headwaters of the River Jordan.  The cave’s mouth is in a large face of exposed bedrock, upon which the Temple of Pan was built.  The cave opening looks like a spooky gate in a city wall, leading to the underworld.  That’s probably exactly the reason that people placed Pan’s Temple there.  

 The Ruins of the Temple of Pan beside the cave mouth now called the "Gates of Hell," Banias, Golan Heights.  

The scene in the Gospel is striking—Jesus takes his closest followers, most of them in their twenties, with him on a day trip to a place that later Rabbis would rule as totally off-limits for followers of God, a place seen as “Sin City.” Maybe Galilean Jews like Jesus and his followers had a saying,  “What you do in Caesarea stays in Caesarea.”  

It is here that Jesus asks his followers, “Who do people say I am,” and “Who do you say I am?” 

It is Simon who replies, “You are the Messiah.  The Son of the Living God.” 

Jesus replies by telling Simon that his recognition of Jesus’ identity did not come from publicly available data, but rather from God speaking in his heart and mind.   

And then he turns the tables.  He tells Simon who he thinks he is.  He gives him a new name:  Rock.  In the Aramaic they would have been speaking, the word is Qepha’.  It is where the name Cephas, one of the Greek names for Peter in the New Testament, comes from.    When you translate Qepha’ into Greek rather than just transliterate it as Cephas, it becomes Petros, our familiar name Peter. 

The rock image used in the name is significant for two reasons.  In the Hebrew Scriptures, the Rock of Israel, the one reliable thing they can cling to when all else fails or fades, is God himself.  It is also the place where God puts you when he wants you safe, “the rock that is higher” than the turmoil you see about you.  It is also the stony, hard facts of life in the desert, from which God can make water spring. 

So he is reminding Simon of the source of his knowledge and of his strength. 

But “rock” also evokes the solid and reliable foundation of the house built by a wise man in the parable of Jesus, as opposed to the foolish man’s foundation of sand.  As an image it stands in polar opposition to the stony façade upon which the Temple of Pan, standing there in front of them. 

“You are Rock, and upon this Rock I will build my Church.”  The Greek here uses two different words, one masculine (petros “stone”) and one feminine (petra “massive outcropping of bedrock”).  But again, in the Aramaic Jesus would have been speaking, there is only one word—Qepha’. 

Now Roman Catholics have traditionally differed in their interpretation of this verse from Eastern Orthodox and Protestant Christians.  Rome has always insisted that it is the person of Peter, and the role he plays (the “Petrine Office”) in the Church that is the foundation stone Jesus refers to.  For them, it is the Roman Papacy.  They link it to Peter later becoming Bishop of Rome and say that it is the role of the Bishop of Rome as the leader of all the other Bishops, increasingly monarchic over the centuries, that is at issue.   Predictably, Protestants have always the “Rock” at issue is faith alone, apart from works—the confession of Jesus as Messiah and Son of God made by Peter in the story—that is the bedrock of the Church.   The Eastern Orthodox have generally said that the Rock is divine revelation, the act of God making Jesus’ identity known  (“flesh and blood have not revealed this to you, but my Father in Heaven”). 

The fact that Jesus here follows his play on words with an immediate statement of Church authority (“what you bind on earth, God will bind, what you loose, God will loose”) and ultimate success (“the gates of Hell shall not prevail against you”) has lead most modern scholars from all these traditions to agree that the story in Matthew is indeed about the leading role of Peter in the early Church rather than later papal presumptions, salvation through works alone, or Eastern Christian mysticism.  

Within three decades of Jesus’ death, Christians were divided between Jewish congregations who saw James the Brother of Jesus as the natural heir to Jesus as leader and wholly gentile congregations who saw Paul, the missionary who had converted them, in this role.  Matthew’s story here is, as it were, taking the “compromise candidate” for Church leader.  Rather than either of the favorites of the two major parties in the early church, Matthew’s source says it is Peter.  James came to believe in Jesus only after the resurrection, and the Jewish communities he led wanted to turn gentile converts into Jews of one kind or another; Paul became a Christian long after Jesus death, only after an infamous career of persecuting the followers of Jesus and then seemed to go to the polar opposite extreme by insisting that his Gentile converts not observe Jewish Law.  Peter, however, was the one who was personally close to Jesus during his lifetime,  was the leader of the inner circle of the Twelve that spent the most time with Jesus, and was a Jew who came to accept and even embrace the outreach of this originally strange sect of Judaism to non-Jews and non-observers of Jewish Law.

