Reputation (13th Sunday after Pentecost, 23rd August, 2026)

 13th Sunday after Pentecost 23rd August 2026 

Wolf Kirchmeir

Reputation

Exodus 1:8-2:10; Psalm 124; Romans 12:1-8; Matthew 16:13-20

May the words of my lips and the meditations of all our hearts be ever acceptable in your sight, O Lord.

Dear Friends in Christ,

Then Jesus strictly charged the disciples to tell no one that he was the Christ. [Math. 16:20]

Jesus is asking the Disciples who people think he is. He’s asking about his reputation. Or what we now would call his brand.

The disciples tell him that people think he’s one of the prophets who has reappeared. He asks the Disciples who they think he is. Peter says, You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. Jesus agrees, and he tells Peter that he will be the foundation of the Church, which will have the authority to forgive sin.

Pretty heavy stuff, that. For the responsibility he lays on Peter has also been laid on the Church. That’s you, and me, and everyone else who claims to be a follower of Jesus the Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One, the Son of the living God.

And after laying on this heavy stuff, Jesus ends the conversation with Don’t tell anybody who I am. 

Why does he say this? I think the answer is a combination of the obvious and the complicated.

The obvious answer is that to claim to be the Son of God is blasphemy. The religious authorities, and indeed most Jews, would be horrified. In fact, that was one of the charges laid against him later, during the trial before the Sanhedrin, the temple court.

Jesus knew that it would come to that, and would end with his death on the cross. But that time was not yet, so it makes sense to tell the Disciples to keep quiet.

There are other themes in this Gospel lesson. The foundation of the Church. The Church’s responsibilities. The mystery of Jesus, the Son of God. The lesson begins with a question about reputation, and that’s what I want to focus on.

Jesus was asking about his reputation. He wanted the Disciples to think about his reputation, and how that compared to reality.

Your reputation is what other people think about you. It’s complicated, because actually you have more than one reputation. You have different roles in different groups, and that means different reputations. That complicates the way we think about reputations in general, and our own reputation in particular. But we all feel that our reputation differs from our reality in many ways.

So I’ll reframe the question: What can we learn about reputation when we think about that aspect of Jesus’s conversation with his Disciples? I’ll share a few random thoughts.

We live in the age of celebrities. I don’t mean that famous people never existed. I don’t mean that famous people were never celebrated in ancient times. I mean that we celebrate people for being celebrities. I suppose most of you have heard of the Kardashians. They were famous for being famous. That’s all.

And it seems that the highest ambition these days is to get a million views on TikTok or Instagram.

The desire to be widely known, to leave one’s mark, to have one’s name recognised during and after one’s lifetime, that desire or ambition seems to be built into us. It’s related to our desire for a good reputation.

 In fact, fame is just a widely known reputation.

The Romans and Greeks celebrated people of outstanding achievement. They applauded the ambition to achieve fame, because they tied fame to excellence. The word fame derives from a Latin word that originally meant talk. To be famous was to be talked about, to be the subject of conversation. You hoped that people would talk well of you, that they would praise your character, your public generosity, your loyalty, or whatever.

So the word famous came to mean having a good reputation. Now it’s more like to be widely known. Your reputation is how people judge you, and for most of us, it’s limited to our family, and friends and community. We all want a good reputation among the people that matter most to us. If that good reputation spreads beyond our circle, that’s a bonus.

Reputation and fame clearly played a large role in Jesus’s ministry.

The crowds that followed him did so because they had heard he was an interesting preacher, or that he had healed some sick person, or that he had upset some authorities.

I’m sure that curiosity was a major reason people turned up to see and hear him. Curiosity is always a reason. We want to see for ourselves what that famous person does. We want to see what they are really like. Do they live up to the hype? Are they like their reputation?

Word of mouth, talk, gossip, conversation are still the most powerful spreaders of fame. They are still the most influential shapers of reputation.

Social platforms just amplify that. We read or listen to social platform posts individually, one at a time, by ourselves. That feels enough like a face to face conversation that we are more likely to believe what we see and hear on Facebook or Tiktok than what we see and hear on TV. Or what we read in the newspapers. If we still read the newspapers, that is.

