Heaven's True Gate

 Texts:    Genesis 28:10-17; John 1:43-51

    WITHIN EVERY HUMAN BEING rises the question, "How do I get to heaven?"  "Heaven" means different things to different people.  For one man, "heaven" might mean eternal unity with the Uncreated Source of all majesty and bliss.  For another, "heaven" could mean having a belly full of good food for now and the foreseeable future.  Some say heaven is a state we enter after this physical life is over; others say it'll come about on this earth when social justice and equal prosperity are granted to all.

    But one thing is common: when we human creatures ask the question, "How do I get to heaven?" we mean, "What do I have to do to get there?"  What good work must I perform, what god must I appease, what pleasure must I give up, what plan must I follow, what cause must I join, what gate must I locate and go through, what ladder must I climb, what must I do to get to heaven?

    But our readings from Holy Scripture turn this common human assumption on its head.  The whole of Scripture teaches us that the principle of us getting into heaven by our own efforts is junk, like a bad GPS that'll send us down a dead-end road.  No, the key to heaven is found in Jesus' statement in John 1:51: "I tell you the truth, you shall see the heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man."

    But how do we use this key?  What is Jesus talking about?

    Jesus is talking about the ladder or stairway seen in a dream by the patriarch Jacob in ancient times, as we read in our passage from Genesis.  As we look at that passage and then link it to what is happening in our reading from St. John, let's ask ourselves: Is it our job to get ourselves into heaven, or does the effort and initiative all belong to God?

    In Genesis chapter 28 Jacob son of Isaac is headed to his uncle Laban's in Haran, in Syria.  Officially he's leaving Canaan to find himself a bride among his cousins there.  The real reason is that he's pulled a low-down, sneaky trick and cheated his older twin brother Esau out of the family birthright.  After a day's journey he camps out under the stars, using a stone for a pillow.  And there Jacob has a dream.  Not just any dream, but a true dream, a vision, actually, given to him directly from the Lord, the God of his father Isaac and his grandfather Abraham. 

    In his dream, Jacob saw a great stairway or ladder with its foot rested on the earth near where he lay.  Its head reached up to heaven.  On this stairway the angels of God were going up and down, pursuing their business between heaven and earth. 

    The Bible tells us in various places about the business of angels.  In the Gospel of Luke and elsewhere they are God's messengers, bringing His commands to His people.  They're ministering spirits, according to the Letter to the Hebrews, appointed to serve those who will inherit salvation.  St. Paul writing to the Galatians tells us that angels assisted some way when God gave the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai.  In Revelation we read  how angels will be God's agents in carrying out His judgment on the sinful earth.  And always and at all times, the angels of God praise Him and give Him glory.  By their activity we see the Lord God's activity and involvement in this world, never ceasing, continually going to and fro, carrying out His plans for creation.

    Jacob saw all this in his dream, but he saw more.  Above the stairway or ladder--above it, notice, not merely at the top of it-- Jacob could perceive a Being that he knew was the Lord God Almighty.  But Jacob doesn't recognize the Lord by His appearance, any more than we do.  He knew Him by His word.  The Lord said, "I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac."  The Lord repeats to Jacob the covenant promises He made and confirmed to Abraham.  But now the Lord grants and applies the covenant promises to him, Jacob.  Jacob, the deceiver, the cheater, the sneak.  The one who deserved nothing from God's hand but judgment and could do nothing to earn His favor.  He wasn't even Isaac's firstborn son!  Out of the Lord's free grace it is Jacob and his descendants who will inherit the land.  His descendants will be like the dust of the earth.  It is through him that all the peoples on earth shall be blessed. 

    Jacob awakes, and he knows he has dreamed true.  He has seen the Lord Almighty standing in heaven above the top of the ladder of the angels.  But now he says, "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it."  The Lord is in heaven, and He is here on the earth below.  He is present with us whether we're searching for Him or not, even when we're totally unaware of His presence.

    Jacob is now awake in more ways than one.  His eyes have been opened.  God has chosen to reveal Himself to him, and he exclaims, "How awesome is this place!"

