Caela's Sermon Blog: “Called Back and Beyond in the Shadow of Empire”

“Called Back and Beyond in the Shadow of Empire”

Matthew 16:13-20

Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

March 3, 2024

Questions you don’t need to answer out loud:

Have you ever run away from yourself?

Have you ever been so confused or discouraged that you forgot yourself?

If you have ever run away from yourself, have you ever needed a friend to call you back to who you are?

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I think Jesus might have been running away in Matthew 16. He’s been trying to escape for quite some time. The pattern repeats again and again - he tries to get some space, people follow him.

It’s not particularly flattering to say this, but Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew can be downright grumpy. He scolds the disciples. He calls the Canaanite woman a dog. Later on, he throws tables in the temple in Jerusalem. Matthew’s gospel is the one with all the weeping and gnashing of teeth. And I wonder if Jesus had trouble sleeping at night. I wonder if his exhaustion was too close to the surface.

At the beginning of Matthew, Jesus is baptized by his cousin John and a voice comes from the Great Beyond, “This is my son, the beloved, with whom I am well-pleased.” But this middle portion of Matthew feels like an absolute slog - people every which way are clamoring for his help AND second-guessing his teachings. His disciples won’t leave him alone AND they don’t seem to understand what’s going on.

And so I wonder if there’s any chance Jesus began to forget himself. And I wonder if he forgot himself so very much that he decided to run away.

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Geography is critically important in Matthew’s gospel. I had a seminary professor tell me once that when the gospel says something like “and then they came to…” you’d better get out your map and figure out why this detail is included. At the beginning of chapter 16, after Jesus gets into an argument with some other religious leaders, we are told he “went away.” But we’re not told where he’s going. Once again, the disciples follow him. Once again, Jesus performs a miracle of feeding multitudes.

The next thing we hear about location is “Now when Jesus came to the area of Caesarea Philippi…” and this is WEIRD. They are more than a day’s walk north of their home base. They’ve never been this far north before, for any reason. If you look at maps of Jesus’s ministry, you’ll see that almost all of it was concentrated around the Sea of Galilee and Jerusalem. The map pin for Caesarea Philippi is way far away. Further, this is not a place you’d expect to find many Jews. It was a longstanding holy place for competing religions, considered idolatrous to Jesus and his friends.

So why is he here? Traditional interpretation says he took his disciples here to make a point. But the text makes it sound like he was just making a pit stop on the way to somewhere else. It’s not, “Jesus took his disciples to Caesarea Philippi…” it’s “Now when Jesus came to the area….” almost as if it was just a place to pause.

And that’s part of what makes me wonder if he was on the run. Fed up. Trying to retreat far, far away to do some real soul-searching.

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If you’re trying to soul-seach, Caesarea Philippi is a good place for it. Its modern name is Banias and it’s a nature preserve. Located at the base of Mount Hermon, it’s all scraggly tan rocks and sheer cliff faces. A spring of water that comes out of the base of the mountain feeds the River Jordan. Greenery lining the water’s pathway. It’s stunning.

Small wonder, then, that people honored this place by building monuments to their gods. The place was even named after gods: originally called Panion after the Greek god Pan, Philip the Tetrarch renamed it Caesarea to honor the emperor and added on Philippi to honor himself. In the time of Jesus, there would have been a large temple honoring Caesar Augustus, built by Phlip’s father, Herod the Great. Kings, gods everywhere.

Some scholars believe the temple of Augustus was built right over the place where the spring emerged from the mountain. This cave’s mouth is still present today, a giant, dark, gaping hole in the side of the mountain. You can see it in the photo on the screens.

Next to the cave entrance was a shrine to the Greek god Pan and his consort Echo. Pan was a god of nature and fertility. In some legends, Echo, who was pursued by Pan, was cursed by having her voice taken away and was forever only able to echo back what others said, never speaking her own thoughts.

It is in this setting that Jesus found himself with his disciples. Surrounded by monuments to various gods and kings, they were, quite literally in the shadow of empire. Jesus asked his friends, “Who do you say I am?” Interestingly, he shows his hand a bit in the asking, calling himself the Son of Man or Human One. He highlights his humanity when he asks the question. And that’s part of what makes me wonder if he had been battered so much at this point, pushed so low, that he wasn’t quite sure who he was anymore. Traditional interpretation of this text is that he took his disciples to this place to prove a point: that in the shadow of all this empire, HE was the Messiah, the Son of God, the light from true light, the great I Am. He was the great one, not all these other gods. And the question, “Who do you say I am?” was a test to see if they’d been paying attention.

