21st Sunday in Ordinary Time
I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 16.19
For more than three hundred years the Book of Common Prayer endured as the sole authorised worship of the Church of England.
In my lifetime, and throughout my ministry, there has been a sometimes bewildering number of new official forms of worship created by the Liturgical Commission of General Synod. There were Series One and Series Two orders of the Eucharist, which broadly formed the basis of the first complete fully authorised prayer book since 1662, the Alternative Service Book of 1980, presented, as the title suggests, as an alternative to the Book of Common Prayer. After the separate publication of some excellent new material, especially covering Lent, Holy Week and Easter and Advent and Christmas, there appeared, in 2000, what I regard as the best and most flexible compilation of all – Common Worship, still in place today.
Alongside all of these changes came new and revised versions of the Lectionary – the prescription of the passages of Scripture to be read day by day, Sunday by Sunday, nowadays mostly (but not entirely) shared by ourselves and Rome.
The first hurdle for any preacher to cross is the Lectionary. It is to be approached with some trepidation in the hope that there will be some way of linking the readings to one another – a hope that is, I am sorry to say, all too often misplaced. A first look at the Lectionary can produce in the preacher any emotion between delight and dismay.
Of all the liturgical revisions that I have experienced over the last fifty plus years the Lectionary of the 1980 book has been in many ways the most helpful. It was compiled with a view to a thematic approach, and it was seldom difficult to discern a common thread running through the appointed readings. Such can not always be said of the Lectionary we now use, though from time to time there is evidence to suggest that an attempt has been made to establish a theme, and the preacher’s hope is then rekindled.
Today’s readings present a good example of a commonality of theme. Both the Old Testament passage from Isaiah 22 and the Gospel reading from Matthew 16 contain accounts of the giving of keys – on the one hand the key to the house of King David, on the other the keys to the kingdom of heaven. The compilers of the Lectionary intend us, perhaps, to see the earlier story prefiguring the later one, and certainly Matthew and his contemporaries would have known Isaiah’s writings well.
Consider the passage from Isaiah. It is one of those narratives that only really makes sense if you know what comes before and what comes after, and in the case of this passage it is also a good idea to know what has been missed out of the middle. All is not as simple as it might initially seem. On the face of it the current house steward, Shebna, has in some way failed to live up to the high standards expected of him, causing God to remove him from office and to give his position to Eliakim, one who will be “a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and to the house of Judah”. But what is this really all about, and why has Isaiah clearly got it in for Shebna?
The part of the narrative that has been left out provides us with an answer. It reads: “(say to Shebna) What have you to do here and what have you here, that you have hewn here a tomb for yourself, you who hew a tomb on the height, and carve a habitation for yourself in the rock? Behold, the Lord will hurl you away violently, O you strong man. He will seize firm hold on you, and whirl you round and round, and throw you like a ball into a wide land; there you shall die, and there shall be your splendid chariots, you shame of your master’s house”. Clearly Isaiah really did not approve of Shebna. He appears to consider him an upstart official who has got ideas and ambitions above his station and possibly one who favours an alliance with Egypt in the face of the Babylonian threat (the tomb building smacks of Egyptian customs, after all), and this is a political stance that Isaiah vigorously opposed. What’s more, it emerges later in Isaiah that Shebna has had merely a minor demotion, appearing as he does a few chapters later as the king’s secretary of state. Some of the tone of the complete passage smacks of Isaiah having a hissy fit!
Eliakim did indeed assume the role of the holder of the key by which he controlled access to the king, allowing it or denying it as he saw fit, and in this we can see a prefiguring of Simon Peter’s place as the holder of the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Eliakim does so after someone deemed unworthy to have such authority is given his marching orders. There is, of course, no direct equivalent of this process in the Gospel narrative, though it is, no doubt, implied and the implication would almost certainly not have been lost on Matthew and his readers. The authority to allow or deny access to God had been in the hands of the High Priest and his fellow members of the priestly establishment. Like Shebna they had abused the power and authority placed in their hands. They had become rich and self-indulgent and God, in the person of Jesus, would take their authority from them and give it to another – Simon Bar Jonah, now to be known as Simon Peter – Simon the Rock.
What, then, of the Gospel reading itself? It is one of those passages that we know very well indeed – so well, in fact, that some of its original impact escapes us. It is all too easy to see it as ordinary, when in fact it is extremely extraordinary.
It begins like an account of an ordinary day in the life and ministry of Jesus and his disciples. They arrive in the region of Caesarea Philippi and Jesus addresses his followers. So far so routine. He then asks them what people say about him, already steering the discussion by calling himself “the Son of Man” – a title used frequently in the Old Testament to signify one of divine status. Their answers, though now we see them as falling short of the mark, are nonetheless powerful, suggesting that the people see him as one of the great scriptural figures returned to life. But things take a very dramatic turn when he asks them not what others say about him, but what they themselves say, and it is Simon Bar Jonah who instantly makes the astounding reply, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God”. We take that assertion in our stride – we know it to be true – but for many of Matthew’s contemporaries it would have seemed the ultimate in blasphemy and extremely startling. The Lord’s response to Simon’s faith and confidence is not a simple “well done, thou good and faithful servant” but an astonishing set of promises and prophecies. First he tells Simon that he is “petros’, the rock – hence he has ever thereafter been known as Peter. Then he promises to build the Church on the Rock that is Simon Bar Jonah, a notion that we understand with the benefit of hindsight but that would have been puzzling to contemporary readers. Moreover he speaks of the power of that Church, which even the gates of hell will not be able to resist. And he gives the keys of the kingdom to Simon Peter, the authority to allow or deny access to the Father, together with the power to bind or to loose, which is still given in the ordination of priests and bishops, and shows that, like Eliakim, he is to be a father to his people.
It is a remarkably brief account of an earth shattering event, taking power away from the priestly caste of the past and giving it to Peter and to the Church – power and authority of which the Church is still the custodian even two millennia later.
But there is one other thing about this account that strikes me, and in a way it represents a departure from the theme of the Old Testament reading. It is to do with the person to whom the authority is given. Eliakim is clearly from an established family (shown by the fact that he is said to be the son of Hilkiah) and of proven worth, talent and character. Peter, on the other hand, has come from nowhere. He is uneducated beyond the basics every child will have learned in the synagogue or the Temple. He is a rough and ready fisherman, an ordinary working class man. I rather doubt whether a Conclave today would give much thought to him when selecting his successor in the see of Rome. He probably wouldn’t be on a short list to be a Bishop or the Vicar of a Parish. Later, outside the High Priest’s house he would three times deny that he even knew Jesus. Yet this is the one whom God chose to be the father of us all.
In today’s second reading St Paul writes to the Romans: “How unsearchable are God’s judgements and how inscrutable his ways!” Seldom has this been more true than in the choice of Peter, the most unlikely prince of the apostles. But God sees not the outside appearance but the inner qualities of faith and trust, and in this we may rejoice since it means there is hope even for you and for me, misfits as we all are in some ways yet so precious in his sight that we may hope to receive his promises.