Son of Man, Son of God (Matthew 16)

     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

     Today’s Gospel is about questions and answers to questions. The first question is about public opinion; “who do people say that the Son of Man is?” The second is about the opinions of the disciples only; “but who do you say that I am?” These two questions are still being asked, and the answers in today’s reading resemble answers still being talked about today. The nature and meaning of the Son of Man are still live issues.

     Scholars and theologians have been debating for some time about the meaning of the title ‘Son of Man.’ For some, it is a Messianic title, for others it is simply a way of saying that someone is human, and nothing more. There are variations on these themes, but there is no final consensus on what the phrase means. In today’s Gospel, the implication is that it is a Messianic title.

     The disciples offer a number of suggestions in answer to the first question; these suggestions are reducible to one: the Son of Man is a prophet. No one actually says that the Son of Man is Jesus, or that Jesus is merely a prophet like the others in the list. But that is all that the disciples come up with, at least as a report of what people in general are saying.

     Then Jesus asks the disciples for their own thoughts, not just a summary of poll results. It is interesting that Peter answers, and no one else. Peter silently, in his own mind, makes two connections: that Jesus is the Son of Man, and that the Son of Man is the Messiah. Peter then blurts out, without any preamble or explanation, the words "You are the Messiah". And then he adds to the Messianic title, and proclaims that Jesus is not only the Messiah, but the “Son of the living God.” We are well beyond mere prophecy here. Peter is declaring the uniqueness of Jesus, and his particular relationship with God. Jesus is no mere prophet, but is another kind of person entirely. Rather, he is the fulfilment of prophecy, the fulfilment of Messianic expectations.

     Jesus says to Peter, “Flesh and blood have not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.” Peter, in other words, has perceived clearly in Jesus, signs of God’s activity and nature. Peter has listened to Jesus’s teaching, seen his signs and wonders, and put it all together in the way that Jesus knew that he would. Jesus recognized in Peter his openness to God; Jesus names this recognition, his "Father in heaven." That is why Jesus calls him the Rock. There is in Peter a solid core of spiritual awareness. That awareness, that strength, enables Peter to see the Messiah, the Son of the Living God, when others can see only a prophet. 

     I’ve been thinking about why the other disciples do not answer the question, “but who do you say that I am?” It is likely that there is more to the conversation than the Evangelist has recorded, but the fact that it is not recorded is itself part of the message. It is worth considering what this silent message may be.

     “Flesh and blood have not revealed this to you,” Jesus says. The disciples, flesh and blood as they are, have not reached the same depth of insight as Peter. So, they preserve their silence, and in their silence, they are open to the revelation that Peter has put before them. So that they can really hear what Jesus and Peter are saying, they listen and don’t distract themselves. Jesus and Peter are leading them past the stage of mere prophecy, up to a new level of understanding. Consequently, Peter, the Rock, is someone on whom Jesus can begin building his Body in the world, and he begins with the disciples, right then and there, by revealing his true nature to them, and Peter’s nature as well. The receptive silence of the disciples makes this possible.

     It is clear from this text, that the gathering of Jesus’s people, his Body in the world, is called to be rock-like. “The gates of Hades will not prevail against it.” The powers of darkness, of evil, will not be able to overcome Christ's Body in the world, if it retains this character, this Rock of faith in the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. The Rock is strong faith in Jesus as Messiah, Son of God, Son of Man, or, as later formulas would state it, of faith in Jesus as God incarnate, as a union of human nature and divinity.

     Next, Jesus, still addressing Peter, says, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of Heaven.” In other words, Peter, by seeing Jesus clearly for who he is, has opened himself, or has been opened by his "Father in heaven," as Jesus says, to direct perception of divine reality, to a level beyond what the other disciples have reached, so far. This awareness of divine reality is called here "the kingdom of Heaven." And this experience is expressed as a gift from Jesus to Peter, because Jesus, who embodies the Kingdom, visualized as handing over the Keys, has recognized in Peter this leap in perception. The Keys have always been within reach; now Peter is able to perceive them, to "receive" them, as it were, to become aware that they have always been there, waiting for him, so to speak. In Tradition, the "power of the Keys" has long been regarded as juridical and jurisdictional, as mere institutional authority in the Church; but it is much more than that. The "power of the Keys" is that unity of mind, that unity of spirit, between Peter and Jesus, that makes Peter's understanding, and our understanding, of Jesus as Messiah and divine Son, possible. That understanding is available to all of us, and so the Power of the Keys is available to all of us. It is not the possession of one person only, of one authority only.

