Читать книгу Luminescence, Volume 1 - C. K. Barrett - Страница 21

[Preached twenty times from 6/25/44 at Bondgate, Darlington to 6/24/84 at Bolton]

I am still following the church calendar. You may have observed that next Thursday (June 29th) is St. Peter’s Day. This is certainly an admirable basis for preaching this Gospel lesson, and I have chosen this text for two good reasons. First there is its own primitive and evangelical meaning, which we ought not to pass by because it has been abused by others. Second, there are these very disputes, misunderstandings, and abuses, to which I refer, and to say the least it can do Protestants no harm to know why and where the triple-crowned bishop of Rome is wrong, and to be able to answer his assertions with confidence.

First of all, as a further point of introduction, it will be necessary to note what is taking place here. Jesus has asked his disciples what people say about him, and various opinions are mentioned. Then he asks point blank: “Who do you say that I am?” Peter answers, “You are the Christ,” then follows the text, then a command that for the present the facts shall not be made known. Matthew next, making a very definite stage in his Gospel reports that “from then” Jesus began to teach that he would have to suffer and die, a strange paradox for the life of the glorious Christ. We shall not be able to treat in full the words addressed to Peter, but the following points come clearly out of them. First, Peter’s faith was the gift of God.

PETER’S FAITH WAS THE GIFT OF GOD

“You have got it from no human source, Simon, my Father has revealed it to you.” Flesh and blood is a Jewish phrase frequently used as an antithesis to God. “No human being has told you, you have not worked it out with your own reason. God has witnessed it directly to you.” This is at once the most humiliating and the most exalting thing a person can ever have to learn. It is humiliating because in the last resort it means that all our human thinking and striving goes for nothing. “No, Peter, no human power has told you this. You don’t say it because you have carefully examined my life and thought out all that is involved in it. By yourself you would be quite incapable of coming to such a conclusion.” Here in this is the destruction of all human pride, and it is an oddly paradoxical thing that so great a structure of human pride should have been built on this huge negative, like a palace constructed over and founded on an excavation.

At the same time, it is exalting. It is the highest possibility conceivable to human beings, that God himself should make known to him his own business. There is no privilege in life comparable to this, that God should stoop to our level to incorporate us in his purposes. All of this, of course, Peter did not understand, and he was still sufficiently sure of himself, to suppose he was strong enough to stand by Jesus to the end, and bear an uninterrupted witness to Him. That bubble was soon pricked. Peter could make a true confession of the Messiahship of Jesus; what he said was true and it was God who put it into his heart to say it. But Peter did not know the significance of what he had said until he had been down into hell, until he had failed his Master, until broken and defeated he had wept bitterly. Then he knew that flesh and blood could not get him very far, that only the Father in heaven could do his work, and that arrogant human interpretations do not advance the work of Christ.

Is there not a great deal for us to learn here? Saintly old Beridge of Everton asked for his tombstone to be inscribed something like this—“trusted in his own works for salvation until . . . trusted in his own works and in Christ until . . .died trusting in Christ alone.” How many of us are still in the middle stage? How many of us are still saying, “Jesus and . . .”? I fear, very many. It is a thoroughly English thing to make the best of both worlds, to say “not either . . . or” but “both . . . and,” to say “flesh and blood” and “my Father who art in heaven . . .” For all, real faith, the faith which God himself gives though it is a gift, is a gift which is not a pure pleasure to receive. Hear what faith meant to Kierkegaard, the Dane. This is what Walter Lowrie says about him:

This is the Kierkegaard I love, not the destitute and despairing youth, nor the returning prodigal, nor the unhappy lover, not the genius who created the pseudonyms, but the frail man, utterly unable to cope with the world, who nevertheless was able to confront the real danger of penury as well as the vain terrors his imagination conjured up, and in fear and in trembling, fighting with fabulous monsters, ventured as a lone swimmer far out upon the deep, where no human hand could be stretched out to save him, and there with 70,000 fathoms of water under him, for three years held out, waiting for his orders and then said distinctly that definite thing he was bidden to say, and did with a hallelujah on his lips.

