St Peter Patronal Sunday (2 July 2023) - Fr Michael Bowie

There’s a famous story of an Archbishop of Canterbury (I think it may have been Geoffrey Fisher) visiting an old people’s home and asking a resident, ‘do you know who I am?’, to which the old lady replied, ‘don’t worry dear, none of us knows who we are either.’

‘Who people say the Son of Man is?’ It’s an odd question if you step back from it. This is someone with whom you regularly eat and talk and travel, admittedly someone you’ve watched doing and saying genuinely remarkable things,
but still someone you’ve been following around as a close friend, with a gang of other friends. Yet now he speaks of himself in the third person, always a worry, with an enigmatic- sounding title – ‘The Son of Man’ – and asks you to tell him who he is.

It turns out to be possibly the primary question in the gospels. We hear today how Jesus gave Peter his nickname, ‘rock’ when Peter answered it. And this naming is momentous. To recover its significance, we need to recover some sense of the sanctity of names, long lost in our culture. Peter was renamed as, at the last, we shall all be.

There’s a beautiful if slightly enigmatic verse in Revelation chapter 2:

to one who conquers I shall give some of the hidden manna and a white stone, with a new name written on it, known only to the person who receives it.

Briefly, that’s a reference to the heavenly banquet or marriage supper of the Lamb later in that book. The new name is our invitation to the end-time supper at which intimate fellowship occurs and

they will see his face and his name will be their foreheads

In the ancient world and the Old Testament, to know someone’s name, especially that of God, often meant to enter into an intimate relationship with that person and to share that person’s character or power. To be given a new name was an indication of a new status. When God’s name was applied to a place in the Old Testament, e.g. the Temple, it often indicated that his presence was there. When someone gave a name to a person or thing it meant that they possessed that person or thing. Therefore, believers’ reception of their name from God represents their final reward of consummate identification and unity with the intimate, end- time presence and power of Christ in his kingdom and under his sovereign authority. Identification with this name begins when Christ reveals himself to people, and they confess his name by faith. Hence the importance of the Holy Name of Jesus in our tradition and the point of allegiance to it. So the ‘new name’ mentioned in Revelation is a mark of membership in the community of the redeemed.

Rewinding to Peter’s naming moment, Jesus gives him a name not at the end time but at the moment at which he recognises the person in whom the end-time will be fulfilled. Confronted with that peculiar question, Peter cuts through all the reported speculation about Jesus’ identity and gives the right answer: ‘You are the Christ, the son of the living God.’ A bold, risky identification, but the truth. And Jesus responds: ‘you are Peter, the rock, and on this rock I will build my church.’

Peter saw, recognized, and acted on his recognition. This recognition is, Jesus says, the firm foundation for life with God, and it is the meaning of faith. So we learn that seeing and telling the truth, recognizing and acting upon it, in the sense that what we do and who we are is changed by the recognition, is faith, is the foundation of that life which has in it the breath of eternity. But we also note that this ‘come to Jesus moment’ doesn’t mean we’ve fully and finally arrived. Peter has been given his name, but he hasn’t got to the banquet yet.

After today’s gospel, Matthew continues:

From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. 16.21
And we know that Peter, emboldened by his recent success, now speaks again. It is sometimes better to keep quiet, especially when you’re ahead. But that isn’t who Peter is. And in speaking again Peter shows that, although he has recognised Jesus, he doesn’t yet understand what he has seen:
And Peter took him and began to rebuke him, saying, "God forbid, Lord! This shall never happen to you."
23 But he turned and said to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me; for you are not on the side of God, but of men." 16.22-23

Recognition, we are reminded, has more than one layer. We may correctly identify Jesus as Son of God, or even Saviour of the world. But is that just a form of words? Do we understand the organic process of salvation, the meaning of death and resurrection, the implications of how to be, and where to locate life, rather than mere existence? Peter has too quickly equated Jesus with the popular concept ‘Messiah’, a twitter-like shorthand he thinks he knows, but doesn’t yet understand. We spend our lives, if we do that in relationship with Jesus Christ, working out how to be truly alive, to breathe the air of eternity.
Directly after Peter has been sharply rebuked for words better left unsaid, Jesus selects him, along with two others, to witness the Transfiguration, a foretaste of the resurrection itself, the revelation of God’s life. Far from being punished for his misguided words, Peter is immediately granted a glimpse of the glorified Christ. And he blunders again in interpretation of what he sees, wanting to build booths to contain the vision: he’s still not at the banquet.

But we may surely be heartened by each of Peter’s blundering forward steps: his is a story of how, if we let it, God’s grace triumphs, because God knows us and loves us, calls us by name. And that the horizon to which we look, the glory, is a place where we too will be given our new names and welcomed into the fellowship of a banquet that is even better than a parish lunch.

Peter’s life was spent sorting out his priorities, slowly learning to get things right. The annual festival of our patron saint is as good a day as any I can imagine to take stock of our priorities and the value that we attach to them.

If we see and recognise Jesus as truly Lord and Saviour, how does that look to our neighbour, Christian or not, seeing us? And are we open to discovering that we haven’t yet arrived, that it may require us to change our mind about our priorities, even to the last moment of this life?