THE STRENGTH OF PETER

Sermon delivered on the 29th June 2008, St. Peter’s Day by Fr. Nicholas J.G. Sykes in the congregation of St. Alban’s Church of England (Cayman Islands).

Scriptures: Ezekiel 3: 22 - 27    Acts 12: 1-11    S Matthew 16: 13 - 19

S. Matthew 16: 18 "And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it."

The Scriptures today include the idea that when a disciple of the Lord speaks as a disciple, his words are being directed by the Lord and are not to be considered just his own words. I suppose this is related to the concept of predestination that we having been doing a little work on recently - a concept that is not very acceptable to the modern mind, yet one that the thought of previous ages and certainly that of the Bible accepts, though in the context that the Scriptures provide for it

In our Old Testament lesson, for instance, we have part of the quite difficult beginning of the book of the prophet Ezekiel in which the prophet receives a number of commissions from the Lord. This fifth commission begins by being a commission to silence. Ezekiel is told. "I will make your tongue cling to the roof of your mouth, so that you shall be mute and unable to reprove them. For they are a rebellious house." But there is a promise with the commission. "But when I speak with you, I will open your mouth, and you will say to them: ‘Thus says the Lord God’. So silence is eventually to give way to speech, and both the silence and the speech, as well as the transition from the one to the other, are within the authoritative will of God, and serve the particular purpose of the Lord at the time for salvation.

Jesus no doubt shared the biblical thought-pattern about this. He specifically declares to S. Peter when he had seen his thinking and his speech dramatically opened: "Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven." After which declaration, come the words of the text today: "And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it."

Perhaps our Lord had for some time been searching for what He knew to be an adequate foundation in human terms for the building of the Church. Of course the disciples were with Him now continually, and theirs was a shared life with His. But in spite of that, there were times when the disciples’ attitudes and assumptions grieved Jesus. But here our Lord recognises in Peter’s sudden admission a breakthrough. His patient months of toil were beginning to bear fruit. His teaching and above all His whole pattern of life had started to have their effect. "Simon, son of Jonah, you are a happy, a blessed man" said Jesus to him. That word for blessed, or happy, is, in the original Greek, makarios - the same word that begins all the Beatitudes: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven" and so on. Simon Peter now shared the blessedness that Jesus taught was the characteristic of those who were to receive the Kingdom of God. Peter had dared to enter the territory of those who are prepared to be led by the Spirit rather than by what others say. While others were being led by a sort of religious rumour-factory about Jesus - that He was John the Baptist risen again, or Elijah, or Jeremiah or one of the prophets - Peter expressed the deep conviction that under the influence of the Father and the Son had been forming in the depths of his spirit - that here in Jesus was none other than the one who was to come to redeem Israel: the Messiah! Truly, it was no human being that had led Peter to this belief. "Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father in heaven."

There is a kind of symmetry in this passage. The Lord calls forth from Simon Peter the recognition of who He the Lord is. And immediately the recognition is given, Jesus then recognises Peter the Rock for who he truly is. There is a play on words, for the Aramaic that Jesus is believed to have usually spoken used the same word for both the name Peter and the common noun "rock": "You are kepha and on this kepha I will build My Church."

But what was it that Jesus found so rock-like, so dependable about Peter? The picture from the Gospels of Peter is of an impetuous rather than a dependable person. He was always the first to get into anything. He walked on the water and then sank. He boasted that he would never let Jesus down, yet denied Him in His presence. In the end perhaps Peter’s recognition of his own frailty, of his own utter undependability in himself, was what brought him to an unmixed state of dependance on the Lord.

And it is this little biographical detail of Peter’s life that we concentrate on this morning, this acknowledgement of Jesus beyond what others said of Him, that was sufficient to show Jesus how rock-like Simon Peter could become. For Jesus not only calls and accepts us as we are, but he recognises in us what we may become.

Jesus saw that Peter’s sudden expression of recognition of the depths of who He, Jesus, really was, was the measure of the depth of a foundation that could be dug in his personality. Jesus saw that in that moment it was depth speaking to depth. Jesus saw that, after all, Peter’s soul could go below the surface of things and that therefore it could become truly rock-like, truly dependable. We recall how Jesus spoke of the man who fashioned his life after the Lord’s words as like a man who builds his house upon a rock. Peter was becoming truly rock-like because he was beginning to build his convictions upon Jesus’ words and teachings themselves.

"On this rock I will build My Church." The Church is built on the rock of dependability, on the secure rock of the divinely-inspired knowledge that Jesus is the Son of the living God. Jesus is more than a good teacher, more than a prophet, more than any other figure from history. No Church can be strong whose acknowledgement of Him is weak. No Church can be dependable in being "about the Master’s business" if it does not exist in a state of real dependence upon that Master. Our dependence on God is strong when we admit that in every area of our corporate life we could only be surviving by His gracious Providence. We truly depend upon God in Christ (and are therefore depend-able to Him) when in response to His words we change some direction that we were set upon, and walk as closely to His way that we know.)

For we are called to be a link in the chain: we are to depend upon God in Christ that we as the Church might become dependable servants of His and be about the business we are supposed to be about. As the Church we are to be a living incarnate sign of God’s rule and Presence. This is a tremendous calling and should mean more to us than all of our natural desires and wishes. Thus Peter in his mature years could say "If you endure suffering even when you have done right, God will bless you for it. It was to this that God called you, for Christ Himself suffered for you and left you an example, so that you would follow in His steps."

The Church is called to be dependable upon the Lord in every circumstance. Let us thank God for the rock on which we are founded and seek to build our "house" upon it too.