Living Proof
Living Proof
Matthew 16
It’s not easy to follow Jesus. It never has been. It wasn’t even easy for the disciples to follow Jesus when they had Jesus standing right there in front of them. Who is he? What is he saying? What’s going to happen next? It seems like most of the time, the disciples were confused.
In our text for this morning, the first people to be confused aren’t the disciples but the Sadducees and the Pharisees—the best religious experts of their day. They want to know who Jesus is but what they really want is some good, solid, reliable proof. They didn’t just want that proof, they were badgering Jesus for it: “Give us a sign! Show us your stuff, Jesus!”
One of the early stops for me after seminary was the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. I had taken a few classes there during seminary. I was excited to study further with those incredible scholars. What I quickly discovered was that the students were at least as smart as the faculty! It was a “heady” time, filled with incredible discussions of the history of religions, of comparative religion, of theological ethics. The joke on campus is that the University of Chicago is “where fun goes to die,” because for those students, relentlessly serious study of whatever the topic might be is actually fun. If you love what you’re doing, why take a break?
What struck me rather quickly, though, in the Divinity School was that the one thing that wasn’t taken seriously was the actual church—not the historical church, the real church in the world, the one trying to speak to the present and respond to the needs of real people. I really wanted to see what would happen if some of those incredible minds engaged that kind of a mission. However, it was like that was a boundary which almost no one would cross. While there were a couple of faculty who were exceptions, the rule held for the students almost across the board: religion was fascinating but faith…well, that was something else.
The interesting thing about religion and faith is that all religions start with someone believing something. Faith comes first. If people come together who believe similar things and they decide to practice those beliefs together and this happens for a few generations, well, then, you have a religion! And by the time a faith turns into a religion, the faith tends to have been tamed. Something that started with someone saying, “I may be crazy but….” has turned into “Of course this is what we believe. People have always believed this. It just makes sense.” Things evolve from people personally owning what they believe to people signing on to own what someone believed centuries before them.
I’m a huge fan of facts and data and historical insight. I want my doctor and my plumber and my architect to be steeped in such things. I loved the incredible knowledge of those students and faculty at the Divinity School. However, when it comes to faith, the doctor, the plumber, and the architect, the tenured theologian and the devoted student of theology, and the custodian who cleans the hallway stand on an equal footing. Faith is not about what you do for a living or how smart you are. It’s about your purpose in living. Faith is not about what you know. Rather, faith is about what you do when you reach the limits of your knowledge. It’s about what holds the world together. Faith is available to you at 4 years old and 14 years old and at 84 years old, and can evolve through a lifetime.
I think this sense of faith is what it is so easy to forget, especially if you’re an expert in religion. Jesus is looking for lived faith and finds it in a woman who touches his robe and in a leper who cries out for help and in a little, tiny, despised man who is hanging out in a sycamore tree. The Pharisees and Sadducees are looking for religious people and they find them, not surprisingly, doing what they tell them to do. Though the Pharisees and Sadducees should be in the business of faith, what they want is certainty and proof and obedience.
Jesus turns the tables on the Pharisees and Sadducees by temporarily becoming a religious expert himself. He tells them that the only sign they will get is “Jonah’s sign.” You remember Jonah, right? I’ll remind you…it is a story about a man whom God called to do something he didn’t want to do. He was supposed to go be a prophet to the people of Nineveh. The problem was that he despised those people so he ran from his calling, signing on to a boat that was going in the opposite direction. When a huge storm hits the boat, Jonah knows that it is God, hunting him down. He has the sailors throw him overboard so that they can be saved. Pretty soon, a fish swallows him and swims with him in his belly for three days and deposits him up on the beach at Nineveh. “You can run from God’s calling but you can’t hide…” Jesus is basically saying, “You’ve already missed any number of signs…next stop, the belly of the fish!”
No…the point isn’t whether a fish could do that. The point is that we miss all sorts of signs and invitations and callings in our lives. Some of those signs and invitations and callings just keeping popping up until we find ourselves doing the work we were called to do in the in the first place, the work we’ve been running from all along. God doesn’t demand things from us. God doesn’t threaten us. No, we just keep recognizing these familiar little “invitations” to do what we know we should do that seem unavoidable.
So, we want proof. God wants us to trust. We want to wait. God wants us to rise to the occasion. We want a guarantee. God wants us to feel the rush of doing the right things simply because it is the right thing to do. God wants us to do what we do out of love because that’s the only way we’re ever really going to come to know that it is love, in the end, that does, in fact, win.
