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Pentecost 12
27/8/2017

Isaiah 51:1-6
Psalm 138
Matthew 16:13-20

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“…I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” (Matthew 16.18f)

Is this not enough to send a shiver down the spine of any modern leftist Christian type (of which there a couple present here today), and enough also to raise the ire of any Royal Commissioner investigating church processes? What are we to do with the binding and loosing authority of the church given its long history of catastrophic failures, whatever good the church might also have done?

As a way into this, a couple of exegetical notes: The function of holding the “keys of the kingdom” appears a couple of times in Matthew. The first is here, when Peter is “given” the keys. The second appearance is in an attack on the scribes and Pharisees:

^23.13 ‘But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them. ¹⁵Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.

The word “key” is hidden in the verb “lock”. Jesus gives to Peter what is implicitly held by the present religious authorities. To the extent that Peter does the opposite of what Jesus criticises here, he would handle the keys appropriately.

Linked to holding the keys is the authority to “bind” and to “loose”. This also occurs again later in the gospel, where the shift is from Peter personally to the church more generally (that is, from a singular “you” to a plural “you”; cf. Matthew 18.18). “Binding and loosing” was a technical term for determining when laws apply and when not. Jesus has already done some important binding and loosing in Matthew’s gospel to this point. In the Sermon on the Mount we hear repeatedly, “You have heard that it was said… but I say to you” (with respect to adultery or murder or oath-making, etc.; 5.21ff). This is a “binding”, an extension of a regulation. On the other hand, Jesus’ actions and teachings in relation to the Sabbath amount to a “loosing” of the Sabbath (12.1-14). It is this kind of interpretative authority Jesus gives to Peter.

Of itself, authority to interpret is unremarkable. Any community will find that it has to invest someone with such authority. If there is an offence in the text here, it is the linking of this authority with heaven: whatever you bind or loose on earth will be bound or loosed in heaven. Can God be bound or loosed in this way? It is as if Jesus allows that the church’s will be done, in heaven as on earth. How is this anything other than simply terrifying?

Yet Scripture is not naïve here. The problem of the church mishandling its authority has escaped neither the attention nor the contention of the Scripture. In fact, the authority given to the church, personified in Peter, is immediately over-stepped by the church, in Peter, and receives immediate condemnation from Jesus. To make the connections between the authorisation and its misuse clearer, let’s play a little with what comes next in the story:

²¹ From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be bound [killed], and on the third day be loosed [raised]. ²² And the church [Peter] took him aside and sought to bind him [began to rebuke him], saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” ²³ But he turned and said to the church [Peter], “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you do not understand your confession [are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things].”

What do we see here? See that in Peter’s (in our) identification of who Jesus is – one of the climaxes of the gospel narrative – both the great authority of the church and its failure to exercise that authority appropriately are immediately manifest. From the outset the text demonstrates what we might imagine we now see clearly only with the benefit of hindsight: the church will bind and loosen in the wrong way. The authority and its abuse are part of the gospel story and not a contradiction of it. The Scriptures are not naïve.

And now to push a little deeper: if the first thing the church does with its authority is to bind Christ then it is in fact the only thing the church does with its authority. To put it differently: if Jesus is the presence of the kingdom of heaven – an earthly binding and loosing which makes heaven present – then Peter’s attempt to restrain him is the authorised church manifesting the original, foundational sin. The fall from Peter’s free confession of Jesus as Messiah to his rebuke of Jesus is the Fall we know from Genesis. “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build…”; “You are Adam and Eve, and all of this is yours, except…” Here Peter (and we with him) takes as his own the divine prerogative to know what is good and what is evil, and judges God (cf. Genesis 3).

This arrogance is untenable but it is central to relationship between God and God’s people. And the point of recounting the failure even of those who rise to the heights of Peter is to illustrate that the problem is intractable. Earth will bind heaven. What, then, is heaven to do?

What heaven does not do is convene a Royal Commission into church failures, or in any other way bring an “outside” authority to bear to effect justice. There is no outside authority; “the church” here is all humankind manifest in the unfortunate Peter, in our “parents” Adam and Eve, and so in us. What heaven “does” is the cross: the cross as the place at which the irresistible force of our willingness to bind God meets the immovable object of God’s loosing love.

