Matthew
16:13-20
I
generally try to make sure that all the different parts of a worship service
fit together. I try to make sure that if
the gospel reading is about, say, Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Messiah,
the Son of the Living God, that the music we sing or hear has to do with that
in some way. At times, though, it
doesn’t always work out. Earlier this
week I learned that the piece that the Jubilation Ringers would be playing this
morning was “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho” and I asked myself how on
earth that had anything to do with the sermon that I had started to block out
in the back of my head. I want to thank
Karen Bretzius for the choice, though, because it pointed me in a direction
that I needed to go. Let’s back up a
minute. Let’s review the story of Joshua
and Jericho.
Joshua
took over the leadership of the Israelites when Moses died. It was he, not Moses, who would lead them
into the Promised Land. The way there,
however, was blocked by the ancient, walled city of Jericho. He sent out spies to gather information and
they entered the town and stayed at the house of a prostitute who lived in a
house that was built into the wall and had a window overlooking the outside. When the king of Jericho sent soldiers to
find the spies, she hid them under a pile of flax and said that they had left
already. Then when night came and the
city gates were locked, she let them down to the ground through the window so
that they could escape back to Joshua.
Before that, though, she extracted a promise from them that she and her
family would be protected when the Israelites attacked. They gave their word and left. [Joshua 2]
Fast
forward a few weeks. Joshua and the
Israelites had crossed the Jordan and laid siege to Jericho. Six days in a row, their army marched around
the walls with seven priests carrying seven rams’ horns in front of the Ark of
the Covenant. That’s all they did. The seventh day, they kept going: once,
twice, three times, …seven times around the city walls. At the end, the seven priests blew the seven
rams’ horns and all the warriors and all the people shouted at the top of their
lungs, and the walls of the city crashed to the ground. The warriors swarmed over the rubble, and
captured the town. There was terrible
carnage that day, and it was a massacre.
This
is one of those passages from the Bible that cannot be explained away. It is one of those times when a people
unified in their belief in God acted with what they thought to be God’s
blessing in a way that we would call barbaric.
In a day when ISIS is turning Christians into martyrs, beheading the
innocent, torturing their own people, and calling it the work of God, instead
of denying that it has ever been done by our own predecessors in our own faith,
perhaps we should point to scenes like this and say, “We know what that
bloodthirstiness is. We know what it
does. We own that it is a part of us and
our history, and we renounce it. It is
real and it is shameful, and we want no part of it. May God have mercy on us that it would ever
cross our minds to call this holy in any way.”
And we should also recall that in the midst of it there was one small
spot of mercy.
“Joshua said to the two men who had spied out the
land, “Go into the prostitute’s house, and bring the woman out of it and all
who belong to her, as you swore to her.” So
the young men who had been spies went in and brought Rahab out, along with her
father, her mother, her brothers, and all who belonged to her—they brought all
her kindred out—and set them outside the camp of Israel. They burned down the city, and
everything in it; only the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and iron,
they put into the treasury of the house of the Lord. But
Rahab the prostitute, with her family and all who belonged to her, Joshua
spared. Her family has lived in Israel ever since. For she hid the messengers
whom Joshua sent to spy out Jericho.” [Joshua 6:22-25]
Over a thousand years later, a man
named Matthew wrote about someone we call Jesus, who lived in that land and who
shared that history. He started out the
book he wrote with an account of Jesus’ genealogy. Listen closely. (I practiced these names.)
“Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the
father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, and Judah the father of Perez and
Zerah by Tamar, and Perez the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Aram, and Aram the father of Aminadab, and
Aminadab the father of Nahshon, and Nahshon the father of Salmon, and Salmon the father of Boaz by
Rahab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of King David.”
[Matthew 1:2-6]
Did
you hear the name Rahab? She, of all
people, was an ancestor of Jesus? (The
name Jesus, by the way, is a version of the Hebrew Yeshua, or Joshua – another connection to that family story.) So Jesus’ own birth came about, in part,
because of one small moment of mercy in the midst of terror.
Move forward again in the story as
Matthew tells it. Jesus has gathered
about himself a small band of disciples and has begun to make a name for
himself.
“Now when Jesus came into the district of
Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, ‘Who do people say that the Son of Man
is?’ And they said, ‘Some say
John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the
prophets.’ He 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.’” [Matthew
16:13-17]
Peter
identifies Jesus as the Messiah. He is
the leader that the Jews of his day were awaiting to lead them out of the
tyranny of the Romans and the religious oligarchy that collaborated with them. He is the one who would establish a kingdom
of righteousness and justice that would exclude the powers that were holding
them down and taxing them until they starved and living in luxury at their
expense. To borrow language from a
different source, the Messiah would set up a sort of Caliphate where God’s rule
would be enforced and God’s law would be the law of the land, and woe betide
the sinner!
Ah, but Jesus knew what that would
lead to. It is his family story,
preserved in holy scripture for all to read.
He presented an alternative version of leadership that excluded the raw
brutality of power, one that actually flew in its face. It was hard for the disciples to
swallow. It still is.
“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 killed, and on the third
day be raised. And Peter took him aside
and began to rebuke him, saying, ‘God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen
to you.’ But he turned and said
to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are
setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’” [Matthew 16:21-23]
It was and is hard to take, because if that can
happen to the Messiah, the Chosen One, that can happen to his followers.
“Then Jesus told his disciples, ‘If any want to
become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and
follow me.’” [Matthew
16:24]
The
question we might ask is not why innocent Christians are killed, but why so few
meet martyrdom, when the forces of injustice and greed and corruption and all
the –isms that they produce are no less active today than in Jesus’ time, and
not just in the Middle East. Mark
Trotter, former pastor of First United Methodist Church in San Diego, said
this:
“All of us need a purpose
that is large enough to include God and long enough to include eternity. We need a purpose that makes life worth
living and gives meaning to our dying.
We need a purpose that calls forth our true stature and elicits the
hidden fire within us. As Christians, we
are called to live with imagination and courage because we have a purpose that
endures past sunset.”[1]
Jesus,
the Messiah, the Son of the Living God, is the one who brings that purpose to
his people, to you and to me and to all who will be a part of his kingdom, one
that is not like any on earth, one where the walls have all come a-tumbling
down, where, as he said,
“Those
who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my
sake will find it.” [Matthew
16:25]
[1]
quoted in Michael S. Piazza and Cameron B. Trimble, Liberating Hope: Daring to Renew the Mainline Church (Cleveland:
The Pilgrim Press, 2011), 159.
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