Revelation & Identity
St Peter’s Eastern Hill August 27th 2023
Isaiah 51.1-6, Ps. 138, Romans 12.1-8, Matthew 16.13-20
Christianity is a religion of Revelation. By Revelation I mean that insight into God which we receive “from above”. We know Revelation has come, when we recognise a Truth we cannot reason our way into. Blessed are you Simon, Son of Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven!
Peter’s confession of Christ came as a revelatory insight, and, in some sense, every Christian confession does. One can never quite explain how it is that we have come to recognise the divine identity of Jesus of Nazareth; not adequately; the same goes for his living Presence in our midst and at the core of who we are. Even as the truths of the faith may meet our deepest intuitions about God, they are not founded upon such intuition, nor are they conclusions that one reaches by reasoning. Our faith in the Divine Son is, at its deepest level, a gift that comes from beyond us.
This Revelatory Character of our faith can be a great sticking point in accounting for the Faith, to ourselves as much as other people. But when held with the right spirit, it is something to embrace. It is not a matter of smiling smugly and thinking, “We know something about God other people don’t”, which is how claims about Revelation can sometimes be construed. When rightly embraced, Revelation asks of us the opposite of arrogance. It asks of us humility. It is a matter of accepting Truth that we can neither prove nor deduce for ourselves. We recognise that we cannot comprehend or define God for ourselves, only accept God as he reveals himself to us. We take these things which, by grace, we recognise to be the case, and go from there in making sense of God’s relationship with us and with the world around us.
We might well describe this—embracing God’s Self-Revelation—as, in a sense, the first step on the way of the Cross. (Which is, by the way, the very next passage in Matthew’s Gospel: his divine identity having been revealed to Peter, Christ openly predicts his Passion.) The Cross is that supreme revelation where Christ as man surrendered his life wholly to God, and Christ as God—this is the bit we can’t forget—Christ as God surrendered himself wholly to us. By way of that Self-Offering we are drawn into the Great Mystery of the God who gives, the God who reveals himself. To accept Revelation is to take a step on that same great Journey of Surrender.
You notice how right after he has identified Christ, Christ identifies him. He redefines him, in fact: And I tell you that you are Peter, you are Rock, and on this Rock I will build my church. The journey that St Peter was about to take toward embracing who God is in the Mystery of the Cross, is the same journey he had to take to discover who he was himself. The identity of the disciple flows from the Revelation of Christ’s Identity.
This is true, not only for Peter, but for the whole body of the faithful.
I don’t think it’s particularly novel to observe that we live in a society where many people are deeply anxious over questions of their identity. That anxiety may in part come from a belief that it is either up to us or up to other people to shape who we are. So, take your pick. I define myself or someone else will define me. This is quite a reasonable source of anxiety, because if one leaves it up to others, they are quite likely to get it wrong.
The Christian Faith offers something different to either of those alternatives. As in the case of God’s revelation, so when it comes to ourselves. We recognise that our identity, while not something simply imposed on us from the outside, does have a foundation beyond ourselves. It is rooted in the very ground of our Being in God. He is the Word who made us, and the Saviour who redeems us, remakes us, giving us new clarity about who we are called to be before Him. Our identities are something to be revealed, not invented, but discovered and drawn out of us.
What I mean by this is that we don’t read through St Paul’s letter to the Romans and say, ‘Hm. I think I’d quite like to be the Prophet.’ That is not in our power to choose. We engage with our Lord and with the world around us, and the identity emerges – the gifts are drawn out of us. We find ourselves serving or teaching or giving or whatever it may be, and we realise it is not just something we are doing, it is someone we are becoming—by the grace of God. To be sure, most character and most gifts can be fostered and honed, but in the first instance, they are simply discovered. Revealed. More than that. They flow from our relationship with God. From whence comes the wisdom, the joy, the prophetic insight, and so on—even, perhaps, when we are not conscious of it. God is the One who is the Source of our being and of what we offer the world.
This is certainly the case with “Simon, Son of Jonah”. In many instances one would think he was better nicknamed The Waverer than The Rock. Of all the disciples he is the one we see Wavering the most. Certainly, our Lord saw that more clearly than Peter did himself. But our Lord didn’t waver, he didn’t change his mind about Peter. Through his relationship with our Lord Peter found the stable ground he needed to become Rock for the fledging Church. Christ is his Rock, a Rock of faithfulness and stability, and St Peter became a sacrament of Him in the world.
This is how we are called to understand ourselves, and to see the people around us. We are to see people, not necessarily even in terms of their office or the labels drawn from our environment, but in terms revelatory of their relationship with God. Most of the descriptors given in St. Paul’s letter are ones that could make a person smile at themselves. They are not titles that would really puff a person up. My personal favourite is The Exhorter: the one going around ‘exhorting’ others. (That title could quite easily become a back-handed compliment, couldn’t it?) Even The Leader is simply marked by ‘diligence’ (nothing too exalted). All the same, take any one of them—The Giver, The Teacher—and it is deeply affirming. Because each one points beyond the self, to the ground of our being in God. Each one is a walking sacrament of the God who has revealed himself to us.
Mthr Kathryn