Year: 2012

“Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church”

The Church does not own this text; this text owns the Church. It is Jesus’ statement about Peter (whose name means rock) in response to Peter’s confession about Christ: “thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” It is a powerful and yet poignant exchange between Peter and Jesus. What Peter has said, Jesus says, is heavenly knowledge: “for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.” The Church is built upon Revelation, upon what is engraven upon rock, as it were, the refined petroglyphs of salvation, we might say.

The Petrine primacy, as it sometimes called, meaning that Peter has a kind of place of first-standing among the apostles, belongs to the life and history of the Church, to the debates and discussions about what it means to be the Church, and especially to the conflicts and controversies between different churches within the idea of the universal church, the catholic church. But this text cannot be relegated simply to church politics and polities. It speaks rather to the catholicity of the Christian confession of Faith.

Peter’s confession must be our confession. And so Jesus’ response to Peter speaks to the very ground of our faith and life in the community of confessing Christians; namely, those who confess Christ as the Son of the living God.

There is in this confession more than mere assent to a proposition, far more than taking sides in the issues du jour, far more than mere opinion. It is about the truth of a living faith. It means the Church but it means the Church as defined by this confession. Remove that from the picture and there is no church, no faith.

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“And thou, child, shalt be called the Prophet of the Highest”

Summertime! The Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist signals the beginnings of summer, falling as it always does near the summer solstice. For Canadians, too, the Nativity of St. John the Baptist is significant. On this day in 1497, John Cabot landed in Newfoundland. It marks, we might say, the beginning of the Christian encounter with this northern land we have come to know as Canada. John the Baptist has become the Patron Saint of Canada.

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“And thou, child, shalt be called the Prophet of the Highest”

“Sumer is icumen in”, as the Middle English round or madrigal of 13^th century origin puts it, perhaps one of the earliest forms of musical counterpoint. It somehow speaks to our celebration this morning. For “summer is a coming in” as the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist reminds us since it always coincides with the week of the summer solstice. There is almost a double counterpoint about this feast, counterpoint referring to a set of opposing contrasts in musical terms which bring out a deeper resonance and harmony of sound. For we begin and we end the summer, especially the maritime summer, with the birth and death of the intriguing figure of John the Baptist. And, of course, the nativity of John the Baptist in the week of the summer solstice equally points us to the nativity of Christ in the week of the winter solstice; there is just that kind of complementary contrast between the week of the longest day and the week of the longest night, a kind of counterpoint of light and dark, we might say.

Such suggestive contrasts belong to the reflective richness of the Christian story, to the back and forth of light and dark, the interplay of birth and death, of nature and grace. Somehow we can only think in counterpoint, we might almost say. Each moment and story has its own integrity and yet illumines another and greater story.

There are only two nativities that the Christian Church celebrates on the basis of scriptural witness: the nativity of Christ and the nativity of John the Baptist. They are not equal. The whole point of the story of the nativity of John the Baptist is how it is preparatory for the birth of Christ. John the Baptist is the great and intriguingly complex figure who in a way sums up the whole of prophecy and points us to the new reality of Christ. “Art thou Elijah,” the Priests and Levites from Jerusalem ask him, to which he replied that he was “not the Christ,” nor the Prophet Elijah, but simply “the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord, as saith the prophet Isaiah” and the one who points out to us the one who comes, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sins of the world.”

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