Elementary

The scriptures referred to are Matthew 16:13-20.

Believe it or not, in the original stories Sherlock Holmes was not always right. In the very first novel, A Study in Scarlet, the detective who is a master of disguise is fooled by a young man dressed as an old woman. In A Scandal in Bohemia he is outwitted by Irene Adler whom he thereafter refers to as “The Woman.” In the The Yellow Face, Holmes' solution is so far off that at the end of the tale he gives Watson permission to remind him of it should he get too arrogant in the future. But what is really startling is that Holmes was mistaken in what he called his technique for uncovering the truth. He called his method deductive reasoning. But that is starting with a general principle and arriving at conclusions that are logically derived from it. And he did that occasionally. For instance, starting from the general principle that dogs tend to bark at strangers, when he found evidence to the contrary, he deduced that the intruder wasn't a stranger. But more often what Holmes did was inductive reasoning: taking specific facts and logically putting them together to arrive at a general conclusion. When Holmes meets his prospective roommate, he observes little details about him, puts them together and concludes that Watson is an Army doctor who has been wounded in Afghanistan.

Like Holmes, we use both methods. Let's say I am at a party and I look at the host's books, as I'm wont to do, and if I see shelves devoted to Sherlock Holmes stories, I can by inductive reasoning be sure that he or she is a fan. Alternately, if someone who I know is a fan invites me to their home, I can deduce that I will see Sherlockiana there.

I can go further. If I see DVDs of Benedict Cumberbatch and none of Basil Rathbone, I can venture a guess that the person became a fan due to the recent BBC series that updated the stories and characters to the 21^st century. If instead I see a lot of very old and hard to find volumes on Holmes, or reproductions of the original books, or a collection of the Strand magazine in which the short stories were first published, I can conclude that this person probably came to Holmes through reading the stories. And if the person has a whole room of Sherlockiana in every medium, including a Snoopy in a deerstalker and Inverness cape, I know I am in the presence of a serious collector and possibly a completist.

Today's passage from the gospel of Matthew uses both methods of logical thinking. We start with Jesus asking his disciples, first, who do others think he is and, secondly, who do the Twelve think he is. He is asking them to look at the data, the things they've seen him do and the things he has said, and draw a conclusion, using inductive logic. And Peter, who acts as the spokesman for the Twelve, says, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” And as Sherlock Holmes followed Watson's unspoken thoughts in the beginning of The Sign of Four, we can figure out how Peter came to that conclusion. Jesus heals the sick, calms a storm, raises the dead, feeds thousands and walks on water. His mastery over illness, death, scarcity and nature puts him above all other prophets. Plus Jesus has keen moral and spiritual insights, gives novel but incisive interpretations of scripture, speaks with authority when opposing religious traditions and forgives sins. It is not too great a leap to conclude that Jesus is the Messiah or Christ, God's Anointed, sent to save his people.

But just as there are many versions of Sherlock Holmes, from Robert Downey Jr. to Jeremy Brett, there were many ideas about exactly what God's Anointed one would be. Because the Hebrews anointed prophets, priests and kings. So he could be any of the three.

Could the Messiah be the prophet predicted in the book of Deuteronomy? In it God says to Moses, “I will raise up a prophet like you for them from among their fellow Israelites. I will put my words in his mouth and he will speak to them whatever I command. I will personally hold responsible anyone who then pays no attention to the words that prophet speaks in my name.” (Deuteronomy 18:18-19) There were a lot of prophets but this one is special. He is to be like Moses, a lawgiver and one who leads his people out of bondage. So the Messiah could reasonably be this special prophet.

Another way of looking at the Messiah was as a second David, an anointed king from his line who would re-establish his kingdom. When David became king, the big threat was the Philistines, who came from the sea, took over the coast and moved eastward. It was David who finally stopped them. (2 Samuel 5:17-25) In Jesus' day, the Romans occupied the land God had given to his people and the Jews wished for a Messiah who would push the Romans out and establish a truly independent kingdom of God. In fact, many thought the Messiah would end the present evil age and usher in the era of God's rule on the earth.

