In every story – every book or film – there comes, sooner or later, a turning-point in the narrative: a point when a series of apparently disparate threads come together and move the story on, giving it a new direction and a new sense of purpose, and ultimately moving it towards the conclusion that the author has, presumably, planned all along.
And sometimes the narrative that is our lives also contains moments like these. We meet the love of our life. We move to a new place where new opportunities, new paths, open up before us. We choose one road rather than another, and it leads us, perhaps, to the place where we always needed to be…
In the Gospel passage we have just heard we witness just such a narrative turning-point. Jesus’s ministry until this point has been apparently aimless, which is not, of course, to say that it has been insignificant, but only that it does not seem to have had a clear goal or destination.
Since his baptism by John in the River Jordan, he has wandered with his disciples around Galilee and the surrounding regions, teaching, healing, telling stories and performing miracles, as we have heard in our Gospel readings over the last few months. He has become known, has gathered a following, gained a certain visibility. There have been hints as to his true identity – he commands the wind and the waves and they obey him, as God harnesses the power of wind and water on the first day of Creation; he feeds a great crowd with bread, as God had fed the Israelites in the wilderness with manna, bread from heaven – but these have remained no more than hints. Now this is about to change.
The exchange with his disciples at Caesarea Philippi which we hear about in today’s Gospel reading marks the beginning of a new phase in Jesus’s ministry: a phase which will culminate, one terrible Friday, in Jerusalem on a Roman cross. From now on there will be no more aimless wandering; Jesus will be moving more purposefully towards the destination that will be the backdrop to this story’s dramatic culmination. This encounter is, if you like, the briefing before the expedition.
And, in fact, in the passage which immediately follows the one we’ve heard today, Jesus will outline exactly what is going to happen next: that he will go to Jerusalem, undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. That’s it: the whole story in a nutshell. The disciples won’t listen, of course; and I suspect that Jesus realises that none of this will really make sense to them until they experience its outworking for themselves. But one thing clearly does matter to him at this stage… not that they understand the story’s dénouement, but that they understand the identity of its protagonist.
‘What’, Jesus asks his friends first, ‘are people saying about me? Who do they think I am?’. But he is not really interested in what others think of him. His real question is the one he addresses to the disciples directly: ‘Who do you say that I am?’. Oh, he knows that they won’t be able to take in his explanation of what is coming next. He knows that they will resist it, trying – misguidedly – to protect him… and to protect themselves, as if pretending not to have heard his warnings about suffering and death can prevent them from coming true. He knows that one of them will betray him, and that, when push comes to shove, one will deny knowing him, and the others will be nowhere to be seen. But for now, none of that matters. What matters is that they have grasped, or begun to grasp, who he is, because it is this, in the end, that is the turning-point on which this story hinges.
And for a moment, at least, impulsive, instinctive, impetuous Peter seems to have got it. ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God’ he responds. And he is right, of course. But his confession of Jesus as the Messiah also raises more questions than it answers… and these will be, to a large extent, the questions that will accompany Jesus on this next stage of his journey, all the way to the cross.
What does it mean to call Jesus ‘Messiah’? Is he, then, the one for whom Israel has been waiting for so long? The one who will restore Israel’s sovereignty and free God’s people from the hated Romans? A great king and military leader, a new David…? ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews’ will be the label affixed to his cross. And yet nothing that Jesus has done so far in his ministry (and nothing that he will do from here on) suggests that he is going to be that kind of a Messiah.
It’s no coincidence, surely, that this exchange takes place where it does, at Caesarea Philippi, a city which had been named by Philip, the son of Herod the Great, in honour of the Roman Emperor, Caesar Augustus. In this, of all places, the contrast between Caesar Augustus, ruler of the whole known world, and an upstart preacher and healer from Nazareth could not be clearer. If Jesus is to be the sort of Messiah who will threaten the Romans and reestablish the fortunes of Israel he has his work cut out for him!
But, of course, Jesus’s kingdom – as he will tell Pilate – is not of this world, his power – power which even the wind and waves obey – is of a different order of magnitude and will emerge not through military victory and earthly glory but through suffering and death, weakness and humiliation. At this turning-point in the story of Jesus’s ministry, we are also reminded that his is a story that turns upside-down established hierarchies of powerful and powerless, of strength and weakness, of insider and outsider, of first and last. It is a story that invites us to look at the world differently… and, having seen the world differently, also to live differently in it, following Jesus’ own example.
The first reading that we heard today also reminds us that the story of God’s relationship with humankind has, from the beginning, been one that has flown in the face of political power and earthly greatness. Consider the bravery of the Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, ordinary women who dare to lie to Pharaoh himself in order to protect the babies of their own people. Consider the faith of Moses’ mother, casting her tiny baby into the water in a makeshift boat, entrusting him to the mercy of God against all the odds. Consider too the daring of Pharaoh’s daughter, adopting as her own one of the hated foreign babies her father would gladly have seen drowned. And consider the vulnerability of Moses, the liberator of God’s people, a tiny baby in a papyrus basket, pointing forward perhaps to a future saviour, a tiny baby laid in a manger.
Peter’s recognition of Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of the living God, marks, as we have said, a turning point in the story of Jesus, a story which continues from Caesarea Philippi to Jerusalem, and then onwards from Jerusalem across the Middle East, to Rome – the seat of those Caesars who liked to think of themselves as gods – and on and on, to England – yes, right here to Whitkirk, right up to the present day.
As we will hear next week, Peter still has much to learn on his part of this journey. His recognition of Jesus is the beginning, not the end, of his story, just as Moses’ recognition of God in the burning bush will be the beginning of his. But Peter’s rock-solid identification of Jesus as the Son of God is the essential starting-point for all that will follow – for him, and for us, the church, founded on that same belief in a God who humbled himself, who was born as one of us, for every one of us. In a moment, we will stand to profess our faith together, saying, as we do every week: ‘We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God’. We, like Peter, will confess Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of the living God. Like Peter, we are not perfect; like him, we inevitably still have much to learn. Like his, our stories will have their twists and turns. But I pray that when we say those words today we will recognise them for what they are: the foundation stone of our faith. And I pray that every time we say them we will allow them to be for us a new turning-point in our personal journey of faith, the narrative of our walk with Jesus, drawing us ever closer to him.