I’m one of those people who generally turns and walks in the other direction when some well-meaning soul starts talking about the “end times.” Because, let’s be honest, most popular end-times speculation sounds eerily similar to other conspiracy theories that emerge like a slime-covered creature from the fever swamps of Paranoiac Village … only with more Jesus-y lingo. I have a difficult time taking seriously people who expend so much energy looking for signs of a world teetering on the edge of some sort of apocalyptic conflagration—like a sanctified Mad Max entering Thunderdome waving a Bible and a Jesus-fish.

But I’ve got to say, I mean, what with a former occupant of the White House and a whole “Who’s Who” of former luminaries in his administration and on his campaign under multiple indictments, with insurrectionists finally going to jail for … wait for it … insurrection, with a climate crisis—with hurricanes and wildfires and rising ocean levels that feels like it might have already reached critical mass … all on the heels (perhaps still in the midst of?) a pandemic that has killed well over one million people in the U.S. and almost seven million worldwide—with all that going on, it feels a bit more hollow to dismiss those who think we’re living in the borderlands of the apocalypse.

It’s difficult not to believe everything is touched by politics right now.

In our passage for today, Jesus and his disciples are outside Caesarea Philippi—a city replete with the symbols of Roman imperial power. As we noted last week, this was the place King Herod chose to build a temple to honor Caesar Augustus—a city renamed Caesarea Philippi by Herod’s son, Philip, linking Philip with Caesar. It was this city that Philip made his capital, where he put his personal palace. It was a city where the Roman general Vespasian launched his military response to what Rome considered the “Jewish rebellion”—a conflict that resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish temple, just years before Matthew’s writing of our Gospel text.

So, as I said last week, the setting for our passage this morning would have screamed “politics” to first-century readers of Matthew’s Gospel.

If you recall, Jesus has just asked his disciples what the word on the street was about him. They yell out the names of famous prophets who’ve gotten sideways with the political kahunas: John the Baptist, Elijah, and Jeremiah.

Peter finally pipes up with the correct answer: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

Jesus tells Peter that it’s upon the foundation of this confession that Jesus will build a new ekklesia, unlike the Roman ekklesia—which was a political assembly where the will of the Roman Empire was made explicit and to which everybody was compelled to listen. This new ekklesia Jesus announces, this new political assembly would make explicit the will of another realm—the realm of heaven—in which the powerful would no longer always be at the center of the community's life. In this new reign, the poor and the dispossessed, the vulnerable and the oppressed would take up their places of honor at the center of the community.

In our passage for this morning … after explaining the political nature of this new community of followers, Jesus tells his disciples that there’s one catch: He’s going to be killed by the very rulers of the old ekklesia, the powerbrokers of the old empire, over which Rome ruled with an iron fist.

And the means of Jesus’ death wouldn’t just be any garden variety slip-and-fall, no succumbing to a bad case of dysentery or scurvy; it wouldn’t even be a regular ol’ state-sanctioned killing for getting caught committing doing something illegal; it would be a political execution ordered by the folks in charge. In the shadow of King Philip’s palace (Caesar’s lapdog), Jesus tells his disciples that he’s going to be crucified. And crucifixion, if you remember, was the most horrific form of punishment the Romans had managed to devise—a political assassination, a public spectacle meant to serve as a warning to anyone else who might harbor visions of rebelling against Rome and its representatives.

Peter, who’d just gotten an A in class for giving the correct answer, presses his luck—showing he didn’t really understand the answer he’d just given: “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.”

And Peter’s confusion is understandable once you realize that being crucified wasn’t something that—by definition—could happen to a true messiah. According to conventional wisdom, being crucified would have been prima facie evidence that Jesus wasn’t the messiah.

“Crucified messiah” was an oxymoron like “God-fearing atheist” or “good driver from Ohio.”

But Jesus is adamant. He knows he’s going to get whacked by Big Brother. Which knowledge raises an interesting question: How does Jesus know he’s in line for a state-sponsored set of body piercings?

I mean, does Jesus have some kind of Sybil Trelawny “second sight” the rest of us don’t have access to? Does he use some sort of divine spoiler info, some top-secret cheat codes that the rest of humanity doesn’t get to see?

If so, then Jesus isn’t like me at all, is he?

If all Jesus has to do at any given moment is dial-up this mental jiu-jitsu none of the rest of us have, then he’s not, as the Hebrews writer says, a “high priest who has been tempted in every way as we are.”

But I suspect there’s a much easier answer: Anytime you challenge Caesar, you’re living on borrowed time. So, the fact that Jesus tells his disciples he’s in confrontation with the powers and principalities that will end in his brutal death is no great magical feat of forecasting. Knowing which way the political winds are blowing is a pretty simple exercise.

No surprise here.

On June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers returned home after a meeting with attorneys from the NAACP. He was the first field secretary for the NAACP in Mississippi, working to organize boycotts and protests and to register black people to vote. Needless to say, Medgar Evers found himself the target of white hostility among those who sought to retain control of the politics and culture of a state with a bloody history of oppressing black people.