A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on August 23, 2026 by Revd Dr Sam Wells
Reading for address: Matthew 16: 13-20
Anyone who’s been anywhere near education at any level in the last 40 years will know since people of my generation left school, someone woke up one day and realised human beings have a variety of learning styles. It turns out a teacher at the front of a class with a piece of chalk and a chalkboard, a bunch of textbooks and an obedient class eager to complete its homework isn’t the only way people explore, discover and grow. If you want to get technical, there’s visual learners, who like graphs, charts and diagrams; auditory learners, who like podcasts, lectures and discussions; verbal learners, who like lists and note-taking; and kinesthetic learners, who learn through movement or touch. It’s now maintained these four styles are too limited, and there are a further four, or even eight more styles, including the rather intriguing rhythmic-melodic. It turns out there’s only one thing more fascinating than realising how multi-dimensional the world is; and that’s realising just how amazingly textured and unique we ourselves are.
Despite our universal impulse to make every conversation in the end a conversation about me, appreciating the variety and character of learning styles is about more than self-acceptance. It’s about realising, as an educator, you need to approach learners from every possible angle to enable them to make knowledge and understanding their own. And it’s about recognising that the point is, as a communicator, not that you’ve said all you want to say, but that the audience has received all there is to receive – including the things the communicator hadn’t thought of.
But beyond education, formation, communication and knowledge lie two things that perhaps have a learning style all their own. One is wisdom. Wisdom is the distillation of experience, observation and reflection into a reservoir of textured, tested and treasured truth. The other is trust. Trust is the moment you turn a measured assessment of whether a bridge is stable, secure and strong into an active step forward to rest your whole weight on it; and the building of a relationship where resting that weight not a momentary decision but a daily discipline and joy. You can have all the learning, discovery and adventure in life you want, but in the end, it comes down to wisdom and trust.
If you think about the story of Jesus’ life, you start to realise that all these categories are quite helpful for understanding what’s going on, especially in his relationship with the disciples – a term that, after all, means learners. There’s a lot of visual learning – they see how he relates to outcasts and authorities, how he heals and reconciles and confronts. There’s auditory learning, as he preaches and tells stories and portrays God’s coming realm. There’s verbal learning, for those who like eight beatitudes and three predictions of the passion. And there’s a lot of kinesthetic learning, as the disciples go on mission trips and cast out demons and no doubt make a bunch of mistakes while shaking the dust off their feet.
But then there’s key moments when Jesus interrupts the conversation, and the lights go down, and the spotlight’s just on Jesus and Peter. One of those moments, about trust, is when Jesus walks on the water and asks Peter to leave the boat and walk towards him. That doesn’t go very well. The other is the story we’ve just read together, which is about wisdom. Jesus is asking the disciples what this preaching, healing, confronting, coming alongside, revealing, challenging, demonstrating all amounts to. ‘What have you learned from these last months and years?’ he’s saying. Before we look at Peter’s answer, I want to pay attention to the two backdrops against which this central conversation is set.
Backdrop one is the geographical location. They’re standing at a crossroads of Roman power and Jewish acquiescence. The clue’s in the name. Caesarea obviously refers to the emperor. Fifty years before this conversation, Herod the Great built a large temple dedicated to the living emperor Augustus. Then, coinciding with Jesus’ birth, Herod’s son Philip erected a whole city in Augustus’ honour and renamed it after both the emperor and himself – hence Caesarea Philippi. Later, Philip’s great-nephew Agrippa II rededicated the temple after the emperor Nero and renamed the city Neronis, keeping up with the changing regime. Then around the time Matthew’s gospel was written, the general and future emperor Titus slaughtered two and a half thousand Jews in the city. This tortured history explains Peter’s words, ‘You are the Son of the living God.’ Augustus was the living God, then Nero was, then Titus was – at least in the view of Roman propaganda. Peter is taking the pervasive language about political domination and turning it round to refer to a member of an occupied people in the process of being annihilated. This is almost unimaginable wisdom, because in spite of the overwhelming political reality and the dominant ideological messaging, Peter sees what Jesus’ life to this point amounts to: and it’s something that makes the might and majesty of Rome look very small indeed.
