The Confession and the Cross

A sign for people who will not read the signs (16:1–4)

Matthew 16 is where this Gospel's one question finally gets an answer out loud. Matthew has been writing from his first page to show that Jesus of Nazareth is Israel's promised king, come to bring in the reign of God. Jesus has spent two chapters healing and feeding crowds in Galilee and arguing with the officials who follow him from town to town. Here he stops arguing. He leaves Jewish territory, walks his twelve disciples far north into Gentile country, and asks them who they think he is.

First, though, one more demand for proof.

“The Pharisees and Sadducees came to Jesus and tested him, asking him to show them a sign from heaven” (16:1).

These two parties agreed on almost nothing. The Greek puts a single article in front of both names, which means they arrived as one delegation. D. A. Carson, the New Testament scholar whose commentary on Matthew is one of the standard works, notes that many scholars have found such joint action so improbable that they read the verse as a late writer's vague memory of official Judaism. He argues the reverse. Naming the Sadducees at all is the mark of a writer close to the events, since a later hand, with only Pharisaism left in view, would never have thought to include them.^*

Jesus answers with the weather. A red sky at evening means a fine morning. A red and lowering sky at dawn means a storm by noon. Every farmer in Galilee knew it.

A textual question sits on top of the saying: a small but important group of manuscripts omits it, Jerome, the fourth-century translator of the Latin Bible, reported that most copies known to him left it out, and one suggestion is that scribes in Egypt dropped it because a red morning sky does not predict rain there. Carson judges the evidence finely balanced and the words probably worth keeping.^*

Either way the charge is the same. They can read the sky and cannot read the hour. And the signs they are missing are not predictions of some later crisis, nor memories of what God once did. They are Jesus himself, and the kingdom breaking in around them. Carson states the irony in one line: the proof that they cannot discern the signs “is that they ask for a sign.”^*

John Chrysostom, the fourth-century preacher of Antioch, watched them walk away from the one answer they were given. Jesus offers them the sign of Jonah — three days inside death, and then daylight — and they do not ask what he means. Which is the one sign God does intend to give. It is not a portent in the sky but a tomb; and the chapter will name it plainly before it ends (16:21). “There is no desire of information in these their doings,” Chrysostom says.^* A question asked with the answer already refused is not a question. It is a door being held shut from the inside.

The yeast nobody can see (16:5–12)

They cross the lake and realize they have forgotten bread. Mark says they were down to a single loaf. Jesus says, “Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees,” and they conclude he is annoyed about lunch.

Chrysostom was startled by how hard Jesus comes back at them. “Seest thou intense displeasure? For nowhere else doth He appear to have so rebuked them.”^* Two miraculous meals are behind these men, and their minds still run straight to the empty basket.

But the yeast is not bread, and it is not simply bad doctrine either. This is where Carson corrects the reading the chapter is usually given. Jesus is not telling his disciples to beware of everything the Pharisees and Sadducees taught. He could side with the Sadducees against the Pharisees about rules of conduct, and with the Pharisees against the Sadducees about the resurrection (22:23–33). The yeast is narrower than a school of thought and worse than an error. It is an attitude of unbelief toward God's own revelation, one that could not recognize the Messiah and that, in Carson's words, “tried to control and tame the Messiah they claimed to await.”^*

That is the sentence to sit with, because it is not a first-century sin. Matthew Henry, the Puritan pastor whose whole-Bible commentary has been in English homes for three centuries, says these men's principles were “souring, and swelling, and spreading, like leaven; they fermented wherever they came.”^* We are rarely tempted to drop the faith outright. We are tempted to keep it and quietly manage it — to hold a Christ who stays inside the shape we have made for him.

Then Jesus does something odd. Instead of explaining the image, he repeats it. Carson takes this as deliberate: a great teacher training his students to think hard about what he has given them, “not content to keep on spoon-feeding them.”^* Matthew tells us it worked. They understood (16:12).

Who do you say that I am (16:13–16)

He takes them to Caesarea Philippi. Herod Philip the tetrarch had enlarged a small town on a high terrace at the foot of Mount Hermon and renamed it for Caesar. “It lies twenty-five miles north of Galilee,” Carson notes, and its people were largely Gentile.^* Of all the places to ask the question, Jesus picks the one furthest from Jerusalem.

He asks it in two stages. First the safe form: who do people say the Son of Man is? Chrysostom saw why the order matters. By asking for the crowd's answer first and then turning the question on them, Jesus arranges it so that “by the manner of His inquiry they might be led up to a sublimer notion” — lifted past the place where the crowd had stopped.^*

The crowd's answers come back: John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, one of the prophets. Matthew alone records Jeremiah, and Carson collects the suggestions as to why — that the mixture of authority and suffering in Jesus looked like Jeremiah, or that he sounded, as Jeremiah had, like a prophet of doom for the nation.^*

It is tempting to dismiss all of this as flattery, and to treat the next verse as the moment the truth first dawned. Carson will not let us. Confession in that generation was not black or white: “It was possible to address Jesus with some messianic title without complete conviction,” or while still badly wrong about what sort of Messiah he was. And John's Gospel is plain that the disciples began following Jesus in the hope that he was the Christ (John 1:41). What happens at Caesarea Philippi is not the birth of the idea. Carson calls it “a crucial stage along that growth in understanding and faith.”^*

“Simon Peter answered, 'You are the Christ, the Son of the living God'” (16:16).