      It is clear from this text that, at the very least, life in the Church has eternal consequences. “Whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” We can, in other words, create our own eternal destiny. We all of us have the ‘Power of the Keys,’ the power of access to the Kingdom. And one of the Keys is faith in Jesus as Messiah and Son of God. Peter was the first to recognize Jesus for who he is, and so he was the first to receive the 'Power of the Keys,' that is, Jesus helped Peter become aware of what his declaration means. Jesus made him aware of the consequences of his faith, the power of his faith. We, all of us who know Jesus as Messiah and Son of God, have the same power, to loose in heaven what we loose on earth.

     “Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.” You would think that the disciples, having learned who Jesus is, would want to proclaim the news far and wide, to announce the arrival of the Messiah at last, to announce the end to all earthly injustice and the beginning of God’s reign, right here and right now. But no, that is not the kind of Messiah Jesus is. There is much that he has to undergo, and there is much for the disciples to experience, before they can reveal this secret. In the very next line, which is not in today’s reading, the Evangelist says, “From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering.” The disciples, including Peter, do not yet know the full nature of Jesus’s Messiahship. And so they must remain silent, until they are truly ready.

     Who do we say that the Son of Man is? These days, there is a tendency to neglect the revelation of Jesus as Son of God, and to emphasize his nature as Son of Man; a tendency, in other words, to neglect the real meaning of the Incarnation, and to dwell too much only on the humanity of Jesus, on the ‘Jesus of History,’ so-called. This has several consequences. One is to think of Jesus only as the Son of Man, as only human. So that is why the disciples report that people, probably including themselves, think that the Son of Man is merely a prophet. Being only human, they think, he can’t be any more than a prophet. It’s a logical, natural conclusion to reach.

     This idea has consequences for the Church. If we imagine that Jesus is only human, then our association with him in community can’t get beyond the level of mere affinity. We hear his prophecy, we hear his teaching, we like him, and it, and so we think of ourselves as nothing more than followers of the great prophet and teacher. This is good as far as it goes, but it goes no further than that. 

     But let us hear what Jesus actually says about himself, and about his Body in the world. When Jesus accepts the titles of Messiah and Son of God, he follows them immediately with a description of his Body in the world, which is more than a community of like-minded followers only, of disciples only. His community is built upon the Rock of the revelation of Jesus as Messiah and Son of God, far beyond a prophet. The powers of Hell cannot overcome that Rock, because it is founded on God himself, and not merely on our affinity for a prophet. The ‘Power of the Keys’ opens the way to the kingdom of Heaven. The power to bind and loose means that in our earthly lives we are creating our eternal destinies. Peter was the first person to recognize the Messiah; once he did this, Jesus was able to reveal the true nature of the community which would flow from that recognition. May we all recognize Jesus as Son and Messiah, now and always. Amen.

      

     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.  (24.VIII.14 Adv., 27.VIII.17 Adv.) (revised 27.viii.23)

Loaves and Fishes (Matthew 14)

     “And all ate and were filled, and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full.” From the Gospel for today, the Gospel according to Matthew, the fourteenth chapter, verse 20.

     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

     I’ve preached on this Gospel before, three years ago. It doesn’t seem like that long, but there it is. I resisted the temptation to look up my previous sermon and rewrite it. Once, many years ago, in a parish in Toronto, where I was deacon and scheduled to preach, I pulled a sermon out of my file, thinking that I could save myself the trouble of preparing a new talk. And so I proceeded to deliver that homily, only to realize halfway through that I had in fact preached exactly that sermon, to that very congregation, three years before! There was nothing for it except to push on, which I did, hoping that no one would notice. Well, of course, they did notice. “We forgave you!” said one very generous member of the congregation. That was a good reminder to the young preacher, as I was, not to look for shortcuts or to fall for deceptively easy solutions. So when I discovered that I would be preaching on the story of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes, as the old translation calls it, I resolutely decided not to look at my previous remarks. I didn’t want to give in to my anxiety that maybe there was nothing new to say about today’s story, that maybe all I could and should do was repeat what I said before. After all, this story is so familiar, and there are stock responses to it which preachers have resorted to, that it would be easy just to give in and go with the familiar, the tried and true. 

