If you ever visit Rome and go to the basilica of St. Peter’s, the first time you see it, no matter how jaded you are, you’ll be overwhelmed by its size and scale. In the midst of all the spectacle, you may not even notice that in the center, carved around the bottom of the dome in what seem like ten-foot letters, are the words Jesus speaks in today’s gospel: You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church. All this, because Peter answered the question from Jesus in today’s gospel: Who do you say that I am? I hear, by the way, they have made it much harder to become pope these days than by answering one question correctly.
Sometimes we imagine that Peter is in the gospels as a willing but not very insightful Dr. Watson, guessing wrong just so that Jesus, the Sherlock Holmes character, can come in and show the right answer that Peter wasn’t alert enough to see. But today, apparently, Peter gets it right. He was the first person to have the courage to come out and say what the disciples had been debating among themselves. He said that Jesus was the Messiah, and more important even than that, the Son of God. We hear first in the gospel all the other things that “people” were saying Jesus was: a prophet like Jeremiah, Elijah, John the Baptist — all impossible, since they were all dead, but nevertheless the only category that people seemed to be able to think in, that Jesus was just like all the other inspired religious leaders who had come and gone over the years, or perhaps even one of them come back to life. But Peter blurts it out when he’s put on the spot for his own opinion, it’s no longer a question of what he’s heard other people say, now he has to answer for himself based on what he has seen and heard. And he’s willing to say that Jesus is literally God’s presence on the earth in a way that presence was never given to us before.
Earlier this week, very unexpectedly during what I thought was going to be a business lunch, someone asked me some prying questions. Why do you believe when it seems that so many people, or even most people, don’t? What is that really sustains faith? What is it you actually are willing to say you believe in? What is God like? Being asked questions like that, when you’re unable to duck them, is like being in Peter’s position: The person asking the question doesn’t want to know what other people say. They don’t want to hear what our church taught us to say. What matters is what we say. And at that moment, who Jesus is for us is really the question, isn’t it. People who wonder why there’s such a thing as Christian faith above all need to hear who Jesus is, that to us he is not just an inspiring religious figure that we quote the same way we’d quote Gandhi or Dr. King or the Dalai Lama. That he is not just a pastel symbol representing love and our best aspirations, or a great moral teacher who was very insightful with a lot of the advice he gave. If we asked today who people say he is, the way Jesus did in Caesarea Philippi, that mostly is what I would guess we might hear.
But as Peter says, he is not those things. Jesus is the son of the living God, alive and active, the presence of God in this world still through the power of the Holy Spirit, a presence and a personality that is slightly frightening, but powerfully attractive, someone it’s impossible to stop wondering about once you have come to realize that he was just possibly who he said he was. Today just as much as at the moment this gospel took place, people need to hear words spoken about who Jesus is, not pounded into their heads as if there couldn’t possibly be another opinion, not spoken smugly as if the whole thing is obvious, but spoken from the heart by people who have come to know him and love him and embrace him. The people saying those words will be us.
That’s an intimidating prospect: Our faith is something that we all have a tendency to keep under wraps, at least outside of this building, uncertain of our ability to explain or defend what we think and feel. The consolation for us is that none of us should imagine that we will always do this well. For example, come back here next week and listen to the gospel then, and you’ll hear that the very next words out of Peter’s mouth make Jesus as genuinely furious as he ever seems to have been in his life. Peter did not always act as if he understood Jesus, and when it came to dying with Jesus he was nowhere to be found. But today, he said something true about Jesus that no one else around apparently was willing to say. He took the plunge and said it out loud.
In a way it doesn’t matter what Peter said, and in today’s gospel it doesn’t matter what any other people say. What matters today about who Jesus is, is what you say. Today is a good day to wonder about what words would come out of our mouths the next time we hear the question asked, and the person who needs to answer it is you.