With Jesus-Tinged Lenses--August 25, 2026

With Jesus-Tinged Lenses--August 25, 2026

Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”  And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you but my Father in heaven."  (Matthew 16:16-17)

"Good news, Pete!  You didn't do it on your own!"

That sounds like sort of a backhanded compliment, doesn't it? 

When Jesus had asked his disciples the critical question, "Who do you say that I am?" Peter had taken the bold, audacious step of declaring, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God!" And for once, Peter's shoot-from-the-hip approach paid off.  He was right!  Maybe none of the other disciples had realized it yet, or maybe they were too afraid of being wrong to risk saying it out loud. But for whatever reason, Peter took the gamble and shouted his belief: Jesus is the Messiah, and indeed, the very Son of God.

And Jesus' immediate response, at least as Matthew tells the tale, is to say, essentially, "You get it!  You really do get it! But you didn't figure this one out by your own cleverness or spiritual insight, because you never would have gotten it on your own--God showed it to you."  So much for earning a gold star for a right answer, huh?

But of course, that's part of the whole point.  Recognizing who Jesus is never was a matter of getting a correct answer on a theology exam.  This was never a test, and Peter doesn't have to worry about getting a passing grade.  This was about allowing God to help him see what was right in front of him all along, but which his own perception wouldn't have understood apart from God's grace directing and expanding his vision.  If we thought that Jesus asked questions in order to determine who was smart enough to earn their way into heaven, Jesus releases us from that error in thinking by telling Peter that the only reason he came to recognize Jesus' identity as the Son of God was that God had already enabled him to see it.  The Christian life, in other words, is not about learning the right religious facts in order to secure ourselves a spot in the Kingdom as a reward. Rather, it's about letting God give us the vision to see God's presence in the unexpected and ordinary humanity of Jesus.  And from there, with Jesus-tinged lenses, we see the whole world differently.

This is a hard thing for many of us to accept, to be honest.  Some part of us would rather have a religion in which we have to get a certain score on a test to prove our worth, get a passing grade (or maybe even a big A-plus from the teacher!), and then tell ourselves we have earned our spot on the ol' Heavenly Honor Roll because we knew enough right answers.  Some part of us wants to be able to say we achieved our salvation because we figured out the right answer to the Big Question, "What is Jesus' secret identity?" and therefore win the prize.  And along the same lines, we want to be able to draw rigid lines between us "insiders" who have acquired our spot on the Good List by our spiritual smarts and right answers and those lost and forlorn "outsiders" who weren't bright enough to arrive at the correct response.  But if even Peter doesn't arrive at the truth about Jesus by his own insight or wits, then surely we don't, either.  We are going to have to accept that even realizing who Jesus is and placing our faith in him has to be a gift of God, one we wouldn't have arrived at on our own.

Today's verses, which many of us also heard in worship this past Sunday, compel us to recognize that our whole relationship with Jesus is only possible by God's grace, from beginning to end.  We Lutherans are famous for reciting the scriptural motto, "We're saved by grace through faith!" but sometimes we try to sneak the old transactional logic of earning in the back door through that last word "faith." Sometimes we take that phrase to mean, "We're saved because we believed the correct facts about Jesus, and in return, God has awarded us a spot in heaven for our correctly held doctrine." Or it becomes, "Did you pray to accept Jesus as the Christ/Messiah, and to recognize him as your Lord and Savior?" or "Can you recite the Creed by memory?"  The particular credentials might change, but the same scheme is underneath it all: to find some way, some angle, to see our being saved as something we earned--if not by our list of good deeds or acts of piety, then by the correctness of our theology or the strength of our faith.  But Jesus pulls all of that apart like he's unraveling a thread: even Peter's core confession, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God!" turns out to have been something Peter had to be shown rather than something he deduced like a geometric proof or a logical syllogism.  Yes, we are saved by grace through faith... but Jesus would tell us that even our faith turns out to be a gift of grace.  Even coming to recognize who Jesus is, we'll see one day, was always made possible because God revealed it to us, not that we sleuthed out the answer on our own.  There's no way around it: everything in our entire lives of faith comes as a gift, even that faith itself.

When we take that seriously, we can stop trying to make salvation into a prize or a spot on the Heavenly Honor Roll and instead receive it as a gift.  And from there, we are freed from trying to draw lines between "good" people who were clever enough to figure out the right answer and "bad" people who got a big red X marked on their papers for wrong answers. Instead, we'll see that we, too, have only come to see the truth about Jesus because God has opened our eyes and pointed us in the right direction... and maybe that God is using us to help point to Jesus for someone else.

How could that happen today?  How might God use you to help someone else recognize that Jesus is the One we've been waiting for all along?  How might you be a part of someone else's story of coming to confess, "You are the Messiah--the Son of the Living God!"?

Lord Jesus, give us the vision not only to see you rightly, but to see the movement of grace enabling us to trust in you.  And let us be instruments that can help others come to faith in you as well.