Here, under the statues of Pan and Echo, the disciples echo what they’ve heard from others: “Some say you’re John the Baptist, others Elijah.” But Simon Peter has other ideas. He confidently speaks his own thoughts, naming Jesus as the Messiah and the Son of God.

These two titles together are the strongest confession of faith we have in the gospels. Simon names Jesus both the Messiah, the anointed one, the hero who has come to save the oppressed AND the Divine Son of God. And he has the boldness to speak these words in this place, where they are surrounded by monuments to empire. Remember: Caesar Augustus was also called the Son of God. To name Jesus as the Son of God instead was dangerous, seditious stuff.

Traditional interpretation says that Jesus’s next statement bestows an A+ upon Simon for passing the pop quiz. The other disciples were clueless, but Simon had been paying attention and gave the right answer.

But I wonder if Jesus asked the question because he needed his friends to help him remember himself. I wonder if Jesus’s response is less a teacher giving a gold star to his pupil and more Jesus receiving his friend’s confession with joy and gratitude. Jesus calls Simon blessed; and here, in the shadow of this sheer, rocky cliff, going 70 feet almost straight up into the heavens, Jesus gives his friend a new name: “I tell you that you are Peter and on this rock I will build my community. And the gates of Hades will not hold when my community storms the gates. Peter, I’m giving you the keys to the Great Beyond. Whatever you say here on earth holds true and whatever you say in the Great Beyond is also true.”

Theologians have been arguing about those six little sentences forever. Usually, they want to argue about whether Jesus really said Peter was the foundation of the church (it’s a whole thing about the gender of some of these words in Greek - and a whole thing about whether you’re team Catholic or Protestant). Some familiar art and funny jokes have come out of this little speech: you know Peter standing at the pearly gates, holding the keys to heaven? Yep, this is why.

But that word that we translate heaven and think of as a place with gold-lined streets wasn’t in Jesus’s mind. The Greek is more like the kingdom of the great sky above. Somewhere over the rainbow - way up there - beyond. And the “gates of Hades” is sometimes translated as “gates of hell” but you probably already know that what we think of as hell doesn’t exist in the Bible. Instead, the gates of Hades were just the gates of the place where went when they died. In fact, the cave mouth that they were sitting by? That was known as one of the gates of Hades. That cave was so deep and dark and mysterious that no one had explored it fully. It was known as a portal to death. That absolute that is everyone’s end.

There is also a lot of chit-chat about what Jesus meant by ekklesia here. It’s usually translated as church. Which is weird because the concept church didn’t exist until MUCH later, well after Jesus’s death. And the word is only used twice in all four gospels. Ekklesia simply meant a gathered community. And so, Jesus speaks here of his community and radical hope that the yawning jaws of death, staring at them from that cave across the way, were no match for their strength.

Jesus, it seems to me, is somehow both here in this moment with his friends and somewhere way out there Beyond in a place they haven’t been yet. Something about Peter’s words has called him back to himself. A few moments ago he was a Human One, but now he is far away in mystical places the disciples can’t yet touch. What he’s speaking of is the hope of Resurrection. Which, I regret to say, we don’t have time to fully unpack today but if you mark your calendars for March 31st, we’ll get there together on Easter morning.

Peter has called Christ back to himself. And we are told that “from that time on, Jesus began to reveal to his friends about what would come to pass in Jerusalem….how he had to be killed and raised on the third day.” He remembered who he was. In spite of the exhaustion, the chaos, the fear, the ugliness, Jesus remembered himself in this place. At Caesarea Philippi, in the shadow of empire and next to the gates of death, Christ spoke of hope, new life, freedom, Resurrection.

Jesus named Peter on this day. But Peter also named Jesus. In gratitude for these two friends, and in the spirit of Jesus who taught with questions, I leave you with just a few:

Who in your life has the power to call you back to yourself?

Who in your community might need to be reminded of their belovedness?

And, how, in the shadow of Empire that we still live in, are we called to be about that work?

Notes:

I learned a lot about Caesarea Philippi and Greek mythology as I researched this passage. Here are some of the sources I consulted:

Hamilton, Adam. Peter: Flawed but Faithful Disciple.

Helyer, Larry R. The Life and Witness of Peter.

Feasting on the Gospels Vol. 2

https://www.holylandsite.com/caesarea-philippi

blueletterbible.com for Greek research

https://www.understandchristianity.com/timelines/chronology-jesus-life-ministry/

https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/peter-receives-his-name-and-his-gender