That’s why social platforms have become such powerful advertising media. We really should call them advertising platforms.

Word of mouth was all the social platform that existed in Jesus’s time.

Oh, I’m sure that if someone seemed to be worth watching, there would be reports from local intelligence gatherers to their masters, who might forward the information to Rome.

But the evidence in the Gospels is that the Romans paid no attention to Jesus. It was the Temple authorities that noticed him. They were worried about his teachings, so they kept an eye on him. They repeatedly sent people to test his understanding of the Law and the Prophets. In the end, they decided that he was a threat to correct religion, so they arrested him and tried him and handed him over to the Roman authorities.

It seems that fame, that being too well known, is risky. Especially if that fame or reputation has a political component.

Better to keep your head down.

Except that Jesus didn’t keep his head down. He continued to preach the good news. The Kingdom of God is at hand was his theme.

He continued to heal people, including people that were marginalised. People who were not welcomed in the Temple. People who were not Jews. Jesus even ate lunch with tax collectors.

He interpreted the Law and the Prophets as guides to making life more convenient – he said that The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. That was bad enough, but he also interpreted the Law and the Prophets as reminders that being respectable wasn’t good enough. That knowing the scriptures inside and out wasn’t good enough. That following the letter of the law wasn’t good enough. That the Law was designed to ensure justice.

It seems to me that doing these things was more than enough to gain a reputation as a rabble rouser or worse. A dangerous reputation, that, because it challenges the received wisdom about the righteousness of the people who have political and economic power. That kind of reputation has always been dangerous.

So one could argue that adding the reputation of being a blasphemer would be step too far. In fact Jesus never claimed that. The closest he came is recorded in the Gospel of John, where he refers to God as his Father. That’s vague enough that it could taken to mean that he was a child of God as we all are. In the Gospel of Mark, he refers to himself as the Son of Man.

This ambiguity and vagueness may help us understand why he told his Disciples not to talk about him as the Son of God.

But whatever the reasons, his reputation became dangerous. The Temple authorities wanted him silenced. They did not want him to continue with his preaching. Underlying all the healing and parables and explanations of the Law there was one overriding message: The Kingdom of God is at Hand.

And that Kingdom that does not run on the customs and laws of the world of power and status and money.

It is a kingdom of justice, where the last will be first, and the first will be last.

It is a kingdom of equals.

It is a kingdom governed by love.

 

I think it’s at this point that the question of reputation becomes personal.

What kind of reputation do we want?

What’s our reputation as Christian church?

What’s your and my reputation as members of that Church? Do we keep our heads down, in search of a quiet life? Do we just do the easy things in our outreach? Do we settle for what costs us the least in time or energy or money?

What is our responsibility as stewards of God’s creation?

What are we willing to give up in order to bring the Kingdom closer to reality?

These are not polite questions.

But Jesus didn’t shy away from impolite questions.

When he drove the money-changers from the Temple, that wasn’t polite.

When he told the parable of the rich man and the poor widow, that wasn’t polite.

When he told the young man to sell all he had and give the cash to the poor, that wasn’t polite.

When he turned the Pharisees’ questions about God and Caesar back on them, that wasn’t polite.

When he summed up the Law and the Prophets as Love God, and love your neighbour, that wasn’t polite, and his parable of the Good Samaritan sharpened his point.

When he referred to the priests as hypocrites and whited sepulchres, that wasn’t polite.

Over and over again, Jesus reminded his hearers that they weren’t perfect. That they fell short of the standards that God set. And more painful still, that they fell short of the standards they claimed for themselves.

He reminds us of the same shortfalls, too.

He reminds us that the reputation we strive for, and the reality we actually live are not as close as we would like them to be.

And he also gives us the guiding principle that will help us choose to do his work. Love God, and love your neighbour.

It’s that simple.

And it’s that difficult.

But we have the Spirit to guide us and to strengthen us. That’s all we need, really. So let us end today’s meditation by praying that the Spirit will continue his work in us and through us, that we may do the work that God has given us to do.

And if we end up with a good reputation, that’s a bonus.