And it may very well have been this version that Peter was thinking about. The clue is in the title he gives Jesus. “Son of God,” which we take to be a title of divinity, was also a title for the king. God uses it of the Davidic line of kings in 2 Samuel 7:12-14. We see it used in the coronation hymn, Psalm 2. So Peter may have been referring to Jesus' divinity but he could also have been confirming the popular idea of the Messiah being a holy warrior-king like David. And indeed acting not as a peacemaker but as the king's bodyguard Peter draws his sword to prevent Jesus' arrest and cuts off the ear of the high priest's servant. (John 18:10) And after his crucifixion, the dismayed disciples heading to Emmaus say, “but we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel.” (Luke 24:21) Notice that they are talking about Jesus in the past tense. A dead warrior-king is no help to their cause.

In our passage Jesus praises Peter because he is right about the Messiah part. Peter is even right about Jesus being a king, though not in the mold that he thinks. Because Peter doesn't have all the data yet. He and the others have not yet seen what will happen on Passover. Only after all that, and, crucially, after Jesus' resurrection, will they understand that there is another type of person anointed by God.

And that is the suffering servant who dominates the last third of the book of Isaiah. In chapter 42, verse 1, God says, “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom I delight; I will put my Spirit on him and he will bring justice to the nations.” When Jesus begins his ministry he reads in the synagogue from the scroll of Isaiah where it says, “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me because the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those in chains, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.” (Isaiah 61:1-2, my translation; cf Luke 4:18-19)

What is distinctive in Isaiah is that God's anointed servant suffers for the people. Again it says, “Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:4-6)

Peter's reasoning was correct but he did not have all the data. And so his conclusions went a bit astray. We know this because when Jesus reveals that he must suffer and die, Peter rebukes the person he just called God's Messiah. So Peter thinks the person anointed by God as his son doesn't know what God's plan actually is.

Jesus says to Peter, “You are not setting your mind on God's concerns but those of humans.” (Matthew 16:23, my translation) Peter couldn't see how Jesus dying was going to help set up the kingdom. Yet this part is crucial. Because a lot of people get Jesus wrong. Many prefer the “conquering holy warrior” kind of Messiah to the one who gets beat up and killed. But seeing and embracing that difference is vital. Because here's where we go from the inductive logic that puts the pieces together and sees Jesus as the one sent by God, to where we switch to making logical deductions from that fact.

If Jesus' mission is to demonstrate God's love by allowing himself to be sacrificed to save his people, what then does following Jesus mean? Does it mean we are off the hook as far as suffering? Or does it mean that we, recipients of God's self-sacrificial love, should in turn be willing to suffer in order to bring that love to others?

We don't have to guess. Jesus spells it out. And if Peter didn't like what Jesus said about him having to die, then he really wasn't going to like what Jesus said next. “If anyone wants to come after me, let him disown himself and take up his cross and follow me.” (Matthew 16:24)

Can you imagine how the disciples took this? People don't want to give things up nor suffer nor appear to be on the losing side, which is what getting crucified meant. And that hasn't changed. Not even in Christ's church. There's this hymn that we all know. It's got a great tune composed by Arthur Sullivan of Gilbert and Sullivan fame. It goes: “Onward, Christian soldier, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before. Christ, the royal Master, leads against the foe; forward into battle, see his banners go!” That hymn is a lot more popular than this next one, which you will also find in our hymnal. The tune is so-so but the real contrast is in the words: “Take up your cross, the Saviour said, if my disciple you would be; deny yourself, the world forsake, and humbly follow after me.” But in our hymnal they substitute other words for the original “deny yourself, the world forsake.” In fact, I looked it up in both the Episcopal and in the Lutheran hymnals, and while the replacements words are different in each, they both take out the reference to denying oneself and forsaking the world.