Chrysostom noticed that others had said true things about Jesus without being blessed for it — the men in the boat (14:33), Nathanael (John 1:49). Peter is blessed not for a better sentence but because the Father had put this one in him. Which means the first thing that happens in this chapter to any one of us happened to Peter here, and it was done to him rather than by him.

The rock, and an argument worth keeping open (16:17–20)

“Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.” Nobody reasons his way to the living God. Matthew Henry puts the pastoral weight where it belongs: let Peter “remember the rock out of which he was hewn,” because he was not born to this dignity but given it.^*

Then the wordplay, and the oldest argument in the chapter. “You are Peter” — Petros, a stone — “and on this rock” — petra, bedrock — “I will build my assembly.”

The reading our tradition has carried is Chrysostom's: “upon this rock will I build my Church; that is, on the faith of his confession.” John Calvin, the Geneva reformer, took the same road and widened it. In laying this foundation Christ “intended to associate with Peter all the godly that would ever exist in the world.” Henry lists three readings — Peter as apostle, Christ himself, and the confession Peter made — and says of the last that “this comes all to one with understanding it of Christ himself,” since “take away this truth itself, and the universal church falls to the ground.”^*

Carson disagrees, and it should be said plainly rather than smoothed over. The Aramaic beneath the Greek almost certainly used one word, kepha, in both clauses, since it served both as a name and as the word for rock. Greek had to move from Petros to petra only because a feminine noun cannot be a man's name. And if Matthew had wanted a contrast between Peter the pebble and Christ the bedrock, the ordinary Greek word for a stone of any size, lithos, was sitting there unused — in which case there would have been no pun, which is exactly the point. Carson's verdict is blunt: were it not for Protestant reactions against Roman Catholic claims, “it is doubtful whether many would have taken “rock” to be anything or anyone other than Peter.”^*

Two things keep that from being the concession it sounds like. The first is that Carson's own reading grants the Roman claims nothing: “The text says nothing about Peter's successors, infallibility, or exclusive authority.” Peter is first among equals, sent by other apostles, answerable to the church in Jerusalem, and rebuked to his face by Paul (Acts 11:1–18; Galatians 2:11–14). Henry, three centuries earlier and with no help from modern linguistics, had already allowed that Peter laid the first stones of the church among Jews and Gentiles alike and “might in some sense be said to be the rock on which it was built” — while calling him “senior among them, but not superior over them.”

The second is that the older reading is not merely a Protestant reflex. Chrysostom was reading Greek in Antioch, and in the same paragraph where he gives the rock to the confession he also says God is making “a man that is a fisher more solid than any rock, while all the world is at war with him.” Even he will not keep the two apart.

So we leave the tension standing, as Henry does. It is Peter — Peter precisely as the man who has just confessed — and the confession is the ground every later believer stands on with him. What the verse will not bear is an inherited office. Henry's own guardrail is the best line in the argument: “those are not the church's friends that narrow its foundation.”

Notice what Jesus calls his people: ekklēsia, a word that appears in the Gospels only here and at 18:17. Behind it stands the Old Testament qahal, the assembly of the Lord, so this is not a new institution but the old people of God gathered now around their Messiah. Carson keeps one distinction sharp that we had let blur: the church is not the kingdom. One word means a people, the other a reign. “The messianic reign is calling out the messianic people.”^*

And then the promise: “the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.” Calvin read the gates as the whole arsenal of hell — “every kind of power and of weapons of war” — and heard a trumpet in the promise rather than a lullaby. Carson takes the phrase more narrowly, and the lexical case is strong: gates of this kind, in Job and the Psalms and Isaiah and in Jewish and pagan writing alike, seem to refer to death and dying, which is why the older Revised Standard Version put the line in terms of the powers of death rather than the gates of hell. The difference matters most at a graveside. The assembly Jesus is building will still be standing when death has finished with every one of us.

To this people he hands the keys. Calvin's image is the plainest: the ministers of the gospel are porters who carry the keys, and the comparison belongs to teaching — which is why Jesus could accuse the lawyers of carrying off the key of knowledge (Luke 11:52). What is loosed by their preaching “may be actually loosed in heaven.” Carson adds the guardrail. The whatever is people rather than rules, and Peter is no “pipeline to heaven; still less do his decisions force heaven to comply.” He binds and looses by proclaiming the gospel he was given, and he can do it with authority because heaven has acted first.

Then, strangely, silence: tell no one. Not because Jesus wanted to hide, but because a confession built on national excitement would be the wrong confession, and because the road to Jerusalem was not to be short-circuited by an early announcement. Chrysostom saw the same wisdom: what “hath been once rooted and then plucked up, would hardly, if planted, again be retained among the many.”^*

The Christ who must die (16:21–23)

“From that time, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem” (16:21).

