Eleventh Sunday after Trinity 2020

 

Lectionary Gospel reading: Matthew 16:13-20

Once upon a time there was a man named Jonah. Not the Old Testament prophet who was swallowed by a whale. Our Jonah lived some seven hundred years later. This Jonah was a fisherman. He had a business partner, Zebedee. Business was doing well. Jonah’s sons, Simon and Andrew, and Zebedee’s sons, James and John, were all in the family business, and there were hired men as well. The boys were already taking on more of the responsibility, and, of course, one day Simon and James would take over from Jonah and Zebedee, and carry on the tradition. Except that, well, it hadn’t quite worked out like that. First, Andrew had gone off to be a disciple of John ‘the Baptiser’—who, by the way, had ended up losing his head. Literally. Don’t get me wrong, Jonah was proud of his boy; the lad had an aptitude for learning, and opportunity his old man never had. And yet, well, he did worry at times. And then, to make matters, not worse exactly but certainly more complicated, Andrew had got involved with this new rabbi, and caught Simon up in it all too. Both boys—and Zebedee’s sons. All the rabbi’s disciples now. Proud as punch, the families were. And yet. It’s a hard thing to put down your expectations, of the life your children are going to lead, and of the life you envisaged for your own old age. Family around you. Daughters-in-law and grand kids. The business in safe hands, doing well. The way things looked to be going, he wouldn’t be entirely surprised if the boys ended up killed, dead before their time, like the Baptiser had been.

Jesus, meanwhile, had taken the boys off somewhere. Caesarea Philippi, where the immigrants lived, with their strange ways. They call it the Gates of Hell. And there he says, Simon, what have you heard? It’s a play on words. Simon, or in Hebrew Shimon, from Shema, to hear: Hear, O Israel, the Lord your one God: you shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart and all of your mind and all of your strength, with your whole being, and you shall love your neighbour as yourself. What have you heard about me, Shimon? And what Simon has heard, Jesus declares, you have heard from God.

And in this moment, Simon is able to hear from God again, this time about himself: your middle name, Petros, rock? On this rock, I will build my church, my community, and the gates of hell—the portal for all the fears that would overwhelm you—will not prevail against you.

Like Jonah, like Simon Peter, who we are, who we think we are and the life we anticipate, gets shaken to the core, several times over in life. Anything we might ground that in—career, family, a nice house, nationality, money in the bank—will need to laid down, sooner or later, before the one person who can give us our true identity in any moment, regardless of circumstances around us, and in the very face of our fears.

So, where are you coming undone? Or, where are you resisting becoming undone? What imagined fear terrorises your sense of self? In the place where that fear yawns open like the mouth of a big, black cave, the very gate of hell, may our eyes and ears be opened to perceive Jesus stripping us back to the rock, in order to build anew.

In the words of the song Build My Life, by the band Housefires,

“And I will build my life upon Your love

It is a firm foundation

I will put my trust in You alone

And I will not be shaken”