    It's really too bad that the word "awesome" is so worn out by slang use these days.  What word can we use to express the combination of fear, joy, wonder, and reverence that surely flooded through Jacob at that time?  He says, "This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven."  Right there in that barren, lonely place, near a village too small even to have a caravan stop, that was the house where God was to be worshipped.  That was the gate through which the Lord had come down and called an unworthy man like Jacob into covenant life with Him.

    The life of the covenant is central to the revelation Jacob receives at Bethel.  Over the years and centuries since then, God revealed to His prophets that the covenant blessings would be focussed in and brought to reality by the Anointed One, the Christ.  The hope and cry of God's people was that soon the King, the Son of David, would come.  He would reclaim the land; He'd grant life and hope to the descendants of Jacob; He'd be the One through whom all nations would be blessed.

    And in God's good time, John the Baptist appeared, preaching that people should repent for the time of the Messiah was soon.  So be baptised!  Get ready!  Finally, one day, Jesus from Nazareth came to be baptised.   The time had come!  John recognized Him and declared,  "Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world!"  He tells two of his disciples, Andrew and probably Philip, that Jesus is the One Israel has been waiting for.  Immediately they approach Jesus to spend time with Him to find out more about Him.  We see in John 1:41 that they are convinced that John has spoken truly, for Andrew brings his brother Simon to Jesus, saying, "We have found the Messiah!"

    All this takes place in Judea, east of Jerusalem on the other side of the Jordan River.  The next day, as we pick up our Gospel reading, Jesus has decided to go back to Galilee.  Before He goes, He extends a special invitation to Philip to be His permanent disciple:  "Follow Me!" Jesus commands.

    Why does Jesus call Philip in particular?  Maybe because of what Philip does next.  In his excitement, he seeks out a friend of his, a man named Nathanael.  Before he leaves for the north he wants Nathanael to hear the good news.  "We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, the one the prophets wrote about!"

    Imagine Nathanael's wonder and hope when he heard this!  Most likely he, too, was a disciple of John, not on the scene when Jesus was baptised, but now how joyful he would be at hearing this good news!

    And how disappointed he must have felt when Philip told him the Messiah was from Nazareth.

    Nazareth?  That hick town?  That barren place half-overrun with Gentiles?  What good could come out of Nazareth?  He's like Jacob outside of Bethel, aware only of the stones and the hardness of the ground.  Nathanael may be looking for the Messiah, but certainly not there.

    But Philip isn't deterred.  "Come and see!" he says.

    When Jesus sees Nathanael coming, He exclaims, "Here is a true Israelite, in whom there is nothing false!"

    What a reversal!  Deceitful Jacob was the original Israelite, you might say.  But God was forging a new Israel, a true Israel, who would deal openly and without guile.  And such a one was this Nathanael.

    This stranger from Nazareth has him pegged.  It's possible Nathanael prided himself on his honesty and straightforwardness.  In a land and a time when it was safer to play things close to the vest, this quality was unusual, and he's amazed that Jesus recognizes it in him before He can actually look him in the face.  "How do you know me?" he asks.

    "I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Philip called you."

    We've all heard of so-called clairvoyants and psychics who claim to be able to see from afar.  But Nathanael knows that the true ability to see into men's hearts, the real far-seeing where the spirit of a man can go with another and see what he is doing belongs only to a great prophet of God, like Elisha in ancient times.  So Nathanael draws his immediate and forthright conclusion: "Rabbi, you are the Son of God, you are the King of Israel."

    Could he have said such a thing unless God had revealed it to him?  Not at all, no more than Peter later on could confess Jesus as Lord on his own initiative.  It is God's revelation and doing.  Nathanael recognises the presence of God in that place; that is, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, and he does so because the Lord God has granted it. 

    Jesus accepts Nathanael's perception of Him, but He knows very well that the man's eyes aren't fully opened as yet.  Nathanael, as well as Philip, Simon Peter, and Andrew, still has a limited grasp of Jesus' identity as the Messiah, the Son of God and the King of Israel.  Angels were called sons of God; kings were referred to as sons of God; prophets, priests, and kings were all anointed ones: how could a Man born of woman, let alone a Man from Nazareth, be the Son of God in the most literal and fundamental way?

