13th Sunday after Trinity
Matthew 16 v 21-end
Guess Who Am I
I wonder if you ever played the Guess Who Am I game – as a young person or with your children or maybe even grandchildren. Two contestants sit opposite with 50 tiles containing a variety of people’s faces on them hidden from the other. Each person chooses one face and the race is on to identify their opponent’s choice by ruling out the rest of the tiles. They do this by asking whether or not they have a particular feature or characteristic – such as do they wear spectacles. Eventually the questions eliminate all but one and the identity is revealed.
The friends of Jesus have just been engaged in a more serious version of this game. Jesus has asked them who they think he is. They go down the elimination track by removing famous characters like the prophets Jeremiah and Elijah. Peter then gets very close by announcing that Jesus is the Messiah. But then he gets stuck.
To compete the identity puzzle Jesus has to provide the final clue to his identity. The missing feature is that Jesus is to undergo great suffering, be killed and on the third day be raised.
For Peter that characteristic is just not in his bank of questions. Peter cannot comprehend something so terrible happening to his lord and master. He tells Jesus this cannot be and God would forbid it. However Jesus is adamant that this is integral to his calling and severely rebukes his friend.
You feel sorry for Peter. One minute praised by Jesus and given a new name and a great responsibility for the future church. The next he has it all wrong and is accused of being like Satan.
From Jesus’ perspective, I wonder if Peter’s refusal to accept the prospect of Jesus’ future suffering reminded him of his time in the desert when Jesus was tempted by the thought of a life and ministry without suffering. Was Jesus recalling the tempter offering another way and promising among other things, that ‘you will not dash your foot against a stone’. Given the attraction of going down this other way it is perhaps no wonder that Peter’s reaction provokes in return from Jesus such a harsh rebuke.
Jesus knows his suffering and his journey towards the cross is an inevitable aspect of his living out fully his human life. It is an essential characteristic for Peter working out the full identity of Jesus in the Guess Who I Am mystery.
We can sympathise with Peter in his lack of understanding about the place of suffering in the journey of faith. Hoping for a powerful political Messiah come to overthrow the oppressive Romans instead he hears talk of taking up his cross and losing his life. And often our image too of what we want God to be like is limited and not fully embracing the crucified God of Jesus on the cross.
2000 years later we too are having to learn that Christ is not where we expect him to be. The medieval writer, Meister Eckhart, wrote that faith was a lifetime of letting go of what you think about God in order to encounter what and who he really is.
So perhaps we are like Peter and sometimes caught on the horns of the same dilemma, acknowledging Jesus as Lord but not fully grasping the significance of that for our lives and for the Church.
Through his words Jesus makes crystal clear the implications of following Christ and lays bare the cost of discipleship. As church communities and individuals seeking to understand who Jesus is for us, we need to remember we have not been promised prosperity or success, power or position. Rather we are called to witness faithfully to a saviour whose obedience took him even to death on a cross. We are to offer ourselves in humble service of others confident that, though we may lose everything, in Christ we are made whole.
One person who lived out this Christian way was the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He wrote a book entitled the Cost of Discipleship and later was martyred for his opposition to the Nazi regime. Bonhoeffer left the comfort of academic teaching in America to minister with the Confessing Church in Germany who were opposed to the regime there. He was found guilty of participating in a plot to assassinate Hitler and was executed in 1945. An example of taking up one’s cross and losing one’s life for Christ’s sake.
However this is not to mean that we are all called to live out our calling in such a dramatic way. There are the little denials in our daily lives – such as the giving of our time to volunteer at the Foodbank or a Homeless shelter. Many of those who participate in such activities will say they get so much more out serving in this way than what they feel they put in.
And then there are the small deaths in our lives when we sacrifice our goods or our cash to support a charity and gain the sense of well being from being able to help others. I wonder if that has been your experience too. If so then you will recognise the lines from the hymn, Make Me A Channel Of Your Peace, which say ‘It is in giving that we receive and in dying that we are born to eternal life.’
Peter with his blurted out misunderstandings might at first have struggled to grasp the full identity of Jesus But it allowed Jesus the opportunity to show him the truth which Peter himself later witnessed through Jesus literally taking on his cross and dying on Golgotha . And then encountering the risen Jesus full of forgiving love at their post Easter seashore breakfast.
As we engage with Jesus in the Guess Who I Am mystery challenge we find we are invited to reflect on the question‘ Then who am I?’ And in so doing we discover what it might mean for us to take up our cross and follow him.
Image: Iain Macrae, Unsplash.com
