The Rock of Stature and Permanence

In Matthew, Jesus says that "after the tribulation of those days," "all the tribes of the earth"

shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.

And then, also in Matthew, the high priest questions Jesus with "I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God."  Jesus replies

Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.

 , , , which answer enrages the council and causes them to condemn Jesus to death.

The above exchange, of course, does not stand the test of our modern standards of being "logical."  Jesus, however, is addressing the council members' internalization of certain imagery.  Jesus' statement to them might be parsed "logically" so as to seem, at worst, irrelevant to the charge presented to him.  The notion of the "Son of man," as the theologians never tire of telling us, was rooted in Old Testament imagery--there is nothing in Jesus' response in itself to indicate necessarily that he is speaking of himself.

Of course, there is the presumed backstory to the Jewish leaders' investigation, in which they have gotten prior information about Jesus (including his references to himself as the Son of man), and there is little profit in wondering whether their investigation was ever going to be more than a formality.  What seems to be little noticed, however, is the fact that Jesus is describing--as is evidenced by the "after the tribulation" quote above--his return from heaven at the time of the end, and moreover that Jesus' overall description of the end (as the critics never tire of telling us) was said by him to have been expected before all of that generation had died.  Moreover, Jesus' use of "hereafter" (or "from this time onward," or the like) is a challenge to the council about something that will appear and exist before their eyes, not something delayed until the end.

What Jesus is confronting the council with is an imagery that they have--for good or ill--internalized, and he is presenting them with an opportunity to respond to it from a similarly internal source.  The outwardly-voiced arguments are but incidentals.  The notions of time and place involved in relating the imagery are similarly incidentals.

Nothing is more malleable in Jesus' descriptions of the end than time and place.  Indeed, (aside from the way his prophecies telescope in and out from the world to Jerusalem and back again), Jesus actually directs his followers to attempt to influence the timing:

But pray ye that your flight be not in the winter, neither on the sabbath day.

Shorn of modern presumptions about what is logical and what is ascertainable--a set of presumptions the theologians discard gladly in myriad maneuverings about regnal years, and co-kingships, and who was high priest, and who got buried where, and who killed Goliath, and how big exactly is a mustard seed--the prophecies about the end times are as personal to the listener as was "the Son of man coming" to (and through) the remaining lifetimes of the council.  Jesus' descriptions to us about the end times tell us more about what to disbelieve than about what to believe, and there is nothing about the apocalypse more important than to be surprised while doing good--as we might always and everywhere.

Jesus addresses those things that are internal to persons.  Jesus approaches potential disciples and promises to make them "fishers of men."  (One might note that the gospels do not say whether those men were the first approached, or if they were the first to accept.)  Of course, one can always say that "there was something about Jesus" that attracted people to him, but that statement is simply raw convenience--and it makes a hollow exercise of that episode and indeed of Jesus' entire ministry.  (Moreover, the Gospel of John makes plain that certain of the prospective disciples were quite attuned to a contemporary--and relatively mundane--advent of the messiah.)  Jesus spoke to what was already in the prospective disciples, and it will become of greatest importance for us to consider from whence such things come.

This takes our discussion to the following (and, to some people, one of the most important) passages in Matthew:

He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am?  And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.  And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona, for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.  And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.  And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.  Then he charged his disciples that they should tell no man that he was Jesus the Christ. (16:15-20.)

We can work backwards through this passage.  It ends with the "tell no man" directive, which is present in the parallel passages in Mark and Luke (without the "blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona" part), making this excerpt all the more understandable--we are going to be talking about finding things in ourselves, not in externally-exchanged arguments.

Prior to that is the "keys of the kingdom" part, which can make plain the import of the strange pairing of Jesus' command to exceed the righteousness of the Pharisees, on the one hand, while simultaneously telling his disciples, on the other hand, to find the true import in such religious strictures (such as reading "do not murder" as "do not kill others with harsh words or actions.")  The notions that people can decide what is right, and can forgive others for doing what is wrong, are notions that only with difficulty fit within the rigors of any religion (as understood from a Christian viewpoint), unless it is taken to be the case that revelation has a living presence in the unbidden experience-life of persons.  Revelation is as expected to reverberate within our fallen selves as to reverberate within a fallen Creation.

And now we have worked back to the "upon this rock" part.  What is "this rock"?  The very necessity of this question reveals the poignancy of the so-often-misdirected course of "the Church."  Asked in a different setting, it would be as the purest milk of truth to say that the "rock" of Christian belief is Jesus' actuality as the God-man Messiah.  This "rock" is of stature and permanence in itself--greater and more permanent than anything conceivable that exists--yet we human beings imagine that it can be argued by us into our own acceptance and into our communal appreciation.  We can voice abroad Jesus' messiahship, but its being grasped by any individual person is as reliant on God's grace as ever was its being grasped in Old Testament days or in the ministry-days when Jesus demanded that it not be noised about.

The substance of our Savior's outreach to us calls to us in our sleep, or in our drowsy hours, or in our inattentions, or in our unplanned flashes of insight, just a surely as the substance of our Savior's outreach calls to the newborn--or called to the awakening Eve or Adam.

The "rock" of the church of Jesus is the conception of Jesus that "flesh and blood hath not revealed," but which comes--unaccountably, of course--by the grace of God.  Simultaneously blessed and encumbered by this conception, the follower of Jesus goes step by step, day by day, doing well and repenting of not doing well, doing good and passing on the even greater good of the forgiveness that Jesus demands of us.