Yet the logic is undeniable: if Jesus is the Messiah, and his mission is to save a sinful world, even at the cost of his life, then as his followers, we are to not only spread the good news of what he has done but also to be willing to demonstrate that same self-sacrificial love as a part of our mission. To the extent that we aren't ready to do that, we can expect that sinful world to call us out on the message we are preaching.

Again one sign that Jesus was the Messiah is that he healed people. If we aren't willing to make sacrifices to see to it that those who are suffering from physical and mental diseases get the medical help they need, why should the world believe we are followers of Jesus the healer?

Another sign that Jesus was the Messiah is that he fed thousands though it didn't look like he had enough. If we aren't willing to do what we can with whatever we have to see to it that hungry people get the food they need, why should the world believe that we are followers of Jesus the bread of life?

Another sign that Jesus was the Messiah was that he displayed mastery over weather. If we aren't willing to make sacrifices to slow and reverse the global warming which the overwhelming majority of scientists say we contribute to, and which our defense department lists as a major threat to world stability and our security, why should people believe we are followers of Jesus who calmed the storm?

You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to see that the church is reluctant to live out the implications of following the person we call Lord and Savior. As I've said before, I've had patients who say they want to get better but don't follow doctors' orders. If I didn't follow the orders of the doctors who saved me after my accident, I would still be alive but I would also still be confined to a wheelchair. Therapy was painful but necessary for me to walk again. If we wish to walk with Jesus, we need to follow the Great Physician's orders.

There are further deductions to be made from our gospel passage. After Jesus puns on Peter's nickname, the rock, he says he will build his church on this rock. I don't think he's talking about this specific fisherman but rather Peter's declaration that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the living God. Jesus is the foundation the church is built on. (1 Corinthians 3:11) But Jesus says he will give the church the keys to the kingdom of heaven. And for time's sake I will quote the rest in my own translation for clarity: “...and if you compel or prohibit anything on the earth it will be compelled or prohibited in the heavens, and if you annul or let anything go on the earth it will be annulled or let go in the heavens.”

Basically Jesus is saying that we, as the church, have authority to deal with things that come up as we carry out our mission. For instance in Paul's day, a married woman would cover her head in church to distinguish her from a prostitute. We no longer require that. It has been annulled. Slavery was universal back then. Early Christians started releasing their slaves and even made certain slaves bishops. They began to realize that slavery was incompatible with following Jesus. After a very long struggle, within the church as well as within the Western world, slavery was finally prohibited, the movement largely spearheaded by Christians. As Jesus challenged the unjust traditions of his day, he gives us the authority to challenge the things which keep people from experiencing God's love and forgiveness and the freedom we have in Christ.

What is essential is that we stay true to our mission: to embody the love of God we see in Christ. And it is not a love which runs roughshod over people but which heals them, which meets their basic needs, which protects them from the storms of life that threaten to sink their lives into turmoil and drown their hopes.

I once wrote a paper for the Baker Street Journal that looked at Sherlock Holmes as a literary Christ figure. As Jesus was an unofficial religious leader who did a better job than the scribes, Pharisees and priests, so Holmes was an unofficial detective who did a better job than Scotland Yard. As Jesus had disciples who spread the good news about him, Holmes had Watson who wrote up his adventures. And as Jesus gave up his life to save the world, so Holmes was willing to die in the grip of Professor Moriarty to rid the world of his evil. And as Jesus rose from the dead on the third day and appeared to his disciples, Holmes reappeared to Watson three years after his supposed death. Many people have been inspired by Holmes to become real detectives and forensic scientists. And they are extending what he did in directions his author never imagined. And as followers of Jesus, we too must keep extending the ways and the areas of life in which we demonstrate the self-sacrificial love and forgiveness and liberating power of Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of the living God. It's not merely logical; it's elementary.