Isaiah 22:19-23 | Romans 11:33-36 | Matthew 16:13-20

Oh God, who cause the minds of the faithful to unite in a single purpose, grant your people to love what you command and to desire what you promise that amid the uncertainties of this world our hearts may be fixed on the place where true gladness is found.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

The theme of this set of readings is a powerful, powerful message of the value and the dignity and the importance of a man who has authority, a woman who has authority, any person who has authority is the one that one needs to be in touch with in order to know what to do, to make decisions, to solve problems, and the beautiful thing about this God that we believe in so deeply is found in the second reading from St. Paul about – the beauty  of this God is the depth of his wisdom and his knowledge.  He knows everything.  He knows who you are.  He knows why you’re here.  He knows where you’re going.  He knows everything, not in the sense of it’s all predestined but in the sense of he knows the issues.  He knows what’s true.  He knows what’s false, and the beautiful thing about this God is his glory, and his glory is nothing more than his desire to share this wisdom, this knowledge with everyone.  He wants us to know the truth.  He put something inside of us that longs for the truth.  He can only be satisfied by the truth, yet we live so often in a world filled with lies.  And we find ourselves lying, because lies work.  They solve problems.  They get us out of trouble, but I want to stress one thing.  The only person that has any real value in the world, in terms of their influence, is a person who lives in the truth.

So we see in the first reading the problem that often happened to people that were in positions of authority.  The problems with positions of authority is that, when you’re in a position of authority and you have a strong ego, the temptation is to engage in using that authority not for the good of people but to control them, to be their master, to be on top, and the ego loves that.  We all love that.  I want to be effective.  I want to be capable of bringing something to you Sunday after Sunday or weekday after weekday.  Whenever you listen to these podcasts or these talks, I want so badly to be effective, and I want to do something of value.  And sometimes I might think in my ego that there are certain things that I could say that you would like better than perhaps what I should say, and I use it, and that’s where I get in trouble, we all get in trouble.  So authority is primarily based in the truth that one is able to share, and it’s interesting that – I don’t know the background enough on Shebna, but he obviously was in a position of authority, as so many people were in the Old Testament.  And they couldn’t deal with it.  They got caught in it, and they couldn’t surrender nor listen to what was true.  And so we see Shebna being taken away from his position.  He is stripped of his office, and it’s given to another person, Eliakim, and what he says about Eliakim, what he could have said about Shebna if he had stayed in touch with the truth, but he said, “I will fix you like a peg in a sure spot.  I will make sure that whatever you open no one can shut.  Whatever you shut no one can open.” 

That’s a phrase we’re going to hear again in the gospel, and it’s in the Old Testament and New Testament.  It always means the same thing.  It’s not that the person who has authority can decide anything he wants.  He’s not in charge of what’s real or true, but when he speaks the truth, when he decides something is one way, no one – no one has the power to take that away from him.  If he’s telling a lie, yes, somebody can take that away from him, but it’s something about this beautiful quality that we can receive from God to know the truth.  No one knows it like God does, but we’re constantly in need of his support, his understanding, his teaching.  We need to surrender to the truth over and over again, and when we’re in it, when we’re speaking, we are valuable.  We are performing the thing that God longs for us to perform to create in human beings the fullness of life, and the only way we can enter into the fullness of the life that God has called us to.  Our authentic self is to live in the truth, but there’s something else we find in the gospel that’s very interesting about the truth.

Jesus is with his disciples.  He does the most interesting thing.  I love the humanity of Jesus.  I go back to it over and over again, and he was like me, like you and all things.  And so he must have been so, at so many times, frustrated and disappointed in the response of people.  He spent three years with his disciples, and it wasn’t until he died and rose and redeemed the world that they grew enough in consciousness to understand who he was and what he was about and what the truth really is.  And that happened after he died.  So all the time that Jesus was with these men, they didn’t fully understand, and so he makes it clear that the reason they don’t understand is because they haven’t gone inside themselves to find the answer.  They’ve been doing what we all do with people with authority.  We do what they say.  We follow them.  I spent 23 years of my life in school, from the time I entered kindergarten until I finished my seminary training, and I sat there listening to people, or we talked about people who had authority, and I would surrender to whatever they said.  And when a professor told me, “This is what the church teaches,” I would say, “Yes, you say it is.  You’re the teacher.  I’m the student.  You’re right.  I don’t know.”  So we give over to people in authority very quickly, but when I know something and I’ve been told is very different than knowing something, really knowing it inside. 