     The problem that this story presents is, of course, its impossibility. In the world that we know, bread and fish don’t miraculously multiply hundreds or thousands of times, and that beyond the actual needs of a hungry crowd. We call this kind of story “mythology” or some such word. Whatever the word, we don’t recognize the world that this story comes from. It is not our world, and for some people that is the end of the matter. And for them there is nothing more to say about it.

     But there is more to say about it. It’s true that the story isn’t 21^st century news reporting, but that doesn’t mean that it’s false. The meaning of the story is not restricted to its surface detail, but also includes what it says about the world that it portrays. And it’s that portrayal that can speak to us today.

     The Evangelist placed this story between the death of John the Baptist and Jesus’s walking on water. We may think of it as a kind of response to the death of John the Baptist, and a preparation for what is to come. The grisly realism of the execution of John is followed by stories of an unselfish, very generous, living, and life-giving, reality. The reality that Jesus reveals in this incident is as unlike the worldly power of the story of John the Baptist as it can be. The story reveals a deeper reality, whose power Jesus uses to feed the crowd. There is nothing wrong with taking the story literally, as a report of historical fact, if we believe that Jesus is the Incarnate Lord, who can act freely in the world in such a way as to reveal his own nature and the real nature of the world in which we live. But we are not limited by hearing the story in any particular way, and we are free to interpret it creatively.

     Basically, this story is about the freedom of God, and about the freedom of people to respond to Him. To tell such a story about Jesus is to say that there is more to reality than its surface appearance. Because Jesus is free to act in his very creative and generous way, so are we free to respond in similar ways. The story is about possibility, about the appearance in the world of something totally new. There is nothing in the everyday world that we know, that could make such an event possible. But the fact of this event means that real freedom is built in to the world, both God’s freedom and ours. In other words, we are not limited, and God is not limited, to our usual, common-sense, cause-and-effect, everyday understanding of how the world works. We may think of this story as part of the long preparation in the Gospels, for the ultimate free act of God in the Resurrection. And that free act is what gives meaning to all the stories of signs and wonders and miracles in the Scriptures. All the signs and wonders are, so to speak, incomplete on their own. They find their fulfilment in the ultimate freely life-giving, life-affirming, act of the Resurrection.

     There is nothing inevitable about the response of the people in this story. They could easily have chosen not to see what was happening; they could have been blind to it; they could have turned down the food that was freely offered to them. They could have doubted Jesus; they could have doubted themselves. But in faith they accepted the possibility that Jesus opened up before them. “And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full.” The possibility that opened up before them was not limited to them alone; in other words, there was enough left over to include others who were not there, but who would be there in the future. The multiplication of the loaves and fishes is an ongoing event, to which all are invited.

     It is possible to understand this story as a description of church life, especially liturgical life. “Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds.” That’s as neat a summary of Eucharistic liturgy as I have ever read. If we in our liturgy place ourselves in that crowd with Jesus, we are present with him and open up to ourselves that experience of freedom and possibility which Jesus represents, which, indeed, he is.

     In our society and economy, we are very good at multiplying, if that is the right word, foods and products and who-knows-what-else, in profusion. Yet there are still many, millions actually, here and around the world, who don’t have enough to eat. I’ve been hearing lately that we Americans typically waste something like 40% of our food. This is a stunning contrast to the “twelve baskets full” of leftovers after the Feeding of the Five Thousand. Those leftovers were not wasted. We can be sure that they fed others not mentioned in the story. Our story is a clear reminder that we must do better in making sure that all are fed. And we can actually do this. We don’t live in a subsistence economy, as the people of the Gospel story did. Yet even in that economy, Jesus taught people that real generosity is always possible. Always. In fact, to emphasize the point, the story is repeated, in chapter 15 of Matthew’s Gospel.

     Even the head-count in the two stories reminds us of the possibility of real generosity. “And those who ate were about 5000 men, besides women and children.” Or, “those who had eaten were 4000 men, besides women and children.” Women and children were not included in the head-count (age-bias and gender-bias, we call this, in our time) but they were definitely included in the distribution. No one was left out. And our liturgy, which echoes these events, must always remind us that no one is to be left out of the distribution, not only liturgically, but also among all the hungry of the world.

     The freedom of Jesus in this story is our freedom as well. The generosity which he teaches is available to us as well. We can be, must be, as generous as he is. The possibility which Jesus puts in front of us is there for us to respond to. Our Eucharistic liturgy reminds us, empowers us in fact, to do this.

     “And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full.”

     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.