As school has begun again, we are reminded of the great esteem we give to knowledge. We spend a great deal of money building facilities that we say are temples of knowledge and we spend a great deal of our lives studying in and learning from such institutions. Underneath it all, however, is a fallacy. Knowledge itself is not the same as wisdom. There are plenty of people who know many things but who are not wise, not the sages we would turn to for the most important answers, and not the leaders we would follow in troubled times. As much as this is true for education, it is no less true for religion. Knowledge is not faith. There are plenty of people who know Bible passages and theological words but who do not believe what they know nor do they confess as faith the words they speak. We all know this.
Satan is the prime example of one who knows God’s Word inside and out but who cannot and will not believe what he knows nor confess it as his faith and reason for being. I wish he were the only example. All the demons knew who Jesus was better than those who watched Jesus cast them out. Even Pilate who condemned Jesus and the soldiers who crucified Him knew who Jesus was. We are surrounded by those who presume knowledge is faith. There are those who believe that children cannot be baptized until they can know the faith and confess it with their own lips. There are many who are satisfied more with knowledge than with faith – thinking that what you know is more important that what you trust. Today we find in Peter the dichotomy between knowledge and faith.
Knowledge does not need the Spirit but faith does. Jesus says so. Flesh and blood have not revealed this to you, Peter, but only the Holy Spirit. Luther picks this up in his explanation to the Third Article of the creed. I believe that I cannot believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to Him except by the Holy Spirit. Knowing and believing are not the same things. It is believing that saves – not knowing. Faith comes from hearing the Word of God and the work of the Spirit in that Word. Faith is not the fruit of a reasoned intellectual pursuit of facts or truth but the work of the Spirit alone working in the Word.
When Pilate asks Jesus if He is the king, Jesus asks Pilate if this is what he knows or what he is confessing. Pilate balks. When Jesus insists His kingdom is not of this world, Pilate jumps on it. “So you are a king?” Jesus wants to know if Pilate is merely repeating knowledge or whether he is giving witness to his faith. Pilate will not go there. So comes the rhetorical question: “What is truth?” Indeed, what is it?
We live at a time in which we have vast knowledge but little truth. Most of that knowledge is irrelevant knowledge – it does not have much to do with our daily lives nor does it have to do with life after death. It is knowledge that is barely more than feelings or aspirations or desires. So we find ourselves bullied into silence by such obvious questions as what is woman or a man? Our knowledge has failed us. We do not know the important things of life but we know a great deal about the least important things of life. Even worse, we are not ready to pin everything on what we think we know. We hedge our bets because our truth is fragile and our knowledge cannot eke out a confession of our convictions that would cost us anything.
Peter calls Jesus the Son of the Living God but that faith that forms Peter’s confession has to come from outside Peter. It comes from the Holy Spirit. No man can Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit. On this day admit that knowledge is not faith and though knowledge is a preliminary step, the heaving lifting is done by the Holy Spirit to make what we know into the conviction for which we are prepared to die and the truth upon which we insist upon living. The same lips that once so boldly confessed Jesus would soon deny Him not once, not twice, but three times. Faith requires the Holy Spirit not only to create faith but to sustain it. And, is that not why we are here today in God’s House?
You also know that Jesus is the Christ. But such knowledge is not faith. Faith has no voice until the Holy Spirit gives that faith voice and that voice lives in confession. We are here because we know enough to know how knowledge has failed us. We knew better but still were silent before the family and friends to whom we could have shared this Gospel. We are here because we know enough to know how influential the world has been in what we think and say. We are here because we know that not ever church is the same and that any church will do if the time comes when you need one. We are here because we have not objected to false doctrine being called truth and truth being labeled as false doctrine. How many times has our knowledge let us down and we have ended up in the shadows with Peter, refusing to own the truth by faith and warming our cold hearts with the fires tended by unbelievers?
Thanks be to God that our Lord is merciful and compassionate. Thanks be to God that our Lord does not condemn us because our knowledge has failed us. No, as with Peter, the Lord forgives and restores. He has not come into the world to condemn it but to save it – even the sinner who glories at what he thinks he knows but is too fearful to own that knowledge by confessing it before the world. That is the connection between the Church and the world. Here in God’s house we are so much like Peter – making the bold confession about who Jesus is and insisting we will never deny that Lord. But once we step out those doors, we are too quick to say we do not know Him and to retreat into the shadows of what the world approves.
Peter is no rock. He is a mere pebble. He admits it. To whom shall we go, O Lord? Who has the word of eternal life? But the faith in Peter knows that the certain foundation on which we build is not a pile of pebbles but Christ the rock. It is not the work for which we can claim credit but the work of the Spirit alone that we believe and confess Jesus Christ as Lord. It is not what we think we know but who we know that leads us to salvation. Who we know leads to confession – the confession of our sins and the confession of our Savior.
Knowledge is not faith. It is preliminary to faith but faith comes only by the Holy Spirit. Without the Spirit, it is only Simon bar Jonah. By the power of the Spirit, Peter the pebble becomes Peter the rock. The Church is not built upon any one man but upon the God-man Jesus Christ, not upon the knowledge of the mind but the conviction of the heart by the power of the Spirit, and not upon what is easy to know but what is hard to confess. Yet that is what we do here week after week. We confess. We confess sins to be forgiven. We confess the Word of God to be the voice of life. We confess the work of God in our baptism to still be in effect. We confess the goodness of the Lord not simply as a matter for the mind but also for the taste of goodness upon the lips in this Sacrament. For this reason the Church is not touting to the world what we know but whom we confess and for whom we are willing to die because He is the power of forgiveness and the truth that saves.
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