Two-Minute Homily: Who Do You Think You Are?             

FINDINGS II

Proper 16 - A - August 21, 2011

Matthew 16:13-20                 

Harry T. Cook

Matthew 16: 13-20

At the time Jesus arrived in the region of Caesarea Philippi, he began questioning the disciples, asking them, "What do people say about the One Like Us?" Some of them said, "[he is] John the Baptizer." Others of them said, "Elijah" and yet others "Jeremiah or one of the other prophets." Jesus asked them [directly], "How about you? Who do you think I am?" Simon Peter was quick to reply, "You are the anointed one, the son of the living God. "To which Jesus responded: "Good show, Simon son of Jonah, because humans did not reveal this to you; my father in heaven did. So I say to you that you are Peter, the rock, and on this very rock I will build my assembly, and the gates of Hades will be unable to overcome it. I shall put in your hands the keys to the heaven's government, and whatever you make fast [in] the earthly sphere will be treated as made fast in the heavenly sphere, and whatever is unbound on earth and shall be considered freed in heaven." With that [Jesus] ordered his followers to tell no one that [they said] he was the anointed one.

(Translated and paraphrased by Harry T. Cook.)

RUBRIC

In arranging the lectionary, an error was made in cutting off the gospel for this proper at 16:20, because the confession, so-called, of Peter cannot logically be separated from the passion prediction (also so-called) that follows directly and is directly related to it in all three synoptic gospels. The relatedness and proximity have clearly to do with the post-70 C.E. kerygma of emerging Jesus Judaism to the effect that Jesus was the anointed one whose death and resurrection had elevated him to the status of divinity in clear competition with the Caesars. That may have been Mark's and Matthew's point in placing the declaration of Peter "in the region of Caesarea Philippi" -- though since Luke does not mention the location perhaps the matter is peripheral. The last mentioned location in Lukan narrative is "the country (or area) of the Gadarenes, which is opposite Galilee" (8:26), about six miles southeast of the Sea of Galilee. Withal, the issue of Jesus v. Caesar is depicted in all four gospels as coming to a head in Jerusalem of Judea, which was governed by Roman procurators of which Pontius Pilate was one.

HOMILETIC WORKSHOP

The question that started everything in this narrative is the central question of the entire enterprise: Who was Jesus? Or, more to the point perhaps, who did the minds of those mid-to-late first century communities that had formed around Jesus' ethical wisdom think he was? Elijah redivivus was part of the messianic drama. The Baptizer had quite a following in his time. But clearly the Jesus as depicted in the gospels was not he. It boiled down to what any individual follower or community of like-minded followers thought Jesus had been.

The radical egalitarian ethic of the sayings being attributed to Jesus would certainly have made those who knew about the prophets of old see those sayings as thematically related to the prophets. The Baptizer is depicted as having been on the scene contemporary with the Jesus of the gospels, albeit with a contrasting message. The Baptizer was finished with the world; Jesus embraced it by perceiving that humanity had within it what it took to save the world ("The rule of God is in your midst" -- Luke 17:21).

The final articulation of the question had to be who and what the communities centered in one way or another around the figure of the Galilean sage thought they were, could be and do. Did their telling and re-telling of the crucifixion story mean that they thought it would happen, if not to them individually, to the communities as social entities if they practiced the ethic depicted as being set forth by Jesus, e.g. passive resistance? A look ahead a couple of millennia to Gandhi's witness will show what can happen.

What of the "anointed one" answer Peter gave to the question, Who do you think I am? At some point in its theological evolution, the church did echo that answer that was as long in the making as the material that Mark wove into the first gospel. It is a different Christology than the fourth gospel articulates in its preface. But it amounts to the same proposition, viz. that Jesus was proclaimed in various ways as wholly related to the imagined deity of the Yahwist tradition and, by the evangelist John, to the creative wisdom and force (λόγος) of the universe.

Matthew alone includes the "keys of the kingdom" passage in which Peter is named the foundation upon which εκκλησία (convention, assembly, community) will be founded. Everything in the narrative from the "keys" to the "binding and releasing" is thought by many who work or have worked with these texts (Oscar Cullman, being one) to have been appended to what comes before, that the pericope originally ended with Peter's confession.

The addition of those verses does expand Peter's role in the tradition making him, in the end, a primus inter pares, and worse. Christianity has paid a dear price for that amendment as one of its historic branches has used it to assert itself as the one, true and only valid church. The question to ask its hierarchy is, "Who do you think you are?"

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Two-Minute Homily

Who Do You Think You Are?                     

By Harry T. Cook

That is not an ontological question. As Tennyson's Ulysses said, That which we are, we are. We are human beings, again to quote Tennyson, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

A common translation of Exodus 3:14 is I am what (or that) I am. But the later wisdom of Matthew 7: 16 (with parallel at Luke 6:44), You will know them by their fruits, pretty clearly implies that we are what we do. In Genesis, Yahweh or Elohim are known by what they have done. G. Ernest Wright's God Who Acts[1] makes that point.

Thus the religious question is not "who" Jesus or any other hero of antiquity is or was, much less who or what an unseen, unknown and therefore imagined deity might be. The question is: What do the acts of individuals and community reveal about them, i.e., say who they are?

Theology, as such, turns out to be a rank abstraction, what with all its creeds and arid propositions all based on pure surmise and, often enough, eisegesis and systemization of random texts forced square-peg-in-round-hole style into belief systems that do not put one plate of food on the table of a hungry person, neither one garment upon the back of an ill-clothed child.

The inquiry the passage at hand might best pose is who, reading and considering it, thinks he, she or they are, i.e. what they are prompted to do in response to the proposition that Jesus through the ethical wisdom teaching attributed to him was an author of moral good in a world that at base is amoral, and in its societies immoral, as Reinhold Niebuhr suggested.[2] That in turn would prompt the question of what that wisdom was. To the Jesus of the gospels was attributed such teaching as the passive resistance of turning the other cheek and walking a voluntary second mile after the mandated first, of loving enemy as well as neighbor, of forgiving as many times as necessary to make peace and of treating others in the way one wished to be treated.

It is said that Jesus committed the keys of the heavenly realm to Peter on the basis of the latter's stated belief, viz. that Jesus was the one anointed as the offspring of God -- or, as we might say in the 21st century, as being possessed of quintessential human potential. That potential was expressed in his ethical wisdom teaching -- a teaching that had far less to do with "being" than with "doing."

Who does any self-avowed Christian think he/she is? The answer to that question is found in what he/she does for good or not for good, for the benefit of fellow human beings and the earth in which humanity lives and moves and has its being. Doing defines being. A religion must be judged on the basis of its adherents' behavior.