A reading aid. The German text is the original.
Take a stand, and you become the post others tie up to.
Who do people say the Son of Man is? That is the first question, and it is easy to answer. The disciples list what you hear: John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, one of the prophets. All perfectly respectable answers, and nothing follows from any of them.
As every Sunday, we listen to what comes across to us from the texts of the liturgy. For me, today is about the difference between that question and the next one.
Staying vague is one of the most reliable moves in meetings. There are voices saying. The team is discussing whether. I'm hearing various things. Every one of those sentences is true, none can be refuted, and nobody has said anything. Whoever talks like that keeps the interpretation to himself: what he meant is still his to settle later. A survey can occupy the same place: you gather what people think about it and no longer have to say where you stand yourself.
Then comes the second question. But you, who do you say that I am?
That but you changes the situation. Anyone asked like that can no longer stand behind other voices, and what he says now will be put down to him.
Peter answers: you are the Christ, the Son of the living God. He let the question reach him and said what came to him as it did. With that he makes himself open to attack. And it is precisely then that he is given the new name, rock, along with the keys of the kingdom of heaven and the authority to bind and to loose.
The key and the firm ground also appear in the first reading, in the book of the prophet Isaiah. There, a good seven hundred years earlier, a post changes hands at the royal court in Jerusalem. Shebna, who runs the king's household, loses his office. Eliakim receives it, with the robe, the sash and the key of the house of David on his shoulder. I will drive him in as a peg in a firm place, it says, and he will become a throne of honour for his father's house. There the reading stops.
I did not understand the passage and went to fetch the context.
Before it stands the reason Shebna has to go. He has had a tomb cut out for himself high above, a dwelling carved in the rock. How do you come to do this, and who are you, it says there. He is wound into a bundle and flung away like a ball, and his splendid chariots will end up there too.
Two verses after the end of the reading it goes on. The whole weight of his father's house hangs itself on the peg, the offshoots and the offspring, every small vessel, from bowls to jars of every kind. Then the peg gives way, breaks out, falls down, and the load hanging on it is smashed.
Nobody hangs a whole household on a hook all at once. It is one bowl, then another jug, and each piece on its own is too light to be worth mentioning.
Anyone with a key person in the office knows this from both sides. There is someone with whom things converge that would otherwise be left lying. She knows the backstory, she has the access, she answers on Saturdays too. So she gets the next thing, because it goes faster with her, and the one after that, because she already has the first. Whether she can carry it gets asked occasionally. If she drops out, people look for someone who does it the same way.
Key person is the right word for her, because she has both. Without her nothing moves on, and what she leaves lying stays lying. The load gets talked about, because people would like to take it off her. The other side rarely, because it hides in the very word we praise her with.
The gospel ends oddly. After the new name and the keys, Jesus forbids the disciples to speak to anyone about it. For me that has to do with the question at the beginning. What was asked for was their answer, and passed on it would be a sentence the next ones could recite without it being an answer of their own.
Zugemutet reads the four texts of the Catholic lectionary each Sunday for what they say about living together. Nothing is chosen.