Thomasius Pentecost 12

Matthew 16:13-19 August 23, 2009

Dear Friends in Christ,

As Christians, we believe that Jesus was God’s only begotten Son and that He came to earth to suffer and die for our sins. This is the very foundation of the Christian faith. As being’s created in the image if God to live in perfection for all eternity, we know that the sin of Adam and Eve brought an end to that perfection. It brought about the wrath of God and the punishment of eternal damnation. It meant that there was no hope for humanity. Yet in God’s love for us, He promised to Adam and Eve a Savior. He promised His only begotten Son as the one who would take our place in the punishment of sin. So it is that we believe that Jesus, God’s Son, came to earth to suffer and die for our sins. We see Him as the Son of God, equal in every way to God the Father and to God the Holy Spirit. We see Christ as our Lord and our Savior.

But even as you and I have been led by God to see this great and simple truth, there are millions, even billions, yes, billions with a “B”, of people living on the earth right now who have never even heard the simple message which is the foundation of our faith. They have never heard of Jesus and cannot possible know that he is the true God made flesh who walked among us. They live in far away lands and they and their parents and their grandparents and their great-grandparents have only known their local religions which are based on faith in gods of wood or the water or the sky or maybe even the worship of their ancestors. Though we know Jesus as our Lord and Savior, they have no concept at all of the one True God of Heaven and the gracious gift of His Son.

But aside from those “billions” who have never even heard of Jesus, there are other billions who have heard of Jesus and they even believe in Jesus. They believe that He was a man who really lived on this earth and they believe that He did many great things. Some even believe that He was able to do miracles and heal people and raise them from the dead, some even believing that that He was a man so blessed by God that He never sinned. But their adoration of Christ stops there. They don’t believe that He was the Son of God. They don’t believe that as God He took on human flesh and blood and they don’t believe that His innocent death on the cross took away the sins of the world to give us everlasting life. They believe in Jesus, but they don’t believe Jesus to be true God.

And with such a wide variety of beliefs, with such a range of not even knowing who Jesus was to thinking He was just a man, or maybe a great man, or even a man or God to Him being the Son of God, it may certainly make the question a valid one to ask: Who is this Jesus?

For no matter what it is that people believe about Jesus, there is no doubt but that He is the most popular individual in the history of the world. Though there may be many pages written about this pop star or that political figure, though there may be many documentaries done concerning this dictator or that scientist, no one in history has had more written about them than Christ. There are more books that focus on Jesus, there are more articles that look at the life of Jesus, there are more songs and hymns and references made to Jesus than to anyone else that has ever lived or most assuredly, ever will. To ask Who is Jesus is not an obscure question. It is not an infrequent question. And most certainly, it is not an irrelevant question.

And so this morning we are going to look at that question of who Jesus is and use it as our theme by asking “WHO IS JESUS?” And though we might easily answer it with the statement that He is our Savior or He is our Lord, our text for today has the answer of the Apostle Peter as He declares that Jesus, the son of Mary, a carpenter from Nazareth, I. GOD TELLS US HE IS HIS SON and secondly II. HE IS THE ROCK OF OUR SALVATION.

Now as we begin looking more closely at our text for today and ask of ourselves that question ,Who Is Jesus, this is a question that our Lord was asking of His disciples. Those men who had been with Jesus for almost three years, and had seen more than any other human beings could witness concerning healings and miracles and signs and wonders, Jesus asked these men that all important question concerning Himself. He asked them, “Who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am?”

In a way, this was a kind of a trick question, for as Jesus presents this question, He clearly refers to Himself as a “Son of Man.” And for the disciples, this was not the first time. We have well over 50 accounts of Jesus calling Himself the “Son of Man.” For most clearly, as He stood before them in flesh and blood, someone who had to eat and sleep, someone who was born and grew older, Jesus was the Son of a human being. But the point of asking the question in this way was to have His Disciples look beyond the obvious. Though Jesus truly was a human being, after three years, did they know that He was more?

