Sunday, August 27, 2023
/Proper 16
Exodus 1:8-2:10; Psalm 124; Romans 12:1-8; Matthew 16:13-20
The Rev. Clint Brown
“Upon you…while still living among us, we already bestow divine honors…and confess that nobody like you will arise hereafter or has arisen before now.”[1] Though not expressing the idea in quite as dramatic a fashion as Peter’s confession, these words make the same point …how in the annals of history, there once came a moment when it had to be admitted that a man of flesh and blood was something more, much more…which would be fine except that these words were not spoken about Christ. These are the words of the poet Horace, spoken not to recognize the Word made flesh but to honor the Roman Emperor Augustus. It was Caesar Augustus, during whose reign Jesus was born, whom the peoples of the earth, near and far, understood to be worthy of divine honors while still alive, and this, from the beginning, set up a fundamental tension with the claims of Christianity: if Caesar was king, then Christ could not be, and vice versa.
To understand the Gospel we must understand that this is the tension in which Christianity operates – the tension between the claims of two kings: the man-become-God and the God-become-man. Who is the real king and who the imposter? Who is the real divinity commanding our loyalty? It is easy to overlook the fact that before it mentions angels, or mangers, or shepherds, the Christmas story mentions Augustus and Quirinius. The context for the birth of Christ is empire, and the omnipresence of that empire lurking in the background is as much a part of Jesus’ story as his miracles or parables. It is the long arm of empire that can force an entire population – among whom were a small-town carpenter and his pregnant wife – to displace itself and return to their ancestral cities to be registered. The census-taking was admittedly a means to more effective administration, but mostly it was about power – the ability to reach down and exert control over every aspect of the lives of a subjugated people – and so “empire,” as I say, is the context for Christ’s life, shaping his life even before it had begun, and it is in the confrontation between the divine Augustus and the divine Jesus that we must consider Peter’s confession.
Which, as it happens, occurs not just anywhere but in a place called “Caesarea Philippi,” a city named for the emperor. How that came to be is worth a brief aside. For most of antiquity, the city had been best known as a shrine of the nature god Pan, and when Caesar Augustus gifted it to Herod the Great as a token of his esteem, he did so under the name Panion = “place dedicated to Pan.” Years later, Herod’s son Philip assumed the role of tetrarch of the region and ordered the city rebuilt and expanded as a way to enhance his image. And to emphasize his loyalty to the emperor he renamed it, this time after the emperor and himself: Caesarea Philippi. It was hardly a subtle gesture. When one’s own power rests in the hands of someone else, it pays to curry the favor of the real power, and, in first century Palestine, the real power lay with Caesar. If the question is asked, “What’s in a name?” then in this name Philip was both courting power and binding his own fate intimately with that power. So when, walking alongside the walls of Caesarea Philippi, Peter confesses that Jesus is “the Messiah, the Son of the living God” (v. 16), you can see now how context is everything. In the very shadow of a monument to imperialism and all that it stands for, Peter is claiming that despite all the evidence to the contrary, Caesar is not actually king, Jesus Christ is.
Now for Christians, of course, our difficulties with the Roman Empire have long since faded into the past. There is no longer a flesh and blood emperor vying for our loyalty. In one of the supreme ironies of history, the empire that had apparently defeated and neutralized the threat of a rival king by crucifying him was itself converted when Constantine declared Christianity the state religion less than 300 years later. But make no mistake, we do live with empire and empire still calls for our allegiance. Empire may no longer be embodied in the measured shuffle of marching legionnaires, but it is alive and well in the values we espouse and in the manner in which we allow the world to operate. It is manifested in the dehumanizing ways we treat one another, in our privileging of self-interest, and how we build great towering edifices not to peace and justice but to greed and domination and idols of our own making. Caesar is no longer king, but the business of making man-into-god goes on. Empire is what the world looks like when the worst human impulses motivate us rather than the law of Christ. Empire is the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God; the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God; the sinful desires that draw us from the love of God.[2] All that we renounce in our baptism is what Jesus Christ came to confront, and this fact demands a decision. It demands a taking of sides. It demands coming out for one or the other. And so, the question for you today is, Will you crown the king of empire or will you crown the King of kings?
[1] Quoted in Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The First Christmas: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Birth (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 63-64.
[2] BCP, 302.