The invitation to preach in such a literary hotbed as Stonington reminds me of a conversation I recently had with another retired priest friend of mine about the use of literature in sermons. “In our day,” he said, “a sermon had three points and a quote from T.S. Eliot. Today it’s two points and a quote from Mary Oliver.” I’m afraid he’s right, though I worry that by the time I sit helpless in the nursing home chapel it will be one point and a quote from Amanda Gorman.
You’re in luck this morning. I do not come armed with arcane literary ammo, though I suppose I could find a few dystopian quotes to buttress my observations about the state of things both in nature and the nation. I live in California, and the heat there this summer has been apocalyptic. And I’m not taking political sides when I say that the state of our nation and world is perilous. Ecologically and politically, we are a mess. And starting with an acknowledgment of that plain fact gives us a way in to understanding our Gospel for this morning.
The world in which Jesus lived, taught, and healed was one dominated by national and local oppression. Rome occupied Jewish Palestine, and they took so much money and food to support their standing army that the people were always broke and hungry. One of the main aims of Jesus’s ministry was to show how we survive in a time of scarcity. Our normal human tendency is to hoard what we have. In feeding the multitudes, Jesus shows that we thrive in bleak times by making common cause with each other.
Things were bad for Palestinian Jews in Jesus’s time, and those perceived as troublemakers lived in constant jeopardy. That is perhaps why Jesus takes his companions today to the far north of Israel, Caesarea Philippi—about as far away as you could get from Jerusalem—to query them about the word on the street about him. [Matthew 16:13-20]. “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” Note the guarded nature of this question. He’s asking about himself in the third person, just in case someone might be eavesdropping.
And note the answers his disciples give him. They don’t say, “Jesus the healer” or “Jesus the teacher”. They reply, “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets”. Biblical prophets were considered dangerous people, and the disciples’ oblique answer to Jesus’s circuitous question adds up to an admission that, yes, people think you’re a troublemaker. One of my lifelong mentors, an Old Testament scholar, used to say that the role of the prophet in Israel was not to predict the future nor to call out injustice but simply to tell the truth about the ways things are. In his words, “The prophet sees reality and verbalizes it.”
Like Isaiah and Jeremiah before him, Jesus describes the world as it is and tells the truth about it—always a dangerous business in combustible times.
When Jesus turns from the word on the street to the word in the group, Peter blurts out, “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God.” In their centuries living under various forms of exile and oppression, the Jews had developed the expectation that a Messiah, an anointed king like David, would come to lead them out of their current mess into a time of stability and peace. This was both a religious and a political hope. Peter and his friends had come to believe that there was more to Jesus than his miracles and parables. They hoped he would be the king who would finally throw the Romans out.
It is easy to see why first century Palestinian Jews, living under Roman rule, would long for a miraculous figure to overthrow the bad guys and bring things back to the glory days. It is easy to see why some of us, 21st century Americans, would hope for a magical benign leader to take us out of political darkness and environmental catastrophe. But, two thousand years on, we have to admit that a Messianic hope is pretty much still just that—only a hope. No Davidic king has come back to restore Israel, and if Jesus was the Messiah, then he exercised his kingly authority in radically unexpected ways. If anything, Jesus was an anti-king, dying between two thieves in the Roman manner usually reserved for revolutionaries. The earliest Christians believed that Caesar did not exercise true authority. Jesus did. And his authority was based on something other than brute power.
So far in this passage, we have learned that Jesus is a truth-teller and the opposite of a king. Now we come to what is for me the most interesting thing that Jesus says to Peter:
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.
By giving Simon the new name “Peter”, which means “rock” in almost every language but English, Jesus is making a pun. “You are ‘Rocky’, and I’m building my church on you.” And then he says the curious stuff about the keys of the kingdom and binding things on earth and in heaven.
It is easy to glimpse the hand of a later editor in language that buttresses the power of the church with talk of keys, rocks, binding, and loosing. It is entirely likely that well-meaning scribes put institutional commercials into Jesus’s mouth, especially about Peter and his papal successors having a lock on the kingdom of God. But it’s the line about binding and loosing that seems most authentic to me. “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”
The institutional church (which I represent) has long taken this binding/loosing language to refer to the absolution of sins. But note that the Gospel text does not actually refer to sins as such. In fact, the two Greek words Matthew uses here
Δέω and λύω mean, respectively, “imprisoned” and “set free”. This moment of Messianic transfer is about much more than institutional prerogatives. It is about the true gift of liberation we know in Jesus. In this act of bestowing, Jesus sets us free from whatever it is that binds us: our guilt, our remorse, our pain, sometimes simply ourselves. We all walk around carrying so much weight from the past. Jesus now sets us free from everything that ties us up in emotional knots.
And not only us. Jesus’s gift to Peter and the community he creates is the power of liberation for everyone. You and I, as Jesus’s companions and the members of the body of Christ in the world, now have the power to bind and loose, to defeat all the forces that seek to imprison human beings and the creation. In today’s Romans reading, Paul calls us the body of Christ. He means that literally, not figuratively. You and I, together, are Jesus in the here and now. We have the authority to set free ourselves and all who suffer under various kinds of oppression, degradation, and confinement. In this moment Jesus makes us all agents of personal and social liberation.
Who did they say Jesus was? He was a prophet, one who told the truth about the way things are. He was also one who gathered around him a group who would continue his work long after his death and resurrection. You and I are members of that group, and we have been given the authority to liberate each other and the world from all the hateful, tyrannous forces that imprison us. And if Jesus is the Messiah, a kind of anti-king who knows human suffering in its very depths, then you and I are the ones who, know that suffering ourselves, have been empowered to heal people and set them free.
As much as we all hope for a mythical magic superhero like Odysseus or Spiderman to come from the clouds to save us, the good news this morning is this: you and I have been given each other and the authority to set ourselves free. Our job, as Jesus’s present-day companions, is to take this authority and use it to love each other, ourselves, and those who suffer because of the cruelty and sin that will continue to persist in our world. You and I, together, as the body of Christ in the world, are the Messiah we hope for. We have been given the keys to fling open the prison doors. Let us use them to set ourselves, each other, and the world free from the forces that will always finally fail in their futile attempts to bind us and those we love. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment