Gossip and Gospel

The Gossips, Norman Rockwell

Matthew 16:13-20

Then He commanded His disciples that they should tell no one that He was Jesus the Christ.

If you are keeping score then you know that I have posted on the story of Peter's great confession two times already. The story is featured in Matthew, Mark and Luke (known as the Synoptic gospels for their similarities). This is my third time covering this story and I haven't even covered the Markan version. This will be my second time covering Matthew 16:13-19... and the last time was in June. You may be aware that I structure the posts on this blog on the Lectionary reading cycle (many Christian and Jewish groups do this) and in doing so some readings are repeated. There is an episodic nature to presenting the Gospel from the lectionary cycle. But truth be told, there is an episodic nature to preaching and presenting the Gospel in general. Both of these are just shadows of the fact that the Gospel narratives are episodic themselves. Christ himself was a preacher. The Gospels themselves are elongated sermons. If presenting the gospel/preaching/evangelizing/"sermonizing" is to have any fidelity than it must be messages that are centered around these long form sermons (the gospels) the testify of the life of a preacher named Jesus and his thoughts that were detailed through his own sermons. We are telling the story about the stories of a great storyteller. We are passing on the messages from the original messenger, and one day he will hold us accountable for what we said and did in his name. He will have us give an account for the distortions of his original message. That is the story behind Norman Rockwell's illustration "The Gossips." We see several episodes where a message is passed on and on and on. It is intentionally painted to illustrate the children's game called "telephone." This group game, which Wikipedia refers to as "Chinese whispers", is played by taking a sentence and having one player whisper it in the ear of another player who reciprocates the action to another player and on and on and on. At the end the final player repeats the message to the whole group. It is often warped and changed in hilarious ways. But as Rockwell has illustrated the real life telephone game of doesn't always end well. The bad news of misinformation can lead to destruction and hurt. Christ has called his disciples to spread the good news: information that lead to life and healing. Yet sometimes those who intend to spread the Gospel are unwittingly just spreading the Gossip. A slight misunderstanding of the secret treasures of God can lead to people valuing fool's gold. One seemingly small detail of Jesus' message can cause us to miss the essence of it all. Christian history is full of episodes like the Crusades where believers thought that they were fighting for the Kingdom of God by using the weapons of violence and oppression. There is one key textual difference between my post on Matthew 16:13-19 and today's post. That difference is verse 20. It is the verse that features what William Wrede called the Messianic secret. That one small difference that makes a world of difference. That is why I placed it first today. When you read it you are forced to reread the previous verses in its light. The proclamation of the Gospel must be read in the consideration of this mysterious episode. It must all be understood in the context of Jesus' secret. Why would the Rabbi who called his disciples to spread the message of his Kingdom at the end of Matthew ask them to conceal his kingship in the middle of Matthew? The narrative of Matthew 16:13-20 is based on rumors, confessions and secrets... and it teaches us the difference between the Gospel of Jesus and Gossip about Jesus.

The Party Wire, Norman Rockwell

Rumors

When Jesus came into the region of Caesarea Philippi, He asked His disciples, saying, “Who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am?”
So they said, “Some say John the Baptist, some Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?”

