21st Sunday in Ordinary Time
(Sunday 27th August 2017)
Keys of the Kingdom – (Matthew 16:13-20)
Today’s Gospel reading is one of those mountain peak readings that the Church gives us, the perspective of which we can see further than usual and we get an incredible vista. That vista is going to teach us who God is and who the Church is in a powerful and profound way. In this reading, Jesus is taking his disciples up to Caesarea Philippi when He asks them and you and I, a very important question. He asks, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” He gets a variety of answers. Of course, all of those are wrong. Then Jesus turns to His disciples, and to you and I, and asks, ‘‘But who do you say I am?” To define who Jesus is, in the end is going to define who we are as His disciples. What Peter replies is so profound and important. He says, “You are the Christ the Son of the living God”. Jesus then gives a blessing to Peter and changes his name from Simon to Peter, which means ‘rock’. Then Jesus says, “You are Peter and on this rock I will build my Church”. Jesus is a builder. He spoke about building earlier in the Gospel in Matthew 7 at the end of the sermon on the mount where He said, “Those who hear these words of mine and does them is like a wise man who builds his house on a rock”. Jesus is telling us that He wants to build His Church on the rock of Peter. Here is the key – at the centre of Jesus’ teaching and focus of His ministry, Jesus comes not only to save us from our sins but to save us for sonship, for the family of God and that is why He is building the Church, which will be the family of God.
A friend of mine who is a fall-away Christian once asked me is Jesus not enough? Why must I go to Church. I can just go straight to Jesus, I do not need the Church. I told him that this is a great question but to let me ask him a question in return; How can someone say that they love the king, but it is just his kingdom that they can’t stand? That they are loyal to the king, but want nothing to do with his kingdom. That would be rather odd, would it not? My friend exclaimed at once, ‘Oh wow, I never thought about it that way’. He had never thought about how the Church is related to Christ as a king to his kingdom. And that is what the Gospel is teaching us here. Jesus is establishing His kingdom, and in that kingdom, that kingdom is His Church. You cannot separate Christ from the Church just like you cannot separate a king from his kingdom. What king has no kingdom? Jesus dies on the Cross as the King of Israel. All about Jesus, his teachings and parables are all about the Kingdom of God. Everything Jesus does is about the Kingdom. He is a King coming to establish a Kingdom. If we do not understand how the Church is a Kingdom, we miss the whole point. Peter recognises that Jesus is the King when he says, ‘You are the Christ the Son of the living God’. Jesus then rewards Peter for recognising who He really is by giving him the keys of the Kingdom. He makes Peter the equivalent of the ‘Prime Minister’ of the Kingdom. Christ is the King of the Kingdom. The Pope’s, who follow in the footsteps of Peter, are all the ‘Prime Minister’s’ of the Kingdom. When the King is away, the Prime Minister rules until the King returns. So the papacy is simply the stewards of the Kingdom who are ruling the Kingdom until the return of the King. That is our Catholic story. For us, we need to understand this deeply in our minds and hearts that the Church is not simply just a religion or institution, but it is a Kingdom. And in spite of all of it’s weaknesses, it is the Kingdom of Christ. We have to love that Kingdom, if we are to love the King. If we are going to be loyal to the King, we must be loyal to His Kingdom which is the Church.
Jesus grows up in Joseph’s workshop, when translated from Greek, as a builder. We often translate that as carpenter but literally in Greek it means ‘one who builds with stone’. Jesus spends His life building with stone and now at the climax of His ministry, He looks at Peter and says, ‘Peter, you are the rock that I have been longing to build with. And now I am going to do my master building by building my Church on you, Peter, the rock’.