 “You are Rock, and upon this Rock I will build my Church.”  From all the other stories we read in the New Testament, this “Rock” was not all that solid to begin with.  “Rocky” might be a better way of describing his impetuousness, and extremes in devotion followed by extremes in failure.  In Mark’s version of this story, immediately after the confession of Peter, Jesus does not give him the keys to the kingdom, but rather criticizes him for not accepting his prediction of the coming passion and scolds him and says, “Get behind me, Satan!”  (Mark 8:27-30; 31-33).   Elsewhere, we read of Peter’s silly reaction to the marvelous epiphany on the Mount of Transfiguration.  We elsewhere see him walking on water through faith and then, faith faltering,  sinking into the waves.  We see him sleeping through Jesus' prayers at Gethsemane, and then denying Jesus three times during the Passion.  But finally, after Jesus has appeared to the women, Peter is the first male disciple (at that misogynistic time, the first legally acceptable witness) to see the Risen Lord.  One of the earliest fragments of early Christian tradition found in the New Testament is preserved in St. Paul’s formulaic recitation, “For I passed on to you what was first passed on to me, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised again on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared, first to Cephas and the Twelve, . . . then to James and the apostles” (1 Cor. 15: 3-7).

So the name “Rock” reminds Simon of who it is that is his rock.  It is this connection that gives authority and power to Simon’s (Peter’s, Rock’s) ministry. “I will give you the keys of the kingdom.”   The image of keys that open irrevocably or close definitively is take from a series of passages in the Hebrew Scriptures and Intertestamental literature.  The idea is that Peter’s actions will be definitive and reflect the will of God (cf. Isa 22:22, 23; Job 12:14; 1 Enoch 1-16).    

“What you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, what you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”  This is a passive construction and euphemism for “What you declare as binding, God will bind.  What you declare as loosened, God will loose.”   So in Matthew’s view, it is Peter’s ruling on the terms and conditions of gentile entry into the Church that take priority over Paul’s or James’, and this because Peter’s rock was God himself, as shown by his early confession of Jesus as Messiah and Son of God.  

The Church built on this Rock, says Jesus, will be able to defeat even the “Gates of Hell.”   The image is a common Old Testament image for death itself (Isa 38:10; Job 38:17;  Psa 9:14;  Wis 16:13).    

But set here in Caesarea Philippi, the reference could also be a image of the Church’s attack on and defeat of the evils of the world, as represented by the Temple of Pan build on the rocky outcrop sitting beside the mouth of the cave containing Pan’s Spring.  Gates were traditionally a symbol of defensive military action, not attack.  So here Peter’s rock-based witness and ministry and the Church founded upon that rock are seen as a vanguard in an effort to reclaim this enemy-occupied territory we call our world.    Based on the Rock of our Salvation, we simply cannot be defeated by the horrors of the world we see before us, including sick religion and death itself.    

All of us, in a way, are like Simon standing with Jesus in Caesarea Philippi.  What we see in front of us is not all there is.  What we see with our eyes and handle with our hands do not tell us who Jesus is, or who we ourselves truly are.  And Jesus is asking us, even today, “Who do people say I am? And who do you say I am?”  He is offering us new names and true identities, the authentic names and selves we were created for but which we have wandered far from.

Faith is trust in unseen truth, and looks beyond the visible, beyond the temptations and distractions around us, beyond the Temple of Pan, the Gates of Hell, and beyond the messed up lives we see about us and which we lead.  It looks even beyond suffering and Death.  If we rely on our Rock, and build upon the firm foundation of Jesus Himself, then our unstable, unsteady selves, our “rocky” selves, will be transformed.  And together, as community in Him as He is in community with the Father, we will be unstoppable in charging up the rocky slope, breaking down the gates of Hell and Death, and changing ourselves and the world.   

In the name of Christ, Amen.