Norman Rockwell captured the pulse of Americana so well because he often was illustrating for publications that sought to share stories that identified the identity of a people. Before he became famous for his Saturday Evening Post illustrations, Rockwell illustrated covers like the The Party Wire for Leslie's Monthly Magazine...which would rename itself The American Magazine. Rockwell was integral solidifying the look of Americana because he depicted the American people when they were at the beginnings of their self awareness as a historic people. America realized that they were being recorded for posterity, but who would be their scribe? Rockwell would step into the shoes of one compiling a hagiography: documenting this nation in its selected golden age as it transitioned from rural/urban to suburban, manual to electronic and homogeneous to heterogeneous. In The Party Wire, Rockwell the documentarian depicts an older woman (the presumed town gossip) doing a little documentation of her own. A party wire (or line) was a discounted service offered in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by telephone companies. The benefit was that several parties could use one line and thereby split up the billing cost. The drawback was that all parties could also listen to each others calls. This new feat of communication was the breeding ground of gossips. When Christ started his ministry to communicate the new covenant he to met gossips. Their were gossips among the Pharisees who spread lies about him and also well meaning gossips who spread partial truths about his message and identity. The harm of a well intentioned half truth is that it is still effectively misinformation. So halfway into his ministerial efforts Jesus calls in his lieutenants for a powwow. He asks them what was being said on the party wire? What was the general consensus about who he was? Now you may critique Jesus for doing a poor branding effort, because how would they know who he was unless he told them? Well Jesus appears to place value on his works themselves as a testimony of his identity. He also believed that Scripture itself was his greatest advertisement. So after assessing the misinformation of those who had heard the gossip about Jesus, he investigated the consensus of those who had been given the Gospel. He asked his disciples who they thought he was.


The Lineman, Norman Rockwell

 Confessions

Simon Peter answered and said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
Jesus answered and said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven. And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it. And I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”

When I was just a young boy growing up in the small Black Baptist churches of the mid-1980's we were still singing a song called "Jesus is on the mainline." We sand it ALL THE TIME! It seems like it was at least two times every church service. It was a message about Jesus deeply embedded in a metaphor from the Norman Rockwell era. Jesus was a telephone operator that would patch your calls to Heaven through. It encapsulated in 20th century imagery our confession that Christ is the mediator between God and Man. He is the great high priest of the book of Hebrews. So that is what the song says and pictures, but it is not what my imagination heard as a kid. Remember, by the 1980's telephone operators largely were not as present in the average telephone conversation. They were largely behind the scenes. So when I heard "mainline" I thought "telephone line": the pole that held the actual circuits that ran into everyone's house and delivered the communication capability. I imagines Jesus to be more of Norman Rockwell's The Lineman than Lily Tomlin's "Ernestine the Operator." I had heard the gospel song about Jesus but didn't understand the image that the lyrics communicated. When Jesus asked his disciples who they said that he was, he was concerned with this very same phenomena. His disciples had heard the song of the Gospel but what had they imagined its words to communicate. When Peter responds by confessing the truth about Christ's messianic identity Jesus responds by confessing what Peter's identity was to be.  If you will allow me to make a Black Baptist preacher point, the text here shares that confession leads to profession. When a follower of Jesus makes a mental assent that Jesus is the Messiah then counters their claim of belief with his belief about them and with a call to action. This entails both definitions of profession: a set of proclaimed beliefs (as in a profession of faith) and a vocation that you are called to (as in a profession that you are employed in). Let us not discount the value of vocation in the ministry of God, since the word literally means a calling or a summons that God gives us. "Faith" is what justifies us before God, but a belief of a certain set of facts about God is just the beginning of what this saving "faith" is. The fullness of faith equals belief, action and love. Faith without works is dead and charity (love) is the foundational gift of God. Jesus celebrated the beginning of Peter's faith and challenged him to fulfill it through the calling that God summoned him to.

Norman Rockwell, Doctor and Doll

Secrets

Then He commanded His disciples that they should tell no one that He was Jesus the Christ.

