Sally A Brown Professor Emerita, Princeton Theological Seminary
Matthew’s careful placement of today’s Gospel text (Mt 16:13-20, often referred to as Peter’s “confession of faith”) hints at its pivotal significance, both literary and theological, for this gospel as a whole. First, the setting—Caesarea Philippi—would have been striking for Mt’s earliest, late-first-century readers. In their day, the city epitomized the power of the Empire—military, religious, and commercial. Rome’s army had rallied there to sacrifice to the gods after sacking and burning Jerusalem in 70 A.D. Evidence of its many shrines and impressive architecture remains to this day.
Second, bracketing today’s reading are scenes that display the disciples’ blindness to the intensifying conflict between Jesus’ God-given mission and the preoccupations of the Jerusalem-based religious establishment. In Mt 16:6, Jesus warns his disciples about the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees, labelling it, metaphorically, as “yeast”—i.e. falsehood. His uncomprehending disciples think he’s scolding them for forgetting to buy bread (16:5). Jesus’ frustration with them reaches a new pitch (16:8-11). Then, immediately after Peter testifies to his God-given understanding of Jesus’ identity (16:16), we watch him figuratively “sink,” just as he did on the stormy lake. Basking, no doubt, in the glow of Jesus’ commendation (16:17-19), and yet quite possibly captive to popular, triumphalist notions of the mission of God’s Messiah, Peter tries to “educate” Jesus, dismissing his foretelling of suffering and death in Jerusalem. Jesus rebukes Peter in caustic terms (16:23).
A preacher might choose to develop any one of several distinctive Matthean themes that intertwine in Mt 16:13-20: 1) the implications of Matthew’s high Christology for the life of the church today (Mt uses three titles—Son of Man, Messiah, and Son of the living God (v 16); 2) the act of confessing faith, not as an achievement on our part, but as God-given gift and the core of all Christian worship (v 17); 3) Matthew’s pre-Pentecostal ecclesiology (which, in a Protestant perspective, rests not on the authority of Peter himself, but on the God-given faith Peter’s testimony represents; see “my church,” v 18); and 4) our ongoing struggle, as disciples of Jesus, to embrace Jesus’ costly mission.
For the first option, one might connect Peter’s confession of faith, the divine identification of Jesus at his baptism (Mt 3:17), and the God-given identity at the core of our own baptism (“child of God”). As Jesus “lived into” the name and mission God bestowed on him at the Jordan, might we, as well, make it our life’s aim to live into our baptismal, God-given identity? Turning to the second option, we might begin by reframing Peter’s confession and Jesus’ response as worship in nuce—that is, as the interwoven testimony of both congregation and divine Spirit to God’s ongoing activity in the world.
Mt alone has Jesus speaking of “my church,” thereby creating an unbreakable connection between the Jesus’ earthly mission and the mission of the church. To be church is to do as Jesus did. This has affinities, too, with the fourth theme: discipleship as the embrace of the “binding” and “loosing” ministry of Jesus. Binding us to the loving and just ways of God, Jesus frees us from fickle social pressure and empty distractions. We become God’s agents of truth and mercy in a suffering world.
Insights into Biblical Greek Grammar and Syntax 