Unlike the Pharisees and Sadducees, the disciples aren’t holding out for proof. No…they just keep getting things wrong. Of course, this isn’t entirely the disciples’ fault. Jesus says some pretty open ended things, in this case, “Keep an eye out for the Pharisee-Sadducee yeast.” We know, because we are considering this with the hindsight of roughly 2000 years, that he was talking about how the Pharisees’ and Sadducees’ idea of seeking proof was like a yeast that could hide and then rise. He didn’t want that kind of thinking to get implanted in the disciples. The disciples, though, thought that Jesus knew that they had forgotten to bring bread with them in the boat. They thought Jesus was mad at them!
This is another human moment. I’ve done something. Now, my regrets filter everything. So, having worried that Jesus was mad at them, the disciples’ behavior leads Jesus to actually get angry. (How many times in a life does that happen? “I think he’s mad at me. Now, he’s mad at me for thinking that he was mad at me!) Jesus basically says, “Do you remember when we fed the 5000? Do you remember the other time when we fed the 4000? Don’t you think we’ve got the bread thing covered?” If we’re immersed in life and not just being intellectual bystanders, we’re going to get frustrated. We’re going to forget things. We’re going to misunderstand each other. Things are going to get messy.
This mess, as often happens, is followed by a breakthrough conversation. Jesus asks them who people think he is. The disciples tell him: “Some think you’re John the Baptist. Others suggest a bunch of different prophets whom you might be.” People tend to understand what’s happening now in terms of what is known from the past. We deal with what is novel by dulling its novelty: “This is just what happened before, happening all over again!” Again, you don’t have to believe anything. You just have to know your history.
Jesus then makes the question personal: “Who do you say that I am?” Without hesitation, in perhaps his finest hour, Peter declares, “You are the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of the living God!” Jesus basically says, “You didn’t look that answer up on Google did you? That’s not the Wikipedia answer, is it?” Jesus says, “God bless you, son of Jonah!” In other words, God bless you Simon, for now you are standing firmly on the beaches of the place that you didn’t really want to go. Simon has been so headstrong and didn’t want to submit to or follow anyone. Now, Jesus renames him “Peter,” the Rock, and tells him that he will be the foundation for everything that is to come. (As an aside, I don’t think Jesus is talking about Peter, himself, being the foundation. I think he’s talking about a faith like Peter’s faith—which takes the leap and makes the declaration and is personal—being the foundation.)
And almost immediately on the heals of his very best moment, Peter utterly and completely fails. (Gosh…who hasn’t been there and done that, too?) Jesus tells the disciples that he’s going to suffer and be killed and on the third day he will rise again. And like all of us who have ever heard of something hard ahead for someone we love, Peter says, “No way!” Jesus just looks his friend in the eye. In one translation, he says, “Get thee behind me, Satan.” Another translation reads, “Don’t tempt me.” What’s underneath those words is this: “This is my calling, Peter. Don’t try to talk me out of this. It’s hard enough already.”
In the wonderful words of our translation: “Then, Jesus went to work on his disciples.” He’s trying to prepare them for what’s ahead. We’d all love to know that everything will work out and know that ahead of time. That would make everything so much easier to endure, right? “This will be hard but when it ends, everything will be fine. This will have been worth it.” Jesus can tell them this but he can’t prove it. They will have to trust him. Of course, that trust is much easier to cultivate theoretically in our minds than it is to locate in real time when things are getting hard. “You’re going to have to trust me. You’re going to have to believe me.” Sometimes that’s the hardest thing in the world to do: to live faithfully in this world.
Second, “You’re going to have to let me lead. I lead. You follow.” This had to be the hardest thing in the world for someone like Peter. Think about it. For years, he made the decisions about where and when to fish. He didn’t answer to anyone. If anything, others tried to hide the fact that they were following him. “Now, this far into my life, you want me to suddenly learn how to follow?” Of course, following is hard for us all. Things get hard and we get overwhelmed with the noise of our own doubts. Things get hard and our vision narrows. Things get hard and we tend to panic. We freeze until we finally whisper, “Okay, God…you lead…I'll follow.”
Finally, Jesus says, “Don’t run from the suffering. Embrace it. Follow me. I’ll show you how.” The most human thing in the world is to avoid pain and suffering at all costs. If we can’t avoid it then we often try to drown it out with our own anger that the pain is present at all. Jesus says that there is meaning to be made and love to be lived even in the hardest moments, even when the pain is very real. Sometimes, he suggests, the only way we really come to know who we really are is by reaching the limits of what we can do without God’s help.
Jesus looks them in the eye and says, “Watch me. Follow me. Let’s walk this walk together.” People want proof. Jesus is about to show us the truth that has to be lived to be believed.