Sermon 8/24/2014
Matthew 16:13-20
Messiah
Who do you say Jesus is? Today, we’re continuing on in
the gospel of Matthew. Since last week’s text, when Jesus met with the
Canaanite woman in the Gentile region of Tyre and Sidon, Jesus healed more
people, fed a crowd of 4000, plus women and children, again, with a small amount
of food, and spent some time debating with Pharisees and Sadducees, who demand “signs”
from heaven. Jesus says to them, in essence, “you’re smart enough to know that
when the sky turns a certain color, it’s about to storm. How come you can’t
read the signs of the times?” In other words, he’s already showing them all they
need to know. Jesus also gets frustrated with the disciples when they still don’t
seem to understand what’s he’s been doing either. They don’t seem to be able to
connect what they’ve been witnessing with who Jesus is, with the significance of
their experiences.
Our text opens today with Jesus and the disciples
arriving in the district of Caesarea Philippi. When he gets there, he asks
them, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” “Son of Man” is title Jesus uses
for himself in the gospels, and it sort of means “the person of persons.” Who
are people saying I am, Jesus wonders? The disciples answer that some say he’s
Elijah or John the Baptist, others says Jeremiah, or another of the prophets.
Now, this doesn’t mean that they thought he was one of these people come back
from the dead. Rather, the names they mention represent more what kind of role
Jesus has come to play, to fulfill. Is he like a second Elijah, critiquing the
religious leaders of the day? Like a Jeremiah, speaking of suffering to come?
Like his cousin John? Some other prophet?
Then Jesus is more specific, more direct: And you, who do
you say that I am? Simon Peter
answers “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus responds by
blessing Peter, and making a play on words with Peter’s name, which means
literally, “rock,” naming Peter as a rock on which the future followers of
Jesus will eventually be built. He speaks of the authority that Peter and the
disciples will have. But, he tells them not to tell anyone that he’s the
Messiah. Not yet, at least.
Sometimes I think the passages of the scripture that are
the trickiest for us to really understand are the ones that seem the easiest up
front. I think we can read this passage and ask ourselves, well, Apple Valley,
who do we say that Jesus is? And we might respond, “The Messiah, duh!” And then
we’ll pat ourselves on the back for our excellent answer, and move on to the
next passage. Only… What does that even mean?
What does it mean to call Jesus Messiah? To say he’s the Christ? What do those
labels mean? It doesn’t do us much
good to call Jesus Messiah or to call him Christ, just because we know it’s the
right answer, if we don’t know what we’re actually saying when we say it.
Before we figure out what we mean when we say it, maybe
we can figure out what Peter meant. The word messiah appears throughout the scriptures. It means “anointed one.”
In the Old Testament, anointed ones were
those who were named as Kings of Israel or Judah. To be an anointed one, a
messiah, meant to be the ruler of Israel, chosen, essentially, by God. You
might be most familiar with the story of David’s anointing by the prophet
Samuel. Samuel had previously anointed Saul as the first king of Israel. But
Saul was no longer following God’s ways, so God told Samuel to anoint David,
the youngest son of Jesse, a sheepherder. David turns out to be a great
military leader though, and eventually, he is able to replace Saul as king.
Kings were anointed-ones. Messiahs, with a small
m.
In the gospels, as we’ll hear about again from time to
time, we see that many of the crowds do
indeed think Jesus is a messiah like this – a potential king, like King
David was, who will be a great ruler of the Jews, who will conquer the
occupying Romans, who will be a political and military great king. In fact,
they want Jesus to be this kind of Messiah so much that they try to force him
to become king, and more than once, he has to slip away from the eager crowds
to avoid this. Eventually, when Jesus is about to be condemned to death, and he
still refuses to take up a sword and fight back, some who wanted this kind of Messiah
get pretty angry and turn on Jesus. What kind of Messiah lets himself get
crucified?