It is often said that this one verse turns the whole Gospel, and Carson is more careful than that. A turning point there certainly is, he says, but he doubts the structure of all twenty-eight chapters is governed by this verse and 4:17, since the same phrase marks Judas's road too (26:16). What is new here is not the fact of the cross — Jesus has spoken of it in riddles since chapter nine — but the plainness: Matthew drops Mark's word for teaching and chooses a word that means pointing a thing out.

Then the hardest word in the sentence: must. Carson locates it exactly. Not fate, and not heroic resolve, though a little of both is in the air, but, in Carson's words, “in willing submission to his Father's will” — and in Matthew's hands the must does the work of “it is written.”^*

Peter takes him aside. The love in it is real, and so is the arrogance. He has just confessed that Jesus is the Christ and now speaks as though he knows the will of God better than the Christ does, with what Carson calls a strong will and a warm heart linked to ignorance. Calvin is merciless about the goodness of good intentions here: “so completely are men hurried on and driven headlong by inconsiderate zeal, that they do not hesitate to pass judgment on God himself, according to their own fancy.”

And Jesus turns toward him — not away — and calls him a rock of the other kind, a skandalon, the stone you trip on in the dark. It is the wilderness temptation again, a crown with no cross, this time in a friend's voice (4:8–9). The irony runs all the way out. The idea of a suffering Messiah, which made Peter a stumbling block to Jesus, became after the resurrection the stumbling block for everyone else (1 Corinthians 1:23).

The road his people walk (16:24–28)

“If anyone desires to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me” (16:24).

Chrysostom's way into self-denial is still the clearest anyone has managed. “Let us learn first what it is to deny another, and then we shall know what it may be to deny one's self.” Think of how we treat a man we have disowned — we see him beaten or led away and we do not step in, because he is nothing to us any more. Jesus asks us to hold our own grasping selves at exactly that distance: “let him have nothing to do with himself, but give himself up to all dangers and conflicts.”^*

Carson keeps us from hearing this as an entrance fee. Dying to self is less a condition met once at the door than the continuing shape of the whole journey. Calvin says the same with a better picture. God lays the cross on good men and bad alike, but only those who bend their shoulders to it are said to bear it, since “a wild and refractory horse cannot be said to admit his rider, though he carries him.”

Tim Keller, the Manhattan pastor, preached this passage as the only honest answer to the modern hunt for an identity. His summary of what Jesus asks is four words long: “become a dead man walking.” But he insists on the order, and the order is the gospel. “It's not until you understand that he died for you and he loves you and you're accepted in him that you will have this strength to see just how screwed up you are.” Self-denial is not how we buy the welcome. It is what becomes possible once the welcome is certain.

Then the arithmetic. Save your life and you lose it; lose it for his sake and you find it. The logic is relentless: three sentences in a row begin with for. And one Greek word, psychē, stands under both “life” and “soul” here. It is the self. Henry sets the whole world in one pan of the scale against a single soul and finds the world wanting: “it is weighed in the balance, and found too light to weigh it down.”^*

And the cross is not the end of the sentence. The Son of Man will come in his Father's glory with his angels, and repay each one according to what he has done — a line lifted from Psalm 62:12, where it is the Lord who repays. Carson catches the quiet claim in the possessive: “They are his angels. He stands so far above them that he owns them and uses them.”^*

The chapter closes on a puzzle. Some standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom. The usual answer is the next paragraph: the transfiguration, six days later. That answer is harder to hold than it looks. Carson objects that a promise about not tasting death is an extraordinary way to speak of three men who will see something inside a week, and that it is not clear how the transfiguration is the Son of Man coming in his kingdom at all. He takes the verse instead of “the manifestation of Christ’s kingly reign exhibited after” the resurrection. Calvin had read it differently centuries before, as the manifestation of heavenly glory “which Christ began to make at his resurrection,” and then by the Spirit and by the miracles. Henry's list is the same: the pouring out of the Spirit, the planting of the church, the fall of Jerusalem. Carson's own conclusion is the plainest of the three. Some of the men standing on that road would live to see the reign of Jesus made visible — the gospel running through the empire, the harvest coming in from the nations.

Where chapter sixteen leaves us

The chapter puts together two things we keep trying to hold apart. Who he is, and how he saves.

Peter got the first exactly right and the second exactly wrong, and about ninety seconds separated them. That should steady us rather than shame us. A man can have the doctrine of Christ perfectly in place and still be scandalized by the way Christ actually goes about saving him.

And see what the King does with the stumbling block. He does not withdraw the promise he made a minute earlier. Peter is still the first stone. The rebuke happens inside the building work rather than instead of it.

We are not asked to carry the cross that saves. He carried that one. Henry says it better than any of us: “He bore the heavy end of the cross, the end that had the curse upon it, that was a heavy end, and so made the other light and easy for us.”^*

So the self we are told to deny is a self he has already died to rescue. The life we are told to lose is a life he has already promised to hand back. And the assembly built on a fisherman's confession will outlast every gate that death has ever shut.