    But this is what Jesus promises to reveal Himself to be.  He tells Nathanael and the others that "you," plural, "will see the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man."  They will come to realize that it is by Him that the angels pursue their ministry of command, comfort, and judgment.  Jesus and Jesus alone will show Himself to be Immanuel, God with us, exalted in the heavens yet present with us on earth.  He will be revealed as the one Mediator between heaven and earth and heaven's true gate.

    Human beings of all religions and no religion at all are eager to make it into some kind of heaven.  But the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob reveals by His word that heaven is where He is, where He rules and reigns in His glory amidst angels and archangels.  It is a state that He offers to us through Jesus Christ, not one that we can earn.  It is all God's doing, offered to us through His sovereign grace in Christ Jesus.  He gives us even the faith to see and believe and the will to persevere.

    But the desire to exert our human will and effort dies hard. Even as Christians, we don't fully understand that it all depends on God.  Think of the song "We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder."  It's in this hymnal.  But we aren't called upon to climb Jacob's ladder, at least not by our good works and service, for Christ Himself has come down to us.  And despite what it says in the Led Zeppelin song, no one can buy the stairway to heaven.  No, the gift of God in Jesus Christ is given to us freely.  He paid our admission to the presence of God by His death on the cross and brought us to the life of heaven by His resurrection. 

      Hear what St. Paul writes in his letter to the Romans.  He is quoting Moses: 

    "Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?'" (that is, to bring Christ down)  "or ‘Who will descend into the deep?'" (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). But what does it say? "The word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart," that is, the word of faith we are proclaiming:  That if you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

    The Lord God is present in Jesus Christ, and there are many in this world who are not aware of it. But to you it is given to know and to see who He is and what He has done for you.  Receive the gift of eternal life through Jesus Christ your Lord, and worship Him and serve Him in loving gratitude.  For He is the eternal house where we meet and enjoy God, He is the true gathe of heaven.

God's Ancient Promise, Ever New

Texts: Zechariah 8:12-23; Galatians 3:6-9, 15-22; Matthew 2:1-12

OUR GOSPEL READING FROM St. Matthew declares, "Magi [or wise men] from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, ‘Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him.'"

How many times have we heard them ask that question in this reading at this time of year? If we're long-time church-goers, probably every year of our lives. It's early January, it must be time for the Wise Men to show up looking for the infant King of the Jews! It doesn't surprise us, does it? I mean, we know who that King of the Jews was and is! He's Jesus the Christ, the Son of God! Of course any sensible person, any man-- or woman-- who claims to be wise would come to seek and worship Him!

But we've read the end of the story. We know Who the Babe of Bethlehem turned out to be. The Magi and Herod and the rest of them are still in the middle of Jesus' story; at its beginning, in fact. We can't assume they knew what we know about Him. They couldn't assume what we take for granted.

And maybe if we saw things from their point of view, we, too, would be filled with new wonder, eagerness, and fear, and come to worship our Lord Jesus with fresh hearts and open eyes.

So I ask you, why on earth would the Magi have come all that way, over a thousand miles, to seek and worship the newborn King of the Jews? Who were the Jews in the days of Caesar Augustus, anyway? They were a harried, scattered, barely-tolerated people. Their ancestral land was divided and occupied and ruled by Herod, a puppet king installed by Caesar in Rome. The last king of the royal line of David had died over 500 years before. The Hasmonean kings and queens, the ones descended from Judah the Maccabee and his brothers, that dynasty had lasted only a hundred years. And the last of them, Mariamne daughter of Alexandros, had married Herod himself and he'd had her executed twenty-five years before. Besides, the Maccabees were from the tribe of Levi, not the tribe of Judah like David. They really weren't qualified to sit on the throne of Israel according to God's promise to David. And Herod himself, he wasn't Jewish at all! His father was an Edomite and his mother was a Nabatean Arab. He professed the Jewish religion-- sort of-- but he was only "King of the Jews" because Caesar Augustus had declared him to be. He was king over the Jews, but he wasn't a king from or of the Jews! To talk of a true "king of the Jews" in those days was practically meaningless!

But there the Magi were in Jerusalem, asking after such a king. But they were supposed to be so wise! They were of the great tribe of the Magi! They were the hereditary priests and royal astrologers of the magnificent land of Persia! Actually, why would these Magi, these high officials, these esteemed advisors to kings and princes, bother with anything Jewish at all?