But the cross is a difficult sea to navigate. This is partly because we consider that the human abuse of its freedom is a moral problem, and so one which we can sort out. Properly, scripturally, the human condition is a mystery within which contradictory things are held in tension. And so the cross is both darkness and light, death and life. The offence of the cross – its darkness – is what forces Peter’s hand to attempt to bind Jesus here. Yet it is this attempt to bind God which makes the cross what Jesus then calls us to as the source of revealing and liberating light.

If the Scripture is right about us and about God and about our relationship, we will not sort out the “problem” of moral failure arising from, or being met with, the blessing of God. This we cannot untangle this knot; the cross marks an impenetrable truth which is nevertheless a necessary truth.

What we can say is that the call to take up the (“our”) cross is not a call to do what Jesus did. The cross marks the collision of our high calling with our capacity to overstep. Jesus will be judged and condemned – marked – by the cross. If Jesus is in any way indicative of the divine, then the divine itself is also marked by the cross. It comes to be that, when we look at God, we can only see as if through a cross-shaped keyhole.

For us to “take up” the cross is for us to see that this is how God lets it stand. Through the cross we see God, and God sees us. We must take up our cross in following Jesus not in order to do what he has done, but in order that we might see him at all, and be seen by him. Perhaps here we can borrow Paul’s “through a glass darkly” (1 Corinthians 13): the mystery of the cross is the darkness through which we are beginning to perceive just what love might be, how far it might go, how distant we still are from being such lovers ourselves and, yet, how deeply we are loved nevertheless.

Of course, there is no “keyhole”, there is no “glass”; all of this is a playfulness by which we might be opened to what cannot be directly said or experienced with simple moral logic. We can’t say it directly because, while sin is quite logical and rational, grace is not. Grace looks like play in contrast to hard moral work.

We open ourselves to the logic of grace in a similarly playful way in the drama of our weekly liturgy. A body broken and blood poured out are the signs of human authority over-stepped, even by those who ought to have gotten it right. And so the ghastly act of eating and drinking the tokens of body and blood is supposed to be ghastly. There is a shock here. It is the shock of Peter’s fall from Great Confessor to Grand Inquisitor, which is the shock of an apple plucked greedily from a branch, which is – to proffer but one non-scriptural example – is the shock of cover-ups of the sexual abuse of children in the church, which is the shock of a God crucified by his own people, the heart of every moral shock. Eating and drinking here is a reception of our own brokenness.

Yet, at the same time, we receive the elements as a sign of a reconciliation, and of an overcoming. If God only sees us through the cross, God nevertheless sees us, although not as we do, “in a glass, darkly”. If the gate between heaven and earth has a cross-shaped keyhole, then God’s eye is pressed up against it. You see much, much more through a crevice when you are right up close. We look though the cross from a distance and so see but a little of God and a lot of the cross, but God is pressed right up against it and so sees all which can be seen through it. The closer we get to that keyhole, the more we realise that what is to be seen through it is the eye of God, beholding us, pressed up so close that he can no longer see the offensive cross but sees only through it.

What does all of this mean?

It means that if the church has an authority to bind and loose on earth and in heaven, it is a cross-shaped authority. In the cross we know that everything we will ever do has already been comprehended, understood, judged, for when we look to God for confirmation of our authoritative actions and statements we see only the cross. But we know also that everything we will ever do is also redeemed, for the more the cross fills our field of vision, the more we discover ourselves to be caught in the loving gaze of God.

The cross binds us and looses us. It is only when we are confined and liberated in this way that we have any binding and loosing authority from God.

In all of this – and it’s been a longer haul today than usual – I’ve not said enough to persuade anyone. Persuasion through argument is another form of moralism, and that is not the province of the gospel.

There is here, in the end, just an invitation: to take up the cross, to turn it over in heart and in mind, to consider whether it might be the key to who you are, to who God wills to be for you, and so be the means by which the God’s kingdom is unlocked.

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Pentecost 11
20/8/2017

Isaiah 56:1, 6-8
Psalm 67
Matthew 15:10-28

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“Dogs”, we tell ourselves, is not a very nice way to speak about people who are different from us. Such a sentiment, then, on the lips of Jesus, is kind of “uncomfortable”.