But Jesus has made it clear again and again that he’s not
here to be this kind of leader. We’ve talked about the kingdom of God – the reign
of God on earth that defies expectations and turns upside down the usual
notions about power, and being first and best and strongest. Well, Jesus is the
anointed one, the messiah, the King of this upside down realm of God: servant
of all, humbling himself, putting himself last, washing feet, eating with
sinners and the unclean and the people on the fringes, turning the other cheek,
submitting to execution as a criminal. Jesus demonstrates real power through pouring his life out as an offering for others,
and then, then, inviting us to do the
same, as his followers. When Peter says, “you are the Messiah, the son of the
living God,” Peter is agreeing to no less than this – that the true Messiah
comes not to conquer and vanquish and beat others into submission, even the hated Romans. Jesus, the
Messiah, the anointed one, comes to serve, to heal, to love, and to give his
life for others. When Peter says Jesus is the Messiah, he’s not just saying
Jesus is in charge. He’s embracing the whole kit and caboodle, the whole
message. No wonder Jesus reacts with such words of affirmation for Peter. With
passage after passage of the disciples missing the point, like we do, they
finally seem to get it!
Do we? I think we don’t have any trouble claiming Jesus
as our Messiah. But I wonder exactly what we mean by it. What do we mean when we say Jesus is Christ? Rev.
David Lose, a pastor whose sermons and notes I particularly like, suggests that
we have to ask ourselves not just what words
we say about Jesus as Messiah, but we must also ask ourselves what our lives say about Jesus being messiah. “Who
do you say he is?,” Lose asks, “Not just say when repeating the Creed, but say
with your lives; that is, with your relationships, your bank account, your
time, your energy, and all the rest. Who do you really say Jesus is?”
His question made me think of the book In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? by
Charles Monroe Sheldon, written in the late 1800s. You might be familiar with
this work because it became very popular for a second time around when, in the
1990s, Sheldon’s great-grandson published a contemporary retelling of the book
and “What Would Jesus Do?” became a popular phrase for bracelets and t-shirts.
I read the original work when I was in high school, and it’s pretty powerful.
In it, a pastor encounters a destitute man who he more or less brushes off. The
man disrupts the Sunday worship service, calling the pastor and congregation out
on their hypocrisy. He dies a few days later, and the pastor is deeply shaken.
He vows, and urges his congregation, to try, as seriously as possible, to only
do what they believe Jesus would do in any given situation for the year ahead.
The story follows the transformation that occurs in peoples’ lives when they
commit themselves fully to doing what they believe Jesus would do.
I think this is what David Lose is wondering, challenging
us to wonder about. We say we believe Jesus is Messiah. What do we mean by that, and how, then, do our very
lives show that we believe Jesus is Messiah? It isn’t as easy as we might think,
when it comes down to it, to put into words what we mean by this title for
Jesus, but here’s what I think, with the benefit of crafting my sermon ahead of
time: When I say Jesus is Messiah, I mean that he is the embodiment of God’s
hope in the world, the embodiment of God’s love and grace and vision for the
world. When I say Jesus is Messiah, I mean that I choose to offer my life to serve
him, rather than money, or ambition, or status, or being well-liked, or being
comfortable, or any number of other things I’m tempted to spend more time
thinking about than about Jesus. When I say Jesus is Messiah, I mean that he’s
the living in-the-flesh version of God’s reign that flips everything upside
down into God’s right-side up, which is always on the side of the least, and
most vulnerable, and on the fringes. That’s just a glimpse, an imperfect
attempt at what it means for me to say Jesus is Messiah. But I think in that
faulty attempt I still have plenty to work on. Does my life say all these things too? I’m working on
that.
Lose says that Jesus wants to know who we say he is not
so that we can pass some test and get the answer “right,” but so that we can
experience the transforming power of being rooted in the love and possibility
that Jesus offers us. Imagine, if we lived in such a way that every part of our
life, every bit of the way we lived, was a demonstration of what we believed. Isn’t
that how it’s supposed to be? Who do you say Jesus is? The Messiah? What does a
life based on that claim look like? What do our
lives, centered on that claim, look like? Let’s find out.
Amen.
(David Lose’s comments can be found here: http://www.davidlose.net/2014/08/pentecost-11-a-who-do-you-say-i-am/)
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