And why should they come now, for this birth? Some scholars believe that the Magi came according to the ordinary international custom of that time. They say that "to worship" only means "to do political homage." But that wouldn't make sense even from an earthly point of view! Kings and nobles paid worship only to rulers they acknowledged as their overlords. The Persians were a proud people who had repulsed the Roman army twice in the previous sixty years. Their nobles weren't about to bow down to the infant King of a miserable conquered people! And suppose they'd intended to do honor to an infant son of Herod, the "official" king of the Jews. Does that really make sense? Herod was always having children! History tells us he had many sons by many wives; yes, and he put many of them to death. If the Magi had wanted to come congratulate old Herod on his newborn offspring, they would've been travelling from Persia to Judea and back again over and over and over.

No, something else was happening here, something the Magi knew and that Herod refused to see. Clearly, back in Persia the wise men had come to know of a promised King of the Jews, who wouldn't be just another earthly king. This knowledge first came to their people when the Medes and the Persians conquered the Babylonian Empire in 538 BC. When they took over the Persians found this peculiar people the Jews living dispersed in the Babylonian lands. The Jews refused to assimilate and take up the gods and the practices of the peoples around them. They kept talking about how the Most High God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, had personally called their ancestor Abraham and promised to make him the progenitor of the greatest nation on earth. They claimed to be God's chosen people and that His eternal purposes would be worked out through them. The Jews clung to their holy writings, where it said that the Most High had promised that a King would come to sit on the throne of his father David, and his reign would have no end. These writings said that God would be especially active and present with this Davidic king, not the way kings and emperors always claimed to be sons of the gods, but truly and actually. And these scriptures said that this promised king would come as a blessing and light to the non-Jewish nations, to share the blessings of the Most High with them all, if they would come in humility and worship and willingness to serve Him according to His will.

The Wise Men weren't wise merely by training or by tribe. They were wise because they believed what had been revealed to them of God's promises to His people Israel. They were looking forward to the birth of this one, particular, special, promised King of the Jews. As it says in the book of the prophet Zechariah, they were ready day by day to come up to Jerusalem to take firm hold of that One Jew by the hem of His swaddling bands and go with Him to entreat and seek the Lord Almighty, for they knew that God would be with Him indeed. So when they saw the star of our Lord Jesus Christ at its rising, they rejoiced, packed up their gifts, saddled their camels, and quickly as they could, they came.

They didn't expect to find Christ the newborn king in Herod's palace in Jerusalem-- you'll notice in the gospel text, Matthew doesn't say they asked Herod first off; no, it was Herod who called the Magi to come to him. They came to Jerusalem for information and directions only. If the Magi failed in wisdom at any one point, it's that plainly they thought that Herod and his court and all Jerusalem would be as glad as they were to hear that God's King of kings had been born! For if they as Gentiles were overjoyed, how much more should God's people Israel have rejoiced!

But they arrived, and nobody in Jerusalem had heard of the birth of the promised King. They weren't even expecting Him. Herod had to convene a special council of the chief priests and teachers of the law to tell him where the prophets said the Christ was to be born. And in the end, Herod didn't care about God's ancient promises. He only cared about his own present kingdom and power.

We know how the story unfolds. The Magi find the Christ child at the house in Bethlehem where He is now living with Mary His mother and Joseph His foster-father. They bow down to Him and give Him gifts, and receive the blessing of God's promises fulfilled. They are not fooled by Jesus' humble circumstances, for just as Simeon had told Mary in the temple, the Magi recognise that this Child is indeed the promised One, the One born to be "a light to lighten the Gentiles, and to be the glory of God's people Israel."

And we know how Herod tried to trick the Magi into operating as his spies to reveal exactly where the newborn King could be found. John Calvin suggests that the Holy Spirit darkened Herod's mind, so he wouldn't think of sending one of his own men to Bethlehem with the Magi to come back with the information he wanted. Perhaps. Or maybe Herod was afraid that anyone he sent would betray him and pledge loyalty to this newborn King! However it was, God warned the Magi in a dream not to return to Herod and they went back to their eastern land another way.