With a view to softening the blow, it’s not uncommon these days to imagine that here we see that even Jesus is “human” – even he can be wrong in his estimation of others, even he has things to learn. This is declared sometimes almost with relief – if Jesus gets it wrong, then we feel a little better when we do – and thanks is given to God for the strength of character of this courageous woman who, through her persistence, teaches Jesus an important lesson.

And yet, why is it that in every other instance in the gospels Jesus is apparently always in “control”, always understanding, leading, directing, challenging and rebuking appropriately, but that just here – at an otherwise unremarkable point in the story – he drops the ball? More likely he does not and we are simply seeing and hearing the wrong thing here.

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been playing with the nature of the biblical text – the intention of its forms in parable and miracle, how these elements operate and cooperate in proclaiming God’s kingdom. Here we have another miracle story, although the shock of what Jesus says is so great that it pretty much overshadows the shock of the miracle. The modern liberal response here is not so much, “Jesus could not have healed the girl,” as it is, “Jesus ought not to have said that.”

But let’s take a deep breath and bring our thinking over recent weeks to bear here also. We have heard from Jesus that the parables are told because they both hide and reveal. This we have also extended to the way the miracles stories work in the narrative. What, then, is being seen and not perceived, heard and not understood, as we hear today’s story? If we attend to what actually happens in the exchange between the Gentile and Jesus, we see that she gets what she desires not because of her quick wit but because she actually agrees with Jesus: “Yes, Lord”; “Yes, Lord, a dog, and yet even the dogs gather up the crumbs from under the children’s table”.

“Yes, Lord, and yet…” Jesus meets this with, “Great is your faith!” But what is this faith? It is not that Jesus could heal her daughter, otherwise he would have met her first request with the declaration and the healing. The faith she demonstrates is in the connection between her “Yes” and her “and yet.” Yes, it is the children’s bread and yet it is for me, too. Her “faith” is that she recites the promise of God that all the nations will be blessed with, or through, God’s “children”, Israel. Her faith is in the one who made this promise, and she speaks God’s promise to Jesus, and Jesus replies, Amen.

We are in the same kind of space we discovered last week. There Peter said to Jesus on the water, I will know that it is you if you command me to come to you, and make it that I can. Today, the woman says to Jesus, You are my God too, if you are the God of Israel. With you, Jesus, crumbs are enough.

The miracle in each story indicates the offence – the utter strangeness – of what is said in the exchanges in the story. Does God really give what God commands? Does God command righteousness, and then give it? This is not how it works with our commands and it would be a miracle if it did. We imagine that God commands that we be his, and that we must then become his, earning this relationship.

And can crumbs be enough? Not with “real” bread, which is why Hotham Mission has put much time and money into food programs and food security research. But this is not a story about bread as such; it is about relationship, participation and blessing. Bread is here a metaphor for these things, which is to say that these things are as essential for life as bread.

The bread metaphor, however, is extended beautifully by the woman’s quip about the crumbs, by which she declares not “I also deserve to be fed” but rather, “So abundant is God’s provision of bread to his children that there are leftovers” – “crumbs”. She speaks the gospel, as did Peter when he challenged Jesus on the stormy waters. [It is worth noting in passing that we’ve only just heard of a miraculous feeding, after which 12 baskets of “crumbs” were collected; and another follows today’s story, after which 7 baskets are collected.]

Whereas our concern tends to be about the woman’s feelings at being excluded because of who she is, she appears in the story not as one offended by Jesus but as one confident in the quality of the bread he brings to the “children”. We are not to defend her, but to believe as she believes.

What is it that she believes? That it is through these few that the many are blessed. And what does this mean, practically? How is it also our truth? We can perhaps drive the point home most clearly with a little “embodied” demonstration. Look to the person next to you and say to them, “Woof!” Are we not all here “Gentile dogs”? The church – which is almost completely Gentile – has its very being from the crumbs of God’s love for Israel. We forget this and, in the forgetting, we harden grace into law – we make ourselves the source of the blessing (which is why we take offence at Jesus here).

But the church is not a community constructed out of the convergence of general goodness (in which, for example, the Canaanite woman shares); it is an emergence from a blessing which took place in a particular time and place which is not our time and place. We have a part in the people of God not because we are somehow equal to everyone else, and so are naturally deserving of good standing before God. God started somewhere else, and we have been picked up along the way.

