Naming and renaming

Jesus said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ Simon Peter answered, ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.’ And Jesus answered him, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.’ Matt 16, 15-18.

Some of you, hearing this passage, will be reminded of St Peter’s in Rome, and of the interior of the great dome, and the Latin words written around the drum: ‘tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam.’ Illuminated by rays of light that seem to descend from heaven itself, they have the power to awe even the most protestant and dissenting of souls: how can one argue with something so grand and so absolutely definitive?

But argue we do, of course; and to say that Jesus intended these words as the foundational text of the Roman Catholic Church depends on a sequence of moves that are very much open to debate. First, the words must be read as addressed exclusively to Peter; then we have to identify Peter with the Roman Church; and then we have to be sure of a line of successors for whom this commission is equally intended, the line that we call the Papacy. Quite a lot of work has to be done to get from Jesus’ words in Caesarea Philippi to the unique authority of a particular branch of the Church. On the other hand, the conventional Protestant reading, that Jesus is speaking not about Peter personally but about his faith, seems to ignore how very personal this exchange is, built as it is around a pun on Peter’s name—‘tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram’—a pun that is there in the Greek as well as the Latin and could hardly have made with the names of any of the other disciples. Peter does seem to be personally intended.

Well, these are old arguments, but perhaps not the most important feature of this passage. Matthew’s main concern here is not with the authority of the Church, but with the identity of Jesus. This is the first time in Matthew’s gospel that one of Jesus’ disciples identifies him as the Son of God, the first time that this is explicitly recognised by his followers. As such, it stands as a turning-point in the gospel: from that point on, what previously was hidden or mysterious—recognised only by demonic spirits—now becomes something explicit, that the disciples have to make sense of.

And in our own time, the real question that this passage raises has to do with knowing Jesus as the Son of God. To put it in that way begs many questions. But it remains the case, today as much as in the first century, that this recognition is the foundation of Christianity, the rock on which Christian belief is built. Not to believe that Jesus stands in a unique relationship to God, a relationship shared by no other human being, is to move away from the centre of the Christian tradition, however much we may retain the cultural and ethical and even the spiritual accoutrements of the faith.

But what does it mean to recognise Jesus as the Son of God? Go back to the passage from Matthew. What did Peter mean when he said ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God?’ Two points need to be made, neither of them at first sight helpful for the orthodox interpretation. First, the Messiah that first-century Jews expected was not a divine figure but a human leader, an anointed king in the tradition of David, who would defeat the foreign enemies and restore the kingdom to Israel. Second, in the language of the time the expression ‘Son of God’ also did not mean a divine figure, but a holy person whose relation to God was close and apparent to all. He might be a prophet or even a high priest. And since kings were anointed by God and therefore in a special relation to him, they could also be called ‘sons of God.’ So it is not surprising that Peter would have connected the idea of the king who was to come, the Messiah, the anointed one (in Greek the Christ) with the ‘Son of God.’

So much the scholarship would suggest. But there is more to be said. There is a small drama going on here, and to get the sense of what Peter is saying, you need to look at the whole exchange. In replying to Jesus’s direct question, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter clearly intends to say something different from what people generally are saying about Jesus. They are saying that he is John the Baptist restored to life, or Elijah, or Jeremiah, or another of the prophets. In other words, they are saying that Jesus is a very holy man, close to God, perhaps a ‘son of God’ in the familiar sense. But when Peter replies “You are the Messiah” he is saying that the conventional view of those around him is wrong, that something new is happening, that the old descriptions don’t fit. Peter is using traditional words—Messiah, son of God—but he is groping to express something new, something that he can hardly understand.

Jesus underlines this in what he says next: “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.” Flesh and blood—the tradition of Jewish history and prophecy—could certainly have identified a prophet or even a Messiah. Those figures and those roles were well understood. They were entirely human figures fulfilling human roles. But Jesus is telling the struggling Peter that you need to step outside the frame of traditional understanding to understand who Jesus is. He is moving Peter away from the conventional concepts, and saying that there is something about this understanding that goes beyond human faculties and resources, that has the nature of revelation. Only God could have shown Peter who Jesus is.

How helpful is that for our recognition of Christ? First, we should recognise that we, like the people of the first century, live within traditional concepts and familiar understandings. The difference, of course, is that the concepts and understandings familiar to us have been generated by Christianity itself. If the Jews of the first century thought that they knew what ‘Messiah’ meant, we think that we know what ‘Son of God’ means. We are so familiar with the expression that we pass over it—in the creed, in the gospels—with hardly a pause: we know that is who Jesus is. But is it anything more than a definition handed to us by other people: as Jesus might have put it, by ‘flesh and blood?’ Yet Jesus says that this is a recognition that flesh and blood is not capable of, one that must come from the Father who is in heaven. We are talking here not about theological definitions but about revelation.

This begins to sound rather hopeless. If the teaching of the church cannot convey the central tenet of Christian faith, what chance is there for us? If we have to wait for a divine revelation to know who Jesus is, we may be waiting a long time. But think for a moment about what revelation is. We are unlikely to hear a voice from heaven declaring “this is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” But revelation means being shown something that we could not have seen on our own, knowing something that we could not have worked out from our own resources: something that flesh and blood could not have shown us, something unpredictable from where we stand, something that could not have been extrapolated from the given and the familiar.

Let’s go back to the passage again. Peter names Jesus the Christ, and that is what we remember. But what happens here is an exchange of names, a mutual renaming. After Peter has renamed Jesus, Jesus takes Peter’s familiar name—“Blessed are you Simon son of Jonah,” and replaces it with a new one: “I tell you, you are Peter.” On the one hand Peter says, “you have been called a prophet, but I call you the anointed Son of God”; and on the other Jesus says, “you have been called Simon, but I call you Peter, the rock, because you have understood who I am.”

As we stand before Christ, we are all given a new name; a name that comes not from the accumulation of our lives, from who other people say we are, but a name that frees us from all that baggage; a name that introduces us, for the first time, to ourselves. If in listening to the gospel or in receiving the Eucharist, you have felt the freedom to know yourself in the truth of your own being, the sense that you are more than and other than what flesh and blood take you to be, then you have heard Christ renaming you, speaking the name that only he knows. And it is because he does that for us that we can name Jesus as the Christ. Christ is the only one who can speak to us our name of freedom and love, as he spoke Mary Magdalene’s name to her in the garden. The name was enough: she knew, then, that love had triumphed, that death had been overcome. Christ speaks the name that raises us to life; and because he can do that, we know who he is—God himself, the only one who knows who we truly are, the only one who can speak the name that calls us from the confusions of the world into the radiance of eternal life. Amen.