Matthew doesn't tell us what they said or did when they arrived back home. But by the Holy Spirit the Evangelist tells us what we need to know, that God keeps His ancient promises. Thousands of years before, God called Abraham and promised that all nations would be blessed through him. And in the visit and worship and joy of the Magi, we see the firstfruits of God's fulfilment of His promise. Jesus Christ the King of the Jews was born for them, as much as He was born for His people Israel.

And Jesus Christ was born for us, for you and me. He was and is the glorious fulfilment of all God's promises to father Abraham. The Apostle Paul wants us particularly to be aware of how that fulfillment comes. Many early Jewish Christians, many early Gentile Christians, even, like the members of the church in Galatia, thought the Gentiles laid hold of the promised blessings by becoming Jews. They thought that in order for Christ to be our King, we all had to bind ourselves first by the Law of Moses and keep it perfectly!

We're rather the opposite. Our culture tells us that God will bless us if we're pretty nice and think the baby Jesus in the manger is really, really, adorable.

But no! No to both those false ideas! As Paul writes in the letter to the Galatians, God gave the promise of universal blessing to Abraham, and Abraham "Believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness." Righteousness is necessary to please God. And that righteousness comes not by obedience to the Law of Moses or to the law of niceness, but by faith. And this faith is not a mere feeling, it is a God-given trust in our Lord Jesus Christ, the King of the Jews. This is how God always intended to justify everyone, Jew and Gentile alike: the Wise Men from the east and you and me besides.

God's promise to Abraham was, "All nations will be blessed through you." He gave it to "Abraham and his seed." St. Paul is urgent to make us understand the implications of that. In Galatians 3:16 he says, "The Scripture does not say, ‘and to seeds,' meaning many people, but ‘and to your seed,' meaning one person, who is Christ."

So ultimately, the promise of being a blessing to all nations is made to Jesus Christ. And the benefits of this promise come to us through Jesus Christ! He and He alone is the bringer of the blessing of God to all nations, including you and me and everyone who believes. Jesus has blessed us by His perfect obedient life and His faithful death on the cross. He fulfilled the Law of Moses for us, so that no longer are we prisoners of sin, locked away from the eternal life and love and acceptance of Almighty God. If through faith we have bowed before Jesus Christ, He is our Lord and King and He shares with us all the glorious inheritance that is His as the Son of God.

This was God's intention from of old. It was His intention when He made His promises to Abraham, it was His intention when He inspired the prophecies of Zechariah, it was His intention when by the rising of a star He drew the Wise Men from the east, to seek and worship the infant King of the Jews.

It was the wisest thing the Magi ever did, travelling all that way to worship the infant King of the Jews. And if we are wise we won't let anything stop us from bowing down and worshipping Him, too. That Child grew up to be our crucified and risen Savior Jesus Christ. He is our King, sitting in power at the right hand of the Father. And He calls you and me and all people of all nations to know Him by faith and receive the peace and eternal life with God that He alone can give. This is God's ancient promise of blessing. It is good even to this present day, it will be good forever. Accept it and be joyful, for the promise is for you.

Revelation, Recognition, and Reckoning

Texts: Exodus 1:8-2:10; Romans 10:5-17; Matthew 16:13-20

HOW WELL DO WE KNOW the men who are running for President of the United States this year? One candidate, we know a great deal about his public career, but maybe not so much about his private life. The other candidate, we’re still learning who he is as a policy-maker and as a private citizen. One thing good about the way our American presidential campaigns seem to go on and on, it’s more likely that we’ll find out what we need to know about the candidates before the first Tuesday in November.

How are we going to find that out? I doubt any of us here know Senator McCain or Senator Obama personally.

Well, we can listen to their speeches and interviews, and to how they do in the debates this Fall. But how do we know if they really mean what they say, or if it’s all just political rhetoric?

Maybe we’ll rely on our gut feelings about how each man looks and how he carries himself. But haven’t we all known times when somebody who seemed really impressive at first turned out to be a real disappointment? How are we going to get to the real, honest, behind-the-scenes truth about our presidential candidates?