It does not matter in the end who is first and who is second, who is fed at the table and who is not, for all will be fed. But we forget the ordering at our peril – the peril of self-righteousness – and at the peril of all to whom we might be a blessing.

This is because we obscure the way God works in the world at the risk of what God actually offers. We speak so easily in the church of forgiveness but what is forgiveness if not the gift of life from outside of us, a blessing with its origin outside of us? In fact, this leads us to a connection which is little short of horrifying for good-minded people such as we are: we might see in our story this morning that the Canaanite woman is “forgiven” for not being a Jew.

This, of course, makes no moral sense, because morals are all about responsibility for fault, and she is no more responsible for her heritage than anyone could possibly be. This is why we take offence here, moralists that we tend to be. It makes no moral sense but it makes good theological sense to speak of her being “forgiven” in this way, because forgiveness is properly defined not by the fault but by the gift. And the gift is always the same: Sinner? You are mine, says God. Canaanite? Mine. Dead? Mine.

The basis upon which that extraordinary woman made her appeal to Jesus is same basis upon which the Christian becomes a Christian in conversion, on which she confesses sin and expects to hear the absolution, on which she takes the death and life of another in sharing bread and wine around a table as a source of new life.

The gift is always the same – that we are claimed – and it always comes from beyond us. And this is why Christians are called to be lovers and givers in the form of evangelism and the service of others. For love is not mere attraction but, more completely, gift. Giving is not at all exchange but the one-way flow of love to another in some concrete form of blessing. And this is always good news.

Such love and such a flow are what we see in the Loving Giver in our story today, who has set as his own reason for being: to let the dogs in.

Such love and such a flow are to be the shape of our own lives. Let us, then, so love and so give, to God’s greater glory and to the richer humanity of all who still hunger for the children’s bread.

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Pentecost 10
13/8/2017

1 Kings 19:9-18
Psalm 85
Matthew 14:22-33

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We hear of Jesus walking on the water and the temptation is strong to ask the question, Did it really happen? To this question the response of the Scriptures is, in no small part, Who cares? Who cares whether Jesus could walk on water? Who cares whether he fed 5000 people with a few loaves and fish? Who cares whether he was raised from the dead?

Now, we can understand the “Who cares?” question coming from the sceptic but could the Scriptures be so impious as to answer in this way? Or, perhaps more to the point, should the preacher be so impious as to suggest this? Just between you and me, your preacher is capable of great impiety – although he thinks that this is probably not an instance.

How could that be so? The problem with the “Did it really happen?” question is that it is a closed question. We might imagine that we are asking it openly, as a scientist might ask about how an apple falls or an acid bites, but the point is that the scientist’s questions are also closed, however earnest she is as a scientist. Such questions are closed not in terms of their sincerity but because there is no deep human meaning attached to the answers. The answers might describe how to move the world but in themselves will not move it; we need to want to move it, and in this is the “meaning” of such answers.

In a similar way, if we could prove a “Yes” answer to the “Did it really happen?” question on any of the miracles of the Scriptures, the Scriptures would ask of us again, So what? What are you going to do with that? What do these 2000 year old stunts have to do with you today? This, of course, is a question often unthinkingly tossed at the Scriptures but the Scriptures toss it right back: what could a Yes mean? The meaning of a Yes is much less clear that we usually imagine.

There are miracle stories in the gospel accounts, of course, but they are largely distractions to us in a way not unlike the distractions of the parables. We’ve seen in the last few weeks that Jesus said he used parables because in them, “seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand” (cf. Matthew 13.13-15). The same could be said of the gospel’s use of the miracles. We often imagine that it is quite clear what we are to see in these stories. We might even imagine that, were we ever convinced that we actually witnessed a miracle, we would know what it meant. This is the assumption in the mocking request for a miracle, both in the Scriptures and today. Yet, to recall again last week’s suggestion that the miracles are parables and the parables are miracles, the miracles also have a “seeing, they do not perceive” quality. We think we know what they would be all about if they actually happened, but we are easily mistaken.

How might such a dynamic be in play in this morning’s text? What is there to be seen apart from the spectacle of a person who walks on water in precisely the way that everyone else doesn’t?

