Peter the Rock?

A sermon from January 15, 2023 by Jamie Howison on John 1:29-42

For several weeks in the period leading us to the season of Lent, we’ll be hearing readings from Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians. While this evening’s reading from that letter is rather basic—just an opening greeting, really—much of this letter is challenging, and at times quite brilliant. We’ll get into some of those really stellar bits as the weeks progress, so just a heads up as to where my preaching attention is likely to land!

For this week, though, I want to focus on this passage from the Gospel according to John. As I’ve said before, John’s is clearly the most impressionistic of all of the gospels, as he seeks to convey to us what he sees as being the heart of Jesus. He quite freely changes up the chronology of things, and paints rather different pictures of some of the key events along the way. Ancient writers thought quite differently about the whole idea of “history,” and were much less concerned with lining up sets of “facts” than they were in conveying the truth as they had received it.

So, we begin with John the Baptist heralding Jesus as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” and “the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.” There’s no actual baptismal scene here, the way in which there is in Mark and Matthew—and note that Luke’s account is very brief compared to those two—but instead just John the Baptist’s insistence that Jesus is the very Lamb of God. This is a theme that bubbles away throughout John’s telling, culminating in his very clear sense that Jesus is indeed the paschal lamb who will die for the sake of the people.

And then it is on to the stories of the calling of the first of Jesus’s disciples. There are two people who hear John’s declaration that Jesus is the Lamb, and they turn to follow Jesus. Interestingly, they are identified as “two of John’s disciples,” and while nameless at first, one of them is soon identified as “Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother.” This is quite a different picture from the one offered in the other gospels as to how Andrew became a disciple, but again a modern understanding of “facts” is simply not John’s concern. The other disciple remains unnamed, but the long consensus is that this second one is John the gospel writer, quietly including himself in the story. He does that again and again, ultimately identifying himself not by his name but by the term “the beloved disciple.”

And so now we have two disciples called, but then John tells us that “Andrew first found his brother Simon and said to him, ‘We have found the Messiah’ (which is translated Anointed).” Andrew then brought his brother Simon to Jesus, who took one look at him and said, “You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas’ (which is translated Peter).” 

But you know, our modern translations don’t do a whole lot of justice to that sentence, because they miss the important word play that is at work in this naming. The Authorized Version or King James Version does it better:

 Thou art Simon the son of Jona: thou shalt be called Cephas, which is by interpretation, A stone.

The word that is at work here is the Syriac term kEphas, which is translated to Greek as Petros, and in turn to English as Peter. But kEphas and Petros both mean “rock” or “stone,” so when Jesus looks at Simon son of John and says to him that his new name is kEphas he’s really saying that his new name is “Rock”. An old youth group leader of mine used to play with this a bit, saying that this name, “Peter, formerly Simon son of John” would be easily recognized by any good Minnesota Swede as simply Rock Johnson, and while that youth leader was being playful, in a funny way he wasn’t all that much off the mark in terms of what John pictures Jesus doing here. You’re getting a new nickname, Simon; I’m going to call you the Rock or the Stone, and believe it or not you’re going to live into that name.

And so much of the picture drawn of Simon Peter by all four gospel writers is of a man who almost lives into his name, and in the end rather ashamedly misses the mark entirely when he denies even knowing Jesus on the night of his arrest.

You have the scene where Peter sees Jesus walking on the water in the midst of a storm, and he wants to try that too. “Come to me over the water, Peter,” Jesus says, and just a step or two out of the boat and Peter begins to sink like a stone, so scared is he at what is happening. Then there’s the scene where Peter, James, and John accompany Jesus up the mountain where they have this extraordinary mystical experience of seeing Elijah and Moses talking with Jesus, and all poor Peter can stammer out is some foolishness about making tents for them to stay in. For all that he is close to Jesus, Peter is a master at completely missing the point. And he bears the nickname of “the Rock,” in spite of the fact that he might better have been called the marshmallow.

The thing is, Jesus knew something about Peter that Peter didn’t know about himself, namely that in spite of all of his foibles he was indeed the one who would become rock-solid in his leadership of the early Jesus movement, on the other side of the resurrection. He is as bold as brass and solid as stone on that Pentecost day when he stands in the middle of the city, and preaches the truth with a fervour that just knocks out that crowd. Jesus may well have been the cornerstone, but in Peter he'd found himself one heck of a building block.

Which is a big part of the reason we should keep an eye on Peter, and remember that he was given his nickname long before he could even begin to be a Rock. It is a deeply hopeful and empowering story for any one of us who has ever stumbled along the way, making mistakes and missing the point and backing out at precisely the moment when we should have stepped forward. Ever been in that space? Surely you have, and just as surely have I.

Not that we’re all meant to be the same Rock as was Simon Peter—oh, and do remember he did stumble much later, in a rather serious conflict with St Paul (Galatians 2:11-14), so it wasn’t as if he suddenly became flawless—but we do need to trust that Jesus consistently sees in us something that we have a hard time seeing in ourselves. We don’t know what nickname Jesus might have tucked away for each of us, but maybe—just maybe—in his heart he’s fond of calling you or me generous or courageous or compassionate or loving or whatever.

The point is that just as Jesus could see in Simon something Simon himself hadn’t begun to understand, Jesus sees in us possibilities and potential and truth that we probably have a tough time seeing or even accepting. And in the end as we limp our way from this life into the fullness of his Kingdom, I believe he will see us not in our sin and fears and failings, but rather in the fullness of what he always meant us to be. And he’ll smile, and say, “see, I knew the real thing all along.”