I guess we’ll have to rely on third party sources. Like the newspapers. And the TV news. And talk radio. And Internet bloggers. These sources have revealed a lot about these two men since they first started running-- when was it, sometime in the Teddy Roosevelt administration?-- and hopefully we’ll get enough reliable information from them before it’s time to vote.

But what do we do when there’s something we absolutely have to know about a certain Person, but there’s no earthly, human way we can find it out? What if it’s desperately important that we get a particular answer concerning this Man, and we don’t even know enough to ask the question? What if our very lives and futures--not just for the next four or eight years, but on into eternity--depend on knowing who this Man is and what He is doing? And what if the truth about Him were so cosmic, so unimaginable, that we’d never think or dream of trying to discover it for ourselves?

We’d really be stuck, wouldn’t we? Our own intellect couldn’t tell us what we needed to know. Our instincts and gut feelings couldn’t lead us to the truth. Human authorities and pundits would be no help to us at all. We’d go to our doom and die and rot in dark ignorance unless something more than human, something beyond the circles of this world comes to us and opens our minds and reveals to us the identity and true character of this most important of men.

There is a Man like that, and for the last two thousand years He has been asking men and women of every race and country, "Who do you say I, the Son of Man, am?" Jesus of Nazareth confronts us with His person and His work and demands that human beings confess and acknowledge who and what we understand Him to be. Our whole fate into eternity depends on getting the answer right, and our of our own human knowledge and initiative we never, ever can.

But, we protest, is it really like that? After all, isn’t Jesus like our presidential candidates? Can’t we just be reasonable about Him, too, if we’re deciding if this Man Jesus really is the Savior and Christ? It’s like, the Press gives us the information about the candidates, we make a choice. Same way, the Bible tells us about the teachings and miracles of Jesus, and we say, "Yes, on that evidence, our reason tells us that He is the Messiah and Lord of all." Isn’t it as simple as that?

Afraid not. In our passage in Matthew 16, Jesus and His disciples are making a retreat in the hills around Caesarea Philippi. As they sit there, Jesus asks the disciples, "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?" Could they honestly answer that the people recognised Him for who and what He really was? No! All those crowds had heard the glorious teaching from Jesus’ lips. The people has seen the miracles our Lord performed. Countless many of them had benefitted from His wonders themselves. Did the crowds get the answer to Jesus’ question right?

No. The disciples had to answer, "Some say you’re John the Baptist raised from the dead. Other people say you’re Elijah or Jeremiah or one of the other prophets, brought back to life." The people had all the evidence about Jesus right in front of them, but their reason and gut feelings and human ability all rolled up together could never bring them to the deep truth of who the Son of Man is.

But then Jesus says to His disciples, "But who do you say the Son of Man is?"
And Simon Peter immediately declares, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God!"

No human reasoning could have brought Peter to that conclusion. For one thing, Peter as a good Jew, who knew good and well that the Lord, the living God of Israel, does not have sons and daughters the way the pagan so-called gods were said to. The idea was totally beyond his imagining. But he declared it: "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God!" and it was the eternal truth. As John Calvin puts it, "Though Peter did not yet understand distinctly in what way Christ was the begotten of God, he was so fully persuaded of the dignity of Christ, that he believed Him to come from God, not like other men, but by the inhabitation of the true and living Godhead in His flesh."

How did Peter know? How was he persuaded? Jesus says this: "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven!" God alone, by the power of His Holy Spirit, was able to reveal to Peter and the other disciples who and what Jesus of Nazareth was and is and always will be. Not the opinion of the crowd, not the judgement of the religious leaders, not even the reasoning of Peter’s own mind could have brought him to recognise that truth, only the revelation of the Father in heaven.

Our Lord goes on to say, "And 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."

The name "Peter" means "a rock," like we might call someone "Rocky." So is our Lord now saying that He will build His salvation community, His church, on the flesh-and-blood man Peter? Some Bible interpreters think so, and they give pretty persuasive answers why. But others point out that everywhere in Scripture only God is described as the Rock of our salvation, and upon Him alone must we ground our faith, for by Him alone we are saved. Jesus has just blessed Peter for recognising what His Father in heaven has revealed to him, and does Christ now undo that and give His glory to a mortal man, however enlightened? Does He say, "You are Peter, Rocky, and on you I will build my church?" No, our Lord says, "You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church," that is, upon the Holy Spirit-revealed recognition and declaration that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, the Son of the living God.