That’s why I love this question.  It’s like Jesus says to you and to me, “What do you think the truth of life is, and where did you get that idea?”  Most of us might say, “Well, I read this book, and they said it was this.  And I think that’s right, or then I read another book, and I think they were right.  And so I’m always looking for the person who can tell me what it is.”  Then he would look at you and say, “Well, what do you think?  Who do you believe the Son of Man is?  Who do you think God is?”  You’ve been listening to teachers tell you.  You’ve read books.  You’ve listened to homilies of other priests.  You’ve done all this stuff.  So what do you really think?  And what he’s saying is that there’s a different source for understanding truth than just someone in authority saying it, and yet when someone that’s in the truth says it, there’s an authority in their words that challenge something deep inside of us, tries to awaken something inside of us that is real and true.  And it’s like what I’m saying is this mystery that we already know the truth.  To be educated is to awaken knowledge that is buried inside of us, not so much facts about things, but I’m talking about the wisdom that human beings come into the world with, the knowledge of who they are and what they’re here for.  And the thing I always find so amazing is the vulnerability God has given to every child, every human being that comes into the world.  Those first six, seven years, they absorb everything around them as if that’s true.  The way my parents act, that’s marriage.  The way my brothers and sisters treat me, that’s who I am, and we go, over and over again, through a period of time where, before we have any filter at all, we have a set of beliefs.  And depending how close those beliefs are to the truth says a lot of how difficult it’s going to be for us to find the truth, because we have to unlearn everything we’ve learned that wasn’t real, that wasn’t true.  And if you think you can do that, then I don’t think you understand the plan of God, because God didn’t come into the world to just say, “You know all this.  Just take a few minutes to think about what you believe, and then it’ll come to you.”  No, we needed to be redeemed, changed, transformed.  That’s what the apostles couldn’t understand who Jesus was until redemption.  So what we count on is this gift.  Call it wisdom, consciousness, awareness.  It’s something that grace creates in us, enables us to see who God is and who we are.  Then when he says, “Simon, who do you think I am, or who do you feel I am,” he gives absolutely the correct answer.  “You’re the Son of the living God.”  That’s not a phrase that was used very much in the Old Testament.  Messiah was, but to know he’s God’s son, the Anointed One, the Christ was an insight that he had that he fully didn’t understand, it’s clear, but nevertheless, what Jesus is saying to him is, “Simon, this is it.  You have been given this gift.  My Father has revealed it to you.” 

What does that say to us?  Can we sit down and think about God and figure out who he is?  Can we read every passage of scripture and study it and come up with who he is?  Can we turn to a book and read it and find out who he is?  Well, they can be helpful, but to know, to know him is not something that’s in our power.  And what do I mean by saying that?  Well, the hardest thing for us often is to move from the brain to the heart.  The part of us that is the mind is always, at least in my life – it’s probably in yours.  Mostly I live in the mind.  That’s how I work all day long.  I think about things.  I remember things.  I write things down.  I go to places.  I fulfill tasks, and that’s important.  Without it, we’d be mush.  We couldn’t accomplish anything, but what you have to understand is that, beyond our logical thinking processes, there’s another way of our seeing.  And it’s the heart, and the difference with the heart – we know the heart is like the brain.  It has brain cells.  It is connected to the endocrine system, the nervous system.  So it actually in many cases overrides the logic of the mind with a knowledge in the heart that knows something that you can’t explain. 

I think it’s fascinating, so many conversations I’ve had with people about – they’re in difficulty and struggling, and I say, “Well, what does God say about this?  What is he saying to you, or have you asked him to take over in this situation?  You don’t know enough.  Would he do it for you?  Would he step in?”  It’s so funny.  So often the results of that kind of question, the response rather, “He’s not that close to me.  He’s got all these other people to take care of.”  What?  No, he lives inside of you.  He’s your Father.  He’s your brother.  He’s your advocate, your lawyer, your protector.  He’s all these things, 100, 1000 percent.  He’s there for you, and unless you know that on some level, not just, “Isn’t that an interesting fact,” no – the knowing of something like that is not able to be proved by the brain, but it is able to be surrendered to by the heart.  And when you do that, wow, something shifts.  Something major shifts inside of us. 

I think in my early years of the priesthood, I spent a tremendous amount of time relying on my role as a sacramental minister.  I could forgive sin.  I could make Christ present.  I could baptize people, free them from sin, all those things.  I knew I could do that as a performer of a ritual that was the source of the power of the change, and I think many times I relied upon that more than I should have, because I almost acted as if it was sort of magic.  And whether I believed it or not, it didn’t really matter, or if I was not paying attention to what I was doing, it didn’t really matter.  But I don't know about that.  Certainly as a protection to people, we’re not going to say it’s all up to the priest.  No, but the priest does have an influence on the way a sacrament is felt and experienced by people, and the difference is whether he believes or he understands, knows God. 

So the gift that God is giving us in this set of readings is a wisdom that is so important.  Number one, there’s nothing more valuable, nothing more effective in your life, nothing you should ask for more diligently and work toward more faithfully than being in the truth, who you are, why you’re here, who is God.  And when that’s there, and it doesn’t come just from your mind or from what you’ve read or from what they’ve told you, but it comes directly from God, people feel it differently.  It’s not information any longer.  It’s a resonance of an intention that you be opened to something you can’t see with your mind, but your heart knows it, longs for it and delights in it.  And when it takes over, there’s a resonance that comes from a person who works out of the heart that’s so different than comes out of the mind and thoughts and ideas.  That’s the gift, to be able to resonate the truth, not as a syllogism or a possibility but simply as a reality. 

Father, your gifts are beyond our imagining, and your willingness to share with us the wisdom that is the treasure you hold in your heart and long for it to be in our own hearts.  So bless us with an openness to your gifts of teaching and showing us in so many ways every day of our life what is going to be seeds that keep increasing our understanding of what is true, what is wise, what is important.  And we ask this through Christ our Lord, amen.