Backdrop two is what we would call historical precedent. When we try to express the indescribable, we start with the examples we have, however inadequate. Whatever our learning style, the way we absorb and assess new material is by fitting it in and around what we already comprehend. The disciples start with John the Baptist, whose fame and savage death seem to anticipate Jesus in significant ways. Then they say Elijah, who, after all, ascended on a chariot so may well never have died. Then they move to Jeremiah, the ultimate anti-establishment figure facing inevitable failure in the face of foreign invasion. Finally they say, ‘One of the prophets,’ which is saying Jesus is part of a tradition that seeks national renewal and a return to God’s ways in the face of faithlessness and loss of identity. This is the context for Peter’s words, ‘You are the Messiah.’ The Messiah is the prophet who reminds God’s people who they are, the priest who reunites them with God, and the king who embodies among them God’s presence. The Messiah is John, Elijah, Jeremiah, the prophets and much more.
Notice how these two backdrops, the present reality of Roman domination and the historical legacy of God’s people, reflect the way people still talk about who Jesus is today. Jesus is still indescribable. So we use the same frames of reference to fit him into what we know. Like the disciples, we know about power. We know there are almost unstoppable forces in the world, there are people who can benefit or ruin the lives of many, there are celebrities who attract devotion, there are forms of technology and control that dominate lives and livelihoods. Beyond this world there are unimaginable phenomena from the Big Bang to the magnetic and gravitational pull of myriad stars and galaxies. So we set up Jesus against a backdrop of a story about power, and he seems a fragile, flimsy, faraway figure hardly worth figuring in the conversation about what really matters.
Meanwhile like the disciples, when faced with the indescribable, we still tell stories to make sense of the world, we still reach for comparisons, and we still struggle to identify something that doesn’t fit into an existing pattern of activity or behaviour. The story of science is one of incidents that repeat; it has no role for a unique figure without precedent or imitation. The story of history is similar: it has a bunch of events, and it can only countenance things of a similar nature: it has no category for things like resurrection or feeding the five thousand. Same again with sociology. We decide there’s something called religion that’s common to a cluster of cultural and devotional practices; we note each religion tends to have a central figure, and assume Jesus is just another of those: one of the prophets, indeed. So we set Jesus up against the backdrop of a constellation of stories, and he seems an absorbing and attractive character of no more than temporal significance.
So how does Peter transcend these categories of power and precedent, and put his finger on the uniqueness and singularity of Jesus? Well, let’s go back to the notion of learning styles with which we began. Learning styles say a lot about us, and teach us to enjoy and respect diversity in those around us. They encourage us to listen carefully to how we’re made and pay attention with flexibility to how other people function. But there’s something beyond learning styles; deeper than how we’re made. And that’s the moment we’re called upon to trust. The best way to trust is to look to our reserves of wisdom, that draw deeply from but go way beyond our sources of learning. That wisdom is precious, vital, and unique – but is ultimately idle unless it translates into trust. When we make the greatest decisions of our lives, when we face the most daunting perils of our existence, when we finally come face to face with death: those are the moments when wisdom issues in trust. And it’s trust, in the end, that life is about, because out of the soil of trust come faith and hope and love. Trust without wisdom is fanatical and arbitrary. Wisdom without trust is wasteful and unfulfilled.
Put it this way. Through all the learning styles in the world, we can amass information, knowledge, and expertise. Through reflection, distillation and gestation, all this data can turn into wisdom. But because of the way our hearts and minds are shaped by power and precedent, that wisdom alone can’t open our eyes to who Jesus really is. There comes a time for each one of us, in the face of doubt, despair, or death, where Jesus turns round and says, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ At that moment we draw on all our resources of wisdom; but they won’t be enough. At that moment what counts, what Jesus is asking for, is trust. Trust that he put us here to be in relationship with him. Trust that he will be with us in the most perilous moments of our lives, come what may. Trust that, when we face and pass through the gates of Hades, he will be there to enfold us on the other side.
It’s not that through all our learning styles we assess the greatest power in the universe and the most stirring precedent in the world and conclude it’s Jesus, and so decide to believe in him. It’s that we see Jesus, utterly true, utterly transparent, utterly faithful, utterly with us, and we realise this is the moment in our lives for all our quest for wisdom to turn to trust – and to our surprise, it’s actually quite easy, because we have no desire to turn anywhere else: we say, like Peter, ‘Jesus, I trust in you.’ It’s the momentous and the most transformative thing we can ever say. And there’s only one thing more astonishing and breathtaking than what Peter says to Jesus. And that is, what Jesus says to Peter and to us in return: ‘I trust in you, too.’
