Last week, when Jesus asked his disciples who people said he was, who they said he was, when Simon Peter confessed him as the Christ, the Son of the living God, and Jesus told Simon Peter who he was, the rock. And here, the rock has so soon become a stumbling block, because he wants to deny that the Son of the living God can suffer and die – understandable! But we do not follow a saviour, lean on a saviour who is indifferent to or ignorant of the trials of this world, but rather one who has gone through them so that he can bring us through into new life.
Who we say God is determines who we say we are, who are made in God’s image, who are neighbour is, also made in God’s image. Who we say we are, in turn, has a whole lot of influence over what we do, how we are in the world.
It’s strange that Jesus tells Peter that his mind is stuck on human things rather than the divine. In some ways, it seems as though the opposite applies: Peter is looking for a miracle, a theophany, a deus ex machina to usher in the Messianic age; he doesn’t want Jesus to take the very human road of suffering in body and in spirit that is the symptom of our mortality. Peter wants to skip straight to heaven.
Perhaps the problem is our definition of what is human and what is divine. What if our hope is not only in the heavens – although that is true hope, too. But what it this life, created and sustained and shared by the Son of the living God – is our share in the work of the Divine? What if we were to take seriously the doctrine of creation – not as a substitute for scientific knowledge, mind you, but as a window open to it? What if we remember that God created us to be in relationship with God, to reflect God’s image in our relationship with the rest of creation? What if we owned not only our authority but our responsibility to God, to one another, to creation?
Then we would be with it in the hurting and the harm of climate change. We wouldn’t deny it, or just hope for the best. Those temptations, to find ourselves above it all, or to throw ourselves from the pinnacle of the temple, devil-may-care, and trust that the angels will catch us – Jesus dealt with those, too. And he said, Away with you, Satan. Get behind me.
We will suffer with the planet, grieve with the earth and the oceans. And that is where God is, how Jesus is with us. Not here to escape our humanity but to heal it, to perfect it, and in his commitment to the way of the Cross, we see that humanity is perfected in love, in humility, in the mercy modelled by the Son of the living God. We see that these traits are the image of the divine: that compassion – not turning away, not denying, but bearing with – that the compassion that gave birth to the Incarnation is at the heart of the Divine.
Who we say God is matters. Moses, faced with a burning bush which is yet unconsumed – because our God is a Creator, not a destroyer – Moses asks God for a name, for a divine identity to share with his people. And God answers in the purest, most generous form: I am.
When God says, I am, God says, I am with you. When God says, I am the God of your ancestors, God says, I have always been with you. When Jesus said, I will go to the Cross for you, God with us, Emmanuel, is saying, I am always with you. Through it all, in it all, so that I can bring you through the storm to safe harbour, still waters.
I am who I am – I am God! I am the God who has always been and I am the God who will be with you. Be still, then, child, and know that I am.
over the water 