The answer that Peter gave is one that gives us some insight not only into the minds of the people living around Jerusalem at the time, but it is also a comment on the limited thinking of human beings in general. For even as those people living in Jerusalem could only think of a few options for who Jesus might be, that He was “John the Baptist, [or] Elijah, [or] Jeremiah or one of the prophets,” very few came up with the right answer, the answer of Peter and the other apostles, the answer that says Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

For just like the people of Jerusalem had all kinds of ideas of what they wanted Jesus to be, they missed the real one. Just like when Charles Darwin saw the similarities between men and apes and believed we must have evolved, or when geologist first studied the Grand Canyon and though it must have taken millions of years to form, or when Muslims believe Jesus is only a second rate prophet compared to Muhammad, all of them have made their conclusions based only on the ideas of men. They were conclusions based on the things they saw with our limited eyesight and our limited abilities to understand what is going on in the world around us.

Yet as Peter and the other disciples confess that Jesus is “the Son of the living God,” the response of Jesus is not one that commends them for being smarter than the next guy or that they are paying more attention than everyone else, but rather, “flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.” The only way that you and I can ever know the truth about Jesus as our Lord is through the revelation of God. The only way that we are not grouped with the billions who do not believe or who think of Jesus as nothing more than a pop star or a great leader of men is because God has revealed it to us. God the Father has spoken to us through His Word and given to our hearts and minds an understanding of Jesus that we would never come to on our own. No matter how we would have tried to answer the question “Who is Jesus?”, without God the Father we would never know.

And as we consider this point in the conversation between Jesus and His disciples, we see that Jesus uses this one point, this message of Him being the Christ, the son of God who has come to save the world, a message given only by the working of God through His Word, to proclaim this as the very rock and foundation of our lives. For Jesus goes on to tell Peter, “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.”

Now at first, it may sound as if Jesus is building the Church on Peter the man. It sounds this way even more in the original Greek because in the Greek, the word for Peter and rock are the same. It sounds as if Jesus is saying “You are a rock and on you, a rock, I will build my church.” But there is a real flaw in this line of thinking. The flaw is a grammatical one. For in the Greek, the word “rock” that is in reference to Peter is in the masculine gender, yet the word for the rock on which the church is built is feminine. To mix the two up is like talking about a man you know and saying “She is my friend.” We would never make that mistake in English andwe should not make it in the Greek. For in the Greek, these two words are very different. The two don’t agree and you can’t interchange them.

What this means is that we cannot make the false claim that Jesus was establishing His Church, the means of salvation and everlasting life on the Apostle Peter. No matter how much of a rock he was, he was still a weak sinner. He was still a man who needed a savior every bit as much as we do. And to ignore this point is not only to say that God established all of salvation on a weak sinner who was rebuked only a few moments later, but it is also saying that the Word incarnate is so inept that He cannot distinguish between male and female genders of a language He inspired.

What this all comes down to is that when Christ heard the sound confession of Peter, the words that proclaimed Him to be true and eternal God, Jesus said that this was the foundation of the Church. This was the truth of eternal life. This was the rock, the immovable object that will never change. It is the hope upon which every decision in our lives is based. It is the one thing that will always be the same. For no matter who you are or when you live, your eternal life comes only through the Son of God taking your place on the cross to give you forgiveness of sins. Only God’s Son, true man and true God, could give us the salvation we can never gain on our own. Only on Christ is there a church that is still ours today.

It is for this reason that we as Christians do not build our lives on the works of men or even the miracles of God, but we build on the message of God that proclaims Jesus is true and everlasting God, our Savior that has taken our place to give us everlasting life. It is a message that hopefully, we hold dear in our hearts. It is a message that hopefully, we teach to our children each and every day so that they will not forget this message of salvation. It is a truth that we pray will also be in the heart and mind of our confirmand who will also give to us a sound confession of Christ as the only Rock of our Salvation. Amen.

13 When Jesus came into the region of Caesarea Philippi, He asked His disciples, saying, “Who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am?” 14 So they said, “Some say “John the Baptist, some Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” 15 He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” 16 Simon Peter answered and said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” 17 Jesus answered and said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for “flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.” 18 “And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it. 19 “And 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.”

In His Service
Pastor Joseph R. Schlawin
Our Shepherd Ev. Lutheran Church
1515 W. 93rd Ave, Crown Point, IN 46307
(219) 663-5853