When we list the advent of telephones as a step in the history of communication devices, we are usually discussing tools that have helped us talk to one another. However, communication is about more than talking. Part of successful communication is listening. Sometimes it is about listening to a communicator that only speaks and we must only listen. In Doctor and Doll, Norman Rockwell focuses on the magic of the stethoscope, the unsung medical device that allows our bodies to communicate. In this painting the doctor listens to the imaginary heart of a doll so that he might win over the metaphorical heart of a little girl. When I use symbolic words like "imaginary" and metaphorical" to describe "heart" I think that many readers may take them to mean that I am downplaying the "realness" of the heart. It is actually the opposite. When we use the word "heart" it is used as a metaphor to describe something realer than the "real" organ that it takes its image from. The heart is the core, the essence of the thing, the center of the will, the soul. The heart of Jesus' message is the heart of his messianic calling. Why did Jesus often keep his messianic identity secret? He kept it secret for a time because those who had the gossip and not the gospel did not understand the heart of his message. If they would be told that he was the Messiah at this point then they would only misunderstand what the job of the messiah was and what the job of the messiah's disciples was. Peter would later show a misunderstanding of the job of the messiah and therefore his job as a disciple of the Messiah. Christ would pull him aside and inform him that the calling of the Messiah was to suffer for the kingdom and likewise Peter's calling would be to suffer to spread the message of the Kingdom. Jesus was wary to quickly associate himself with the title of Messiah/Christ because the public had a faulty understanding of what that even meant. So Jesus would labor for three years to provide the multitudes with a correct perception of what the Messiah actually was. The Messiah was one that would teach about God, love, sacrifice. humility and forgiveness and then suffer a humiliating, sacrificial death so that we might know the forgiveness of sins and the love of God. The secret about the secret is that it had a secret of its own. Jesus sought to make known the secret truth about what it looks like to be the Messiah before he revealed the secret that he was the Messiah.

Models for The Gossips. Gene Pelham

When I was searching for images for The Gossips I came across an item at a Sotheby's auction. It was the original photographs of the Models for The Gossips that Rockwell's right hand man, Gene Pelham, had taken for the artist to use in constructing his painting. Maybe this erases some of the myth of the genius of the artist for some of you. You get to pull back the curtain and see that the wizard of Oz is just a clever man using the advances of technology. The truth is that since the invention of the camera most artists (especially illustrators) use photographs to create (or at least fact check) their paintings. David Hockney  proposes that before the invention of the photograph the Masters used such trick devices as the camera obscura. Both devices (the photographic camera and the camera obscura) are used to make the art faithfully reflect the everyday world around us. That is where we get uncomfortable with the Bible. The literary artworks that we call the four gospels are not just created to document the historical person of Jesus but also to faithfully reflect upon the everyday world around us. When their is a discrepancy between the depictions of Christ's admonitions in Scripture and the lives of contemporary believers it is of no fault of the artist. The error does not lie in the one who was called to write the gospel but rather we who have been called to live the gospel. The gospel is not only spread to the world through our sermons but through our lives. So I ask you: are we spreading misinformation about Christ? In our words? In our deeds? In our lack of love? Can onlookers clearly see Jesus through us? Are we promoters of Gospel of Jesus or perpetuators of the Gossip loosely surrounding Jesus. The second epistle to the Corinthians testifies that we are the actual epistles of Christ. We are a Jesus' living, breathing, walking letters of recommendation. If this is the case then what job would Jesus get with us as his references? Christ is the incarnate Word of God yet he has called us to be word on the street about him. What are we saying about him? Jesus asks us "who do they say that I am?" The answer is probably what we have told them, showed them and neglected to show and tell them. Do they think that Jesus is bigoted? Do they think that Jesus has limits to his love? Do they think that Jesus is the purveyor of Western Imperialism? Do they think that Jesus preached materialism? Do they think that Jesus doesn't care about the sick and the lonely? Because that is what they think about us... because that is what we've told them. If that is your view of the Messiah then please keep that Messiah secret. But let allow me to tell you about my Jesus. Let me tell you about the Christ of Scripture. The Messiah of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The real Messiah is the Jesus who served the stranger as his brother and preached about the faith of the foreigner. The real Messiah reveals that their is nothing that can separate us from the love of God that is found in Christ Jesus. The real Messiah tells us to eschew violence by turning the other cheek. The real Messiah was homeless yet has a big tent that all humanity can dwell in. The real Messiah constantly calls the hurting and downtrodden to come to him for peace. If that is the Messiah that you believe in then spread that Gospel to all in words, action and love. That is the secret that Jesus is calling you to share.