We hear that the disciples see Jesus coming to them on the water but fear that it is a ghost. The fear is important. They are not amazed that they see Jesus on the water but imagine something more sinister. Jesus responds to the anxiety. He asks not, “Didn’t you know that I could even walk on water?”, but declares, “Do not fear, it is I”.

Peter’s response arises out of the disciples’ anxiety. We hear not “that’s amazing” in response to the miracle but the surprising, “If it is you Lord, command me to come onto the water with you.” Notice what Peter’s response is not: it is not, “If you, Jesus, can walk on water, then make it such that I can as well. Peter does not say, “Let me walk on the water too”. We hear, rather: “If it is you, command me to come to you.” Peter tests the “ghost” not by wanting to walk on the water himself, but by seeing whether it can command him to walk on the water. The implication is, “I will know that it is you, Jesus, if you command me to come to you.”

This, surely, is an odd proposal to our ears. Anyone could simply utter a crazy command like this, not least a tempting siren in the waters on a wild night. But here is the faith of Peter – and of the church – at its very best: the confidence that Jesus makes possible what he commands. It is for this that Peter listens, and looks.

Jesus gives the command; Peter walks. But this is not Jesus performing a “nature miracle” and so demonstrating himself to have the divine power of the creator. The thing which is established is that the ghost is Jesus. How do I know that it is him? Because he made possible what he commanded; this is the proof of his divinity. This is the work of Jesus, of God; in this are they “miraculous” – that they effect what they command: “let there be light” (and there is); “be clean” (and we are).

If Jesus did actually pull a stunt like this, now – in the text as Scripture – it is something else: something deeper and richer, something which relegates our typical concern with mere miracles to “Who Cares?” Our story this morning declares, What God commands, God gives.

So far as sheer miracles go, if there is a reason we don’t do a lot of walking on water these days it is simply that God doesn’t command such silliness. Instead of wondering why we don’t see such miracles today, we might wonder what it is that God does command of us, how it might be that God might provide what he commands, and what our “posture” as disciples is to be between that divine command and divine fulfilment. So let’s turn to that.

Our lives are filled with commands – to do, to be, to have, to desire, to give, to live – and those people or situations which make these demands of us rarely contribute to their fulfilment. We are made responsible for ourselves, for our standing before each other and so for our standing before God. In this, life becomes a matter of anxiety – whether it is manifest on the surface of our lives, or is deeply hidden behind the protective measures we’ve constructed around ourselves. Do these things and, so, save yourselves.

Now, the point here is not that God must have commanded these things and, so, God will give them. It is the other way around: if what is commanded is not given by the one who commands it, that one is not God. There is certainly something which commands of us that we be relaxed and comfortable, educated, healthy, live in a certain suburb, drive a certain car, speak with a certain accent and style, live a long life, be beautiful according to local expectation. Something commands these things but it is not God. In such things we are left alone to succeed or fail, to attain “life” as we imagine it, or to sink below the waves as we perceive them.

There is certainly something which commands that our data be backed up, our opinions be surveyed, our insurance premiums paid, our budgets be balanced, our accommodations be of a certain type, that the sound system work and that the children be quiet… but it is not God. These commands and the anxieties they create come from elsewhere, however much we might be pleased to hear them.

Any such penultimate things might be used by God, but they could also be different from what we imagine or desire and still be used by God. God does not command that we and our things be useful but simply makes them so. This is the meaning of creation out of nothing and salvation by grace alone.

What does God command? Come. This command is delivered to us as we are and not as we ought to be. There is no moral or spiritual limbo through which we have to pass in order to be able to respond, nothing which has to be gotten straight before we move. Jesus says, Come. “So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus”. As simple as that, if God makes possible what God commands.

There is only one miracle at the heart of Christian confession: a God who gives what he commands and whose one command is that we be his. God says to us, Come to me, be my children. And it is done in our hearing and stepping out. Faith is holding that God commands that we not be lost, and keeps us safe in that command. That being done, we are then free to do with all the other lesser demands of us as we wish. Doubt is holding that everything which really matters is up to us, and sinking under the weight of it all into that which cannot support us but swallows us up.

Let us choose faith, with the life and freedom it brings.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.