Trinity 12

Isaiah 51.1-6, Matthew 16.13-20

 

My late father-in-law was a geology lecturer. I think it would be fair to say that his life revolved around rocks. Clearing his house after his death last Christmas has shown us that, if we didn’t know it already. We’ve come across box after box of carefully labelled rock samples, gathered on working trips, but also on family holidays. Coming back from the seaside with rock is nothing unusual, but it’s usually the sort that’s made of peppermint candy, with the resort name running through the middle of it. Not for the Le Bas family – they came back with the real thing, packed in the car around the luggage. To us, as we wondered what to do with all those rock samples, one looked much like another, but to Philip’s father each one was unique, coming from somewhere specific, with its own story to tell.

 

“Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were dug”, says Isaiah to the people of Israel. They’d been in exile in Babylon for generations at this point, and their big fear was that they would lose their identity, their heritage, their sense of who they were as children of God, that they would just be absorbed into the empire that had conquered them and sink without trace. Isaiah’s answer to that fear was to point them back to the stories of their faith, stories like that of Abraham and Sarah, called by God to journey into the unknown, getting it wrong as often as they got it right, but learning bit by bit to trust God.

 

Isaiah is reminding his hearers of God’s steadfast love for them. This is the bedrock of their faith, the faith which inspired Abraham and Sarah. This is the “rock from which they were hewn”.

 

The Gospel reading is also a rocky one. In one sense that’s obvious – Jesus calls Peter the “rock”, which is what the Greek word Petros means, on which his church will be built. But those who originally heard this story would probably have other rocks in mind too.  

 

It’s all to do with where it takes place. Jesus is in the district of Caesarea Philippi, a town in the far north of Israel, near what is now the border with Lebanon, in the foothills of the range of mountains that included Mount Hermon. As that might suggest, it was a rocky landscape, peppered with limestone caves and outcrops, and the site of ancient shrines carved out of the rock, including a very popular shrine to the Greek god Pan.

 

If we imagine this scene, then, as its first hearers would have done, we need to see Jesus and his disciples standing amongst the rocks; rock beneath their feet, rock in front of them, rock around them, rock everywhere, rock carved into altars and statues, monumental reminders of the powers that ruled those lands.

 

The name of the town itself, Caesarea Phillipi, was a reminder of what were seen as the non-negotiable realities the people of this area had to deal with. It was named for Caesar Augustus, the Roman Emperor at the time it was founded, and for Philip the Tetrarch, the Jewish king, part of the family of King Herod, who was the puppet ruler put in by the Romans, who had founded this town as a stronghold on an important trade and military route. Power and authority were enshrined right there in its name. If anyone was in doubt about who was in charge, who ruled the roost, who decided what was what and who mattered, the two words “Caesarea Phillipi” were designed to give them rock-hard certainty about it.

 

That makes it all the more extraordinary that when Jesus asks his disciples, “who do you say that I am?” , Peter answers with no hesitation, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” In this place, where the source of power, the bedrock of people’s lives was supposed to be so clear, Peter makes a bold and counter-intuitive claim. He wasn’t looking to Rome, or to the Herodian kings for guidance and authority. He was looking to a Galilean carpenter who had called him, loved him, chosen him, who had transformed his life and shown him a new way, a way of love and inclusion. Jesus couldn’t offer him glory, or financial reward or security. In fact, he was clear that following him was likely to lead to confrontation with the authorities, challenge and trouble. But despite all of that, Peter knew that this was the person, this was the way he wanted to shape his life.

 

It wasn’t always plain sailing for him, of course. Not long after this, he would deny even knowing Jesus, when Jesus was arrested and crucified, but Peter soon realised that he might have preserved his life by doing so, something within him had died when he turned his back on Jesus. He couldn’t just walk away from Jesus, and as history bears witness, he did indeed become that rock on which the church was built.  

 

These readings challenge us to ask ourselves what our bedrock is, what are the things that really matter to us, and why It’s often said that we live in a very commitment phobic age. Maybe that’s because many people have more choices than they might once have done – choices in relationship, choices about whether to have children or not, choices about jobs, volunteering, hobbies, what to spend their time and energy on, choices about faith, political opinions and lifestyles. That’s not true for everyone, of course, but the more choices we have, the more we are aware that choosing one thing – one partner, one job, one way of life – means rejecting other options, and that can feel very difficult. It’s all too easy to end up like the donkey that starves to death between two bales of hay, because it can’t decide which one to eat first. The result can be that we drift through life, rootless and restless, never making a conscious choice at all, but discovering that our reluctance to commit ourselves has shaped our lives just as much, and often not for the better.

 

There’s no magic formula for making those tough decisions in life, and  and often, in retrospect, it’s impossible to tell whether we got it right or wrong – whether there even was a right or wrong - but what really does matter  is that, in all our decisions, we remember “the rock from which we were hewn”, the bedrock of our lives, the values that matter to us, the things that are foundational for us, and the one who gave them to us.

 

God’s love for us is as steadfast as it has always been, and he calls us to rest on that love, to trust it and build on it because when the empires of the world crumble away, as they all will, when the things we thought we were certain of are stripped away, his love will still be solid and enduring.

Amen