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DonateAugust 25, 2002
Commentary by Paul Nancarrow |
See also: [2008] [2005] |
Isaiah 51:1-6
Romans 12:1-8
Matthew 16:13-20
While the readings appointed for this week have many points of connection, they are also rich with their own meanings and internal structures. I will comment on each one separately (omitting the psalm), pointing out where some of the connections with the other readings may be made.
The main reason for the inclusion of this passage in today’s lectionary seems to be its verbal connection to the gospel: Isaiah exhorts the people to look to the rock from which they were hewn, and Matthew shows Jesus calling Simon Peter the rock on whom the church will be built. Wordplays such as this, while they may often look fortuitous or superficial to the modern, logical mind, carry great significances in biblical texts and the thought-patterns that undergird them; to the postmodern, imaginative, relationally oriented mind, wordplays can suggest poetic ranges of meaning that are equally significant. What do Abraham and Sarah the rock and Peter the rock have in common? If rock is used here as a symbol for faith, how does that connect with the Psalmist’s cry to God to be a “strong rock, a castle to keep me safe” (Psalm 31)? How are God’s faithfulness and human faith related? And how are we called to such faith—how are we “chips off the old rock”—in the ways we live into God’s promises, the ways we re-enact in our becomings the ideals and values exemplified in Abraham and Sarah and Peter? There is much material for meditation and preaching in the seemingly simple image of this rock.
To take a closer look at the original context and import of this passage: the prophet is here using what we might call a “past is prologue” rhetorical trope. The prophet assures the Exiles in Babylon that, because God was faithful in leading Abraham and Sarah to the fulfillment of the first covenant promise, so God can be trusted to lead the people through the Return and Rebuilding of Jerusalem in restoration of the covenant promise. Abraham “was but one” when God called him, but God made him many; so also God will make the ruins of Jerusalem a garden and a place of joy and gladness and song.
Then the prophet carries the promise even farther: Zion will not be rebuilt just for itself alone, but as the center from which God’s teaching and God’s law will go out to be “a light to the peoples.” This also is in fulfillment of the promise to Abraham and Sarah: part of the original threefold promise was that they would be blessed so that through them “all the families of the earth will bless themselves”; and now, says the prophet, through the soon-to-be-restored Jerusalem, “God’s arm will rule the peoples” and “the coastlands wait for God.” All the peoples of the earth are to be included in the covenant restoration built on the rock of the Abrahamic promise.
Finally,
the prophet introduces something of an apocalyptic note. “The heavens
will vanish like smoke, the earth will wear out like a garment,” the
prophet foresees, and there will be great death in the dissolving world;
but the salvation and deliverance that come from God will endure through
the destruction and will not pass away. The main point here does not seem
to be the more fully developed and intricately allegorical significance of
later apocalyptic, but the simpler and more direct point that the aims and
purposes of God endure through the changefulness and instability of the
temporal world. From a process-relational point of view, I am reminded of
Whitehead’s statement that God “uses what in the temporal world is
mere wreckage” in order to achieve value and the greatest possible good.
We can ask, “How do we experience the steadiness of God’s aims in the
changefulness of our own world of experiences?”
Romans 12:1-8
We can make two major points about this passage in today’s context.
First, Chapter 12 marks a “turn” in Paul’s argument in Romans, a transition from his summary of salvation history to his paranetic teaching on Christian behavior. The “therefore” in the first verse refers to the entire rehearsal of salvation history that has preceded this chapter: because God has done all this to bring about salvation, therefore Paul’s readers in Rome should present themselves as “living sacrifices” to God in “spiritual worship,” not “conformed” to the self-serving patterns of “this world” but “transformed” by accepting God’s aims and exemplifying in their own behaviors the values derived from God’s work of salvation. We can see here a similar “past is prologue” pattern as in the Isaiah passage: because of God’s faithfulness in the past, the people can put their trust in God and act to realize God’s aims and values in the present.
The
second major point is Paul’s use of the body metaphor to describe the
working of the Christian community. The metaphor of the many members, each
with its own proper function, making one body is of course one of the most
familiar metaphors in the whole Pauline corpus; in this passage, it
is particularly striking how the body metaphor is linked to the
presentation of the body as a living sacrifice in spiritual worship, and
the renewing of the mind to discern the will of God. We today typically
think of personal renewal and worship as individual things, carried out in
the closed privacy of the inner world. But to Paul, such personal
transformation can only take shape in a communal context, where the
particularities of each individual believer are contrasted and
complemented by the particularities of other believers, so that the whole
is greater than the sum of its parts. Because each member of the community
exemplifies those ideals of God that are “according to the grace
given” them, the community as a whole reveals more of God than
any single member can reveal, and enacts more of God’s will than any
single member can enact. It is therefore in the relational reality of the
community, as that community lives in the larger stream of salvation
history, that personal transformation and Christian behavior become
possible.
Matthew 16:13-20
We have already seen some of the symbolic resonances in this gospel’s identification of Simon Peter as the rock whose faith illustrates the foundation of the church. In this familiar story of “the confession of Peter,” Jesus asks two questions that are crucial to the faith development of any follower of Jesus: “Who do the people say that I am?” and “Who do you say that I am?” Belief in Jesus must be built both on the witness of others and on one’s own experience, both on the inheritance of the past and the immediacy of the present. The other disciples answer Jesus’ questions primarily in terms of the past, comparing Jesus to John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah; Peter integrates the tradition of the past with what he himself has witnessed of Jesus, and comes up with a newer and truer answer: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.
In the story, Jesus recognizes Peter’s answer as something more than just a logical conclusion arrived at through rational analysis of the evidence: it is a “revelation” that has come, not through “flesh and blood,” but from “my Father in heaven”—or, as we might say in process terms, it is a divinely inspired proposition, a coming-together in Peter of different orders of experiences in a pattern-of-togetherness given as a special aim from God. Peter’s willingness to see past what is immediately obvious—or indeed what is immediately non-obvious—and embrace the divine proposition, the divine possibility that there is more going on in the given situation than the analytical mind can grasp, is the act of faith that establishes the foundation for the church. Every believer must be willing to do as Peter has done—to balance the witness of others with one’s own experience—in order to be the rocks, the “living stones” as they are called in 1 Peter, built into the spiritual fabric of the community of faith.
And, as we saw in the passage from Romans, believing in God’s saving proposition also entails behaving in ways consistent with God’s proposition. As soon as Jesus identifies Peter’s faith as the foundation-rock of the church, he says to the disciples (in the Greek second-person plural), “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.” The authority represented in the symbol of the “keys of the kingdom” lies in the authenticity with which the disciples reproduce in their own behaviors the ideals revealed in Jesus and accepted by Peter in his act of faith. The disciples will “bind” and “loose”—they will make decisions to act based on values derived from what Jesus has shown them about the character of God—and these decisions will be reflected in “heaven,” they will be taken up and integrated into God’s ongoing providence for the world. The faith that founds the church, then, is not merely the intellectual entertaining of certain factual assertions about God or Jesus, but is a continuing dialogue with God, an acceptance of God’s propositions of new ways to hold together divine ideals and human facts, with a willingness to act to embody those propositions and to give the fruits of those actions up to God. This is the faith that saves, the faith through which God’s saving values are instantiated in real human experiences.
For
the preacher, then, the leading questions might be, “Where in my or my
community’s experience are we called to Peter’s kind of faith? What more
in our life and work is offered to us in God’s proposition for bringing
together human facts and divine values? Where can we be the rock on
which God can build the community of love?”
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