January 18, 2006
Rocks
It was news to me as a budding student of geology that petroleum is a rock. Any combination of two or more minerals, hard or soft, the teacher said, makes a rock. For example, rocks are like the words, minerals, the alphabet. For another, petroleum gets its name from the same Greek word that Peter gets his.
Without much ado at all, Peter’s sudden public realization that Jesus is the Christ gets on the calendar today as his “confession.” Rome puts a lot of stock by him as their foundation and the reason for their apostolic success, but now that they’ve abolished Limbo and are next to canonizing Judas, even they may have run out of convincing copy.
Noticeably, as the covenant story unfolds, it’s the daemons, not Peter, who are on to Jesus all along. Strangely, he never gives them a new name, only tells them to get lost in a herd of pigs, thus taking, as no less than Dorothy Sayers herself once said, a rather casual disregard for other people’s livestock.