Ever Wild

Propers: The Second Sunday in Lent, AD 2021 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

You can never truly know a person, completely. You can feel like you do, but then they surprise you. And that’s wonderful, isn’t it? Every human soul contains a vastness of unexplored depths. So long as we are alive, there are always new possibilities. We barely know who we are, let alone our friends, our children, our spouses. That’s why love is so inexhaustible—real love, I mean, not just feeling in love. Who we are is always growing, always changing, always rising up anew. We are myriads.

How much truer, then, must this be for Jesus, who is indeed a man like us, a human like us, yet who is at the same time truly, fully God. We are finite creatures who even in a long, full life barely scratch the surface of our potential. Imagine then an infinite life—not just infinitely long, but infinite beyond space, beyond time, beyond thought, beyond words. Whatever we can think of God is already inadequate, already limited, a fishbowl next to an ocean. We can only speak in analogy, in truths that point beyond themselves to the One who is absolute Truth.

It’s not that God is changing, mind you, or that He has to discover Himself over time in the way that we do. Rather, it’s that there’s always more to God, and always has been. We could never fully grasp Him, never exhaust His depths. And yet, miracle of miracles, by the wonders of Word and Sacrament, He is ours and we are His forever, members of His Body, breathing His own Spirit. And so indeed are God and man made one in Jesus Christ. And our union with God can never be exhausted, never be emptied, never become boring or stale. For we shall drink and drink and drink our fill, and never be thirsty again.

In our Gospel reading this morning, Peter thinks that he’s got Jesus pegged. They’ve gone out to a very peculiar place, a site sacred to Pan of the desolate wastes.

One can picture the Holy Land as a strip of country running north to south, about the size of New Jersey. Down the middle runs a range of rocky mountains, with impassible desert to the east, and the wild Mediterranean to the west. High places in the north—the Golan Heights, Mt Hermon—trickle waters down a marsh to the Sea of Galilee, the great lake of the north. And then from the Sea of Galilee flows the River Jordan, threading its way south, all the way to the Dead Sea, which has no outlet, and thus an incredibly high concentration of salts.

Centuries before Jesus, the armies of Alexander the Great traipsed through the Holy Land on their way to conquer Egypt, and they came upon a spring up in the north—one of those water sources that irrigates the whole country—and in their delight and relief they built a temple at the spring to Pan, the half-goat god of the wilds. This area, the Panion, was thus at the very limit of the Holy Land, the farthest northern border of God’s people Israel, and it was a pagan place, an unclean place.

By the time of Jesus, the Panion had been annexed to the kingdom of Herod the Great, the old villain of the Christmas story, and here he built a city to house and honor his Roman patrons. Herod’s son Philip renamed it Caesarea Philippi: “Caesar’s place, from his buddy Philip”—just in case anybody forgot how obsequious and bootlicking the whole horrible Herod dynasty really was.

What a place for Jesus to be, surrounded by symbols of Roman power and statues of Greek gods. It is here that Jesus asks His disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” And Peter, ever eager, ever hotheaded, blurts out: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God!” And this earns Peter a gold star. “Blessed are you,” Jesus tells him, according to Matthew’s Gospel, “for flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father in heaven.” Go to the top of the class.

Immediately thereafter, however, Jesus begins to teach the crowd that the Son of Man—that is, the Christ of God—must undergo great suffering, be rejected by religious authorities, and be put to death, only to rise again on the third day. And Peter is clearly flummoxed. Here Jesus has affirmed all of Peter’s hopes, that He is indeed the Christ, the promised and prophesied Messiah, for whom God’s people Israel have waited and longed for literally hundreds of years. And now He’s saying that He must be rejected? He’s saying that He must go and die?

This is not what the Apostles signed up for. No, sir. The Messiah doesn’t get rejected. The Messiah doesn’t get killed. The Messiah is here to raise an army and cleanse the Temple and toss the Romans out on their ears. Everybody knows that. Don’t give me any of this Suffering Servant nonsense. Not here with all these creepy statues. So Peter takes Jesus aside and says, “Cut that out. Nobody wants to hear that. Nobody’s going to kill the Messiah on my watch. You go that?”

And here, alas, Peter squanders his brownie points. “Get behind me, Satan!” Jesus snaps. “For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” What a turnaround! What a one-eighty! From blessed to rebuked in five verses flat. For hundreds of years the people have been waiting for Jesus. Hundreds of years, expecting the Messiah, the Warrior-Christ, the cosmic conquering King. And they’ve got it completely wrong. Utterly backwards.

Even the people who know Him best, His inner circle of beloved Apostles, don’t have a clue what He’s come to do. Even when He speaks quite openly, they can’t quite seem to hear, because Jesus isn’t fitting into their preconceived notions of what a Messiah ought to do, what a God ought to do. How fitting, then, that we in the West hold up Peter as Prince of Apostles. For just like him, we’re all-in on Jesus, all-in on this Christianity thing. So long as it doesn’t surprise us. So long as it meets expectations.

Yet the Lion of Judah is wild and free. Always good, but never safe. And He warns us very openly: “If any want to become My disciples, let them deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow Me. For those who seek to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for My sake and the sake of the Gospel will save it.” God is ever calling us to new things, scary things, dangerous things. God is ever calling us to come to Him and die: to die to ourselves, die to our egos, die to the systems of power that ever enslave us while telling us that we are free.

Have you ever wondered why nobody can seem to make a good Jesus movie? It’s because we can never quite get Him right. The Gospels are too wild, too untamed. Americans expect an American Christ. And so we’re always rewriting Jesus in our image, to make Him safe and inoffensive; declaw Him, that He might be made marketable for general consumption. A plush Lion of Judah, with a barcode.

Get behind me, Satan. For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human.

Jesus will always be wild. He will always surprise us, no matter how well we think we know Him. The Gospels are not long books, yet we read them over and over and always they shock us, always convict us, always they kill us and raise us again. And that’s just the written Word; that’s not the living Word, not Jesus Himself, to whom the Gospels can only but point. It is Jesus who raises the lowly, who topples the high, who liberates the enslaved and brings life to the dead. And that’s still scary.

Christian life is death and resurrection every day. It is dying to our sins, in our beds, every night. And it is rising with Jesus’ Resurrection at dawn. You will never fully know Him to exhaustion. You will never manage to tame Him, to make Him docile or safe or quiescent. He will always be wild, always be new, always be Jesus. And the one thing you can trust in this life is that He loves you, that He is good, and that He will never let you go.

Apart from that, I make no promises. Y’all best buckle up. Because God is not done with you yet. God is not done with any of us yet. And the only people in the Gospel who look and think like us are the Romans who nailed Jesus to His Cross. Thank God that didn’t stop Him. Thank God it barely slowed Him down. The Christ we killed is coming for us, and He will not let us go until we bless Him, one and all.

Dear Christian, dear sinner, dear children of the Lord. Take up your cross and follow. And we shall see what happens next.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.