Today’s gospel reminds us to listen to the whole biblical narrative with an ear for who gets named, or re-named, and who is left nameless in the background.
Matthew’s gospel gives us lots of opportunities for this kind of listening, beginning with the genealogy of Jesus, which includes, by name, three Canaanite women — women who we learned last week would have been outside the Jewish community. (Matt.1-17) But it’s not only in Matthew; throughout Scripture we hear people renamed by God: Abram is re-named Abraham (Genesis 17:5); Jacob is re-named Israel (Gen. 35:10); and Saul is renamed Paul (Acts 13:9)
And in today’s gospel, after the disciple Simon makes his confession of faith, Jesus renames him Peter, which comes from the Greek petra or rock.
This is the same disciple who a few weeks back nearly sank in the stormy sea and was called out by Jesus for having little faith.
The same Peter who, we know, will not want to hear Jesus tell of his death and resurrection. (Matt. 16:22)
The same Peter who, we know, will want to stay on the mountaintop at the Transfiguration when Jesus is illuminated, and God speaks from the heavens. (Matt. 17)
The same Peter who, we know, will deny Jesus three times at his arrest. (Matt. 26)
This often-reckless, selfish, and imperfect disciple is the one whom Jesus calls “the rock” and says, “I will build my church upon you.” (v. 18)
I found myself wondering what Jesus meant. Scholars debate whether Jesus spoke of Peter himself, the foundational confession that Peter makes here, or something else entirely.[i]
During our lectionary study earlier this week, one of my colleagues called Peter “Peter the blockhead.” Maybe you remember that “blockhead” was a favorite insult by the Peanuts gang in the comic by Charles M. Shulz. Lucy calls Charlie Brown a blockhead and his teammates pile on him, blaming him for losing the baseball game. His little sister Sally calls Linus a blockhead for ruining her Halloween. Calling someone a blockhead was another way of saying, “You got it all wrong.”[ii]
The image of “Peter the blockhead” being the rock upon which the Church is built has stuck with me, precisely because sometimes Peter got it all wrong, and Jesus loved him anyway.
Reflecting the meaning of the metaphor, another pastor described her family’s experience of trying to build rock cairns, the stacked towers of stones that you can find in all different places, built for all different reasons. I’ve seen them near mountain trails and in rivers, signposts that a place has meaning. In their attempts to build cairns, two things stood out to her; first, despite their appearances, the rocks didn’t have any perfectly flat surfaces, which made it really difficult to stack them evenly and keep them from slipping and tumbling over. And second, she confessed that trying to find ways to balance them tested her family’s patience and they gave up. [iii]
Like those precarious rock cairns, the Church that we have today is filled with its own imperfections and rough edges and sometimes it feels like it wouldn’t take much to make it come tumbling down. There are gaps where the gospel that we proclaim doesn’t match up with the witness of our lives. And sometimes it is enough to cause us to lose patience, throw up our hands in frustration and even want to give up and walk away.
But God doesn’t give up. Not on Peter and not on us.
God is still here among all of us imperfect, rough-around-the-edges people. In fact, God calls us “precious living stones” (1 Peter 2:5) and works through us to build the Church that we may continue to tell the world how much God loves us all.
A third image comes from earlier in Matthew 7, in a part of the Sermon on the Mount that we didn’t get to hear this year; it’s where Jesus says,
24 "Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. 25 The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. (Matt. 7:24-25)
Too often, in our sin, in our self-centered failure to trust God, and our temptation to listen to lies and evil that would destroy what is given by God, we question why God would try to build anything with us or entrust this life-giving Gospel to us. But God is a God of wisdom, not foolishness, and God has built on rock, a solid foundation grounded in faith.
In The Message translation of this passage, Eugene Peterson writes that Jesus told Simon, “I’m going to tell you who you really are.” Who you really are in God’s eyes. Not who others say you are, not who you appear to be on your clumsiest or least grace-filled day, but who God says you are. There are times when we are blockheads. There are times when we stumble and fall down or get knocked down. But the God who loves us sees all of our imperfections, knows our sins before we even commit them, and forgives us abundantly.
The ekklesia or Church is the community united by faith in this Good News, in God’s saving action for each one of us. And Jesus has placed the Church into our hearts and hands, that our neighbors and community would know it too.
Let us pray…
Good and gracious God,
Thank you for your Son Jesus who sees us and calls us by name. Thank you for your abundant grace that sees our imperfections and the works through us anyway.
Teach us to trust your wisdom and share your Good News that our neighbors will know Your love.
We pray in the name of Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.
Amen.
[i] Audrey West. “Commentary on Matthew 16:13-20.” Workingpreacher.org.
[ii] There is even a book published in the 1960s called The Gospel According to the Peanuts; the author Robert Short was a Presbyterian minister and Lutheran pastor Martin Marty wrote the foreword.
[iii] “A stack of rough stones.” Liddy Barlow, “Sunday’s Coming,” The Christian Century.
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