Jesus says, "The gates of Hades"-- all the powers of death and the grave-- "will not prevail against" His church. How will He effect this? He says to Peter: "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."

This word "you" is indeed singular. For Peter is the first representative of how God would use His power on earth to open the kingdom of heaven to mankind. Peter was the first in the church to receive God’s revelation of Christ as God and to confess that it is so. Peter was appointed by God to be the first to preach the word of Christ crucified for our sins and risen for our new life, on the day of Pentecost when he commanded the people to repent and be baptised for the remission of sins. Peter was the first to declare to the Jewish authorities that the name of Jesus Christ is the only one given under heaven by which we must be saved. He was the first to enter a Gentile’s home and open up to him and his household the riches of grace that seemed to be reserved for the Jews.

In all these things, Peter uses the power of the keys, which is nothing less than the preaching of the Word of God, calling people to believe and be saved. It is by the preaching of the Word of God that the Holy Spirit opens the minds of sinners and reveals the saving power of Jesus Christ.

Peter was the first to do this, but he was not the last. What does it say in our Romans passage? "How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!" For "faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ." Through the preaching of the Word the Lord our God goes on revealing to His elect people who and what His Son Jesus Christ is, and what He has accomplished on our behalf. With His Word preached comes the blessing of His Holy Spirit, to bring people from unbelief to belief, from self-righteousness to the righteousness of God.

But with this revelation there comes a reckoning. The Word of God preached can bind as well as loose. For as Paul says in Romans, "Not all have obeyed our good news." When the word of God is preached, not everyone recognises that Jesus Christ is the Messiah, the Son of the living God. They go on thinking He’s only a human prophet. Or a Great Teacher. Or a Good Moral Example whom they can come up to, if they just try hard enough. Sadly, there are those who keep wanting to pull Christ down out of heaven to their level. Others feel Jesus needs their help, as if they needed to pull Him up from the dead. At the end of days, the Word of God will witness against such people in the judgement.

In the days before Moses was born, the King of Egypt stopped recognising the greatness of Joseph. He was blind to the special blessings the Lord had laid on His chosen people, the Hebrews. In fact, he was jealous of God’s people, and set out to destroy them as a separate nation. He certainly wouldn’t have recognised anything special in the infant Moses. But God was working in the Hebrews and He was working in the life of Moses, preparing him to be the one who would reveal God to His people and to all who would recognise the Lord and believe. At the same time, the word spoken by Moses brought judgement to Pharoah and all Egypt with him.

Even more, now, God calls us to hear Him as He reveals Himself in His Son Jesus Christ through His Word read and preached. By His word He brings us to recognise Jesus Christ for who He really is, and to become like Peter, ready to confess with our mouths that Jesus is the only Lord, risen from the dead for our salvation.

It is on the rock of divine revelation recognised, confessed, and proclaimed that Jesus Christ builds His Church, such that the gates of Hell will not prevail against it. God reveals Himself and opens the kingdom of heaven by the means He has established, now and forever. Not by the church’s good works. Not by praise bands or well-rehearsed choirs. Not by meetings and conferences and general assemblies. Not by dressing up or dressing down, not by candles and incense or by the latest sound systems or high-tech extravaganzas. These things can support and promote the Word-- or they can detract from it. Despite all our human devices, the God of power and might still reveals the truth of Christ in the way He always has: in the preaching of His word by fallible, erring human beings like Simon Peter, human beings who have been inspired by the Holy Spirit to confess before the world, "You, Jesus, are the Messiah, the Son of the living God."

God gives this message to everyone who believes. We’re not all called to be ordained preachers, or Bible study leaders, or Sunday School teachers. But God instills in every Christian the word that is near us, on our lips and in our hearts, the word of faith that Peter and all the apostles and every faithful preacher has always proclaimed: Jesus Christ is Lord, and all who call upon His name will be saved.

Who do you say the Son of Man is? Believe the good news that your Father in heaven has revealed to you! Recognise your Savior in love and obedience, and may it always be reckoned to you as blessedness, now and in the world to come.