That was Kierkegaard’s compliance, lying out over a depth of 70,000 fathoms of water. Faith means simply relying on God in Christ and nothing else. And the consequence of it is (with other things) the peace and courage that Kierkegaard had. Peter with his poor self-confidence was soon brought down. It was not until that self-confidence was broken down in despair and failure, until it drowned in a sea of bitter tears that Peter learned the meaning of “faith alone.”

All this is not to belittle the faith of those to whom the Heavenly Father has revealed some of his truth and love, and who do love and serve Christ as Peter did. It is only to beg that you not stop short in the world of compromise. Study hymn 376:

Thou great mysterious God unknown,Whose love hath gently led me on,E’en from my infant days,Mine inmost soul expose to view,And tell me if I ever knew Thy justifying grace,Thy justifying grace.

Whate’er obstructs Thy pardoning love,Or sin, or righteousness, remove,Thy glory to display;My heart of unbelief convince,And now absolve me from my sins,And take them all away. (Charles Wesley)

ON THIS ROCK I WILL BUILD MY CHURCH

We must not run away from the plain meaning of these words. It is said that Jesus will build his Church upon Peter. The play upon words, especially when you consider the Aramaic makes that perfectly clear. It will be well, however, to spend just a moment in observing precisely what that does and what it does not mean. It does mean that the Church is to be built on Peter, Peter the recipient of God’s revelation, Peter the apostle. There is nothing startling in that. We read elsewhere (in Ephesians) that the Church is build upon the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, and here Peter, making this earliest of confessions of faith, is thought of as first of the apostles. This we must think of again, later.

Let us now notice what the text does not mean. It means nothing at all with regard to those who regard themselves as the successors of Peter, in the bishopric of Rome. I will say nothing about whether Peter ever visited Rome at all. There is of course no certainty that he did. But there is a much more important point at stake here. Suppose it is true that Peter went to Rome and there instituted an episcopal Church. We are asked to suppose that the words spoken to Peter can be mechanically transferred to his second, his third, his a hundredth successor. If that is done, the very words are made to contradict themselves, for they themselves declare that the confession of Christ is a spiritually given thing. Not flesh and blood, but God in heaven. This is the same as Paul’s “no one can say Jesus is Lord except in the Holy Spirit.” And now we are able to equate the Holy Spirit with so profane a thing as a list of bishops! No that is what we can never do, whether we are asked by Rome or by Canterbury or by Lambeth. Yet in our polemic against this abuse, we must not forget this: the Church is built upon the apostles, we do rely on their God-given testimony and their God-given faith in Him. If they had not believed, if they had not preached, our faith would have no resting place at all, it would have been, if it had existed at all, but an airy fancy. It is they who point us back to Jesus, and it is through this testimony that we know him. Finally then we must consider the nature and strength of the church.

THE NATURE AND STRENGTH OF THE CHURCH

It is against this Church that the gates of Hell shall not prevail. Not because the Church is so strong, but because its Lord is so strong, not because we can make politic concordats with our neighbors, but because rather we remain faithful. Kierkegaard once made this parable about the Church. “Imagine a fortress absolutely impregnable, provisioned for an eternity. There comes a new commandant. He conceives that it might be a good idea to build bridges over the moats, so as to be able to attack the besiegers. Voila! It converts the fortress into a country seat and naturally the enemy takes it. So it is with Christianity. They changed the method, and naturally the world conquered.” Kierkegaard believed that had happened to the Danish Church in his day. I believe that there is a real danger of it happening at any time, of it happening now. Are we really a community that lives by faith and lives under the Cross?

Think of what it means to be the Church of Christ crucified and of what it means to be an apostolic Church. You cannot rely upon the ordination of your minister— ‘because he was ordained by a bishop in apostolic succession, we are alright.’ You have the responsibility of checking all my teaching by the Word of God. You and I can only prove our faith by what we say and what we do. I will mention this only. Peter was made a shepherd, an under-shepherd under the authority of Jesus. The true Church is a shepherd Church that seeks the lost and shepherds its own. I cannot but think of this in terms of the Commando Campaign. Are we ready for a mission of the Churches to the outsiders? And are we ready to welcome strangers in?