Sunday’s Readings: Twelfth Sunday after Trinity

Proper 16: Isaiah 51.1-6; Psalm 138; Romans 12.1-8; Matthew 16.13-20

JESUS asks the disciples who people think he’s. Peter affirms that Jesus is the Messiah. It is a moment of divine disclosure which also points towards Jesus’s humanity.

How a lot of us have asked our friends: “What are people saying about me?” We can have done something silly or embarrassing and be fearful that individuals are laughing at us, having glimpsed our vulnerability.

This is unavoidable during — to make use of the old-fashioned word that I prefer — courtship. We cannot clarify our attraction to a different person without risking others’ glimpsing our vulnerability, which pride desires to conceal. In the novel Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Lucas, a plain and plain-speaking friend of Elizabeth Bennet, warns that hiding one’s attraction to a different person could also be dangerous: “It is typically an obstacle to be so very guarded. If a lady conceals her affection . . . from the item of it, she may lose the chance of fixing him; and it would then be but poor consolation to imagine the world equally at the hours of darkness.”

Most reflections on the Caesarea Philippi episode concentrate on Peter’s declaration and what flows from it. This is comprehensible if Peter is supposed to represent us — and if his insight is supposed to encourage our own. For the Church as an establishment, Jesus’s corresponding affirmation of Peter matters most: if Acts 2 is the birthday of the Church, this scene is the confirmation of her conception, promising the fulfilment of secure delivery in due time.

However interesting we discover ourselves, we should know that God — the Holy Trinity — is the main focus of our life. Faith is content with being a part of God’s pattern, not its centre. It is proper to see the guts of this Gospel episode as consisting first in human recognition of Jesus’s identity, then the human response to it. But there’s also a spot for reflecting on Jesus the human individual made within the image of God, as he reveals his humanity by asking his friends and followers what individuals are saying about him.

One detail in Matthew’s version piqued my interest. There, Jesus refers to himself within the third person: “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” In the opposite two Synoptics, the query is asked in the primary person, not the third: “Who do people say that I’m?” (Mark 8.27, Luke 9.18). If Matthew’s Gospel were like Julius Caesar’s history of his wars in Gaul (which was the primary translation I ever published), asking the query within the third person would have a depersonalising effect, giving an impression of objectivity. Some commentators minimise the discrepancy, arguing that, for Matthew, “Son of Man” was effectively a private name (as “Christ” also became).

There could also be no theological message behind Matthew’s substitution of “I” with “Son of Man”. But, even so, the effect is intriguing: Matthew is showing us Jesus, taking a step back from his own query, to deflect its otherwise directly personal force. This could also be because he intuits what I begin to perceive on this scene: the danger that Jesus’s query, in its original form, makes the Lord sound a bit too human — maybe even needy, or a minimum of looking as if he’s looking for reassurance.

Thinking concerning the options prompts me to look back to an event from the start of Matthew’s Gospel, just before the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry: his temptation by the devil (4.1-11). Of the three temptations that the devil dangles before Jesus, two recommend the identical lure: the universal human hunger for reassurance. Will Jesus prove to himself that he’s the Son of God by testing his power to show stones into bread or by forcing his Father to save lots of him from death?

Back then, Jesus proved his identity — by refusing to prove his identity. This time he asks who people think he’s because, I think, he wants to grasp them and their needs: this is just not about his own. Then, after they come to him, he’ll give you the chance to assist them to listen to his message concerning the Kingdom of heaven. If they’ve discovered his true identity, that have to be an indication to Jesus that their love for God is awakening. His job is to forward that burgeoning love. After all, as Charlotte Lucas concludes, “There are only a few of us who’ve heart enough to be really in love without encouragement.”