In 2019, a large, round spaceship landed in California’s Silicon Valley, a spaceship home to over 12,000 people. Or more accurately stated, a four-storey, glass-sheathed orb with a circumference of 1.5 kilometres known as Apple headquarters. One of the lead designers was a British national named Jony Ive. He was surprised that more buildings in the region were not designed to withstand a massive earthquake and wanted to ensure Apple’s new headquarters was prepared.
Instead of a traditional foundation, the headquarters was built using base-isolation technology. The building, which has a concrete foundation that resembles a bathtub, is not attached to the ground. At the base of the building’s nearly 700 columns are stainless steel pucks that sit on top of massive steel saucers. When an earthquake disturbs the ground, the pucks slide across the saucers as much as four feet. It’s something of a paradox – a strong, solid foundation of concrete and steel designed to move as the ground violently jolts.
In our lesson today, Jesus popped a big question: ‘Who do you say I am?’ Peter answered: ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.’ Immediately Jesus responded by giving Peter a nickname: ‘I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.’ The name stuck: we know Peter best by this new name rather than his given name, Simon.
Peter is the foundation of the church. What does that mean?
In the Greek language of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus says you will be called Petros and on this petra I will build my church. There is a paradox in this statement made by Jesus. Petros (Peter) refers to a stone that can quite easily be moved – a stone in a path, a pebble that can be picked up and tossed so that it skips across the water. Petra refers to a large rock, a boulder – the kind of stone that is not easily moved. [Douglas Hare, Interpretation: Matthew (John Knox Press, 1993), 189-190.] We might translate this better: ‘I tell you, you are movable stone and on this immovable rock I will build my church.’ Peter, the church’s foundation, is a movable-immovable rock – the sense of Peter’s new name in the Aramaic Jesus would have used, Kephas, which by itself indicates a stone that is movable and immovable at the same time.
After renaming Peter, Jesus gives him, and then in chapter 18 the entire community of his followers, the power to bind and loose. The term ‘loose’ is borrowed from Greek political discussions of a state’s or a people’s constitution and laws. Another New Testament scholar, Warren Carter, explains: ‘The word appears in contexts which make a paradoxical assertion that the founder’s laws are not to be abolished, yet they can be changed in order to adapt or abolish them for new circumstances.’ (Warren Carter, Matthew and the Margins: A Socio-political and Religious Reading [Orbis, 2000], p. 336.) Jesus grants Peter and later the entire community the task of adapting or abolishing religious teachings and commandments.
These are the paradoxes that form the foundation of the church of Jesus Christ. We are built on solid rock … and yet we are built to move. We are bound to the teachings of Jesus … and yet as a community of Jesus’ followers we are charged by Jesus to adapt
his teachings.
In these times when the world seems to be rupturing and change is hitting us with an unrelenting rapidity, perhaps we need to take a lesson from Steve Jobs and Jony Ive. A lesson from Jesus and his giving Simon the name Peter. We need a solid foundation of faith that is designed to be shaken – jolted not just by tremors but by major seismic shifts in the ground beneath us.
We need to engineer our churches and our individual faith for seismic activity. Can our faith withstand shifts in our understanding of the world, our lives, the human experience? If our faith cannot withstand the shifts in our understandings, is the problem God? Is the problem the Way of Jesus? Or is it that we need to re-engineer our foundations, not to resist the changes within and around us, but so that our faith has the ability to move with
those changes?
Paradox. If we cannot live with paradox, then our churches and our faith might not survive the seismic activity jolting our world today.