At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, according to St. Matthew, Jesus speaks of a wise man who built his house on rock. Rain came, floods rose, gales blew, and hurled themselves against that house, and it did not fall (7:25). Now today we hear him speaking of the house which is his Church, founded on the rock which is Peter (16:18).
This seems to be very odd. Peter was a man of ardent love, but wavering faith. During the Passion, he three times denied his Lord (26:34,69-75). When he tried to walk across water towards Jesus, he was like a rock alright: one that has been thrown into the sea. There he cried out, saying Lord save me! And Jesus reached out his hand and held him (14:30).
For the building of his Church, then, Jesus chose what by the world’s standards seem weak and foolish (cf. 1 Cor 2:27), in order that he himself might always remain her strength, and that she might always depend on his help, his presence, his grace. The Church founded on the rock of Peter, and also on St. Paul and the other Apostles, has, we believe, a supernatural origin, and a supernatural end. Storms arise, now and again, to batter her, but the Church herself will never fall; the faith of Peter will never fail; until the end of the world.
The 29th June in the year 67 is the traditional date for the martyrdom of St. Peter, on the Vatican hill, under the Emperor Nero. We rightly say that this was a glorious martyrdom: glory for Peter, glory for the Church, glory in heaven. But it didn’t seem like that at the time. Both Peter and Paul met their end in distressing, even sordid scenes of humiliation, pain, defeat. To an external observer, it would have seemed that the powers of this world, even the powers of the underworld, were triumphing there over Christ’s Church, and his Kingdom.
In Ancient Rome the Vatican hill lay outside the walls of the City, on the other side of the Tiber. The area was marshy and unhealthy: a place for slum dwellings, rubbish, burials, and executions. In the 60's A.D. Nero built a circus there, in which unspeakable scenes were enacted for the entertainment of the mob. Doubtless St. Peter was crucified, upside down, in that circus, then buried just outside it. Nero is depicted in the Apocalypse as the Beast from the Abyss, symbol of the final anti-Christ. His City Rome is the great whore Babylon, seat of all evil, source of authority for the crucifixion of Jesus, persecutor and enemy of the Church, enslaver of the whole world.
Now, consecrated by the blood of martyrs, Rome has paradoxically become a holy City, centre and reference point for the whole Catholic Church. Maybe even more paradoxically, the Vatican has now become one of the world’s richest treasuries of art and culture. The process leading up to that was begun around 250 years after Peter’s death, when the Emperor Constantine built a Basilica exactly over the spot where he was buried. In order to do that, in one of the great feats of the Ancient world, his engineers had to level off the Vatican hill. Constantine also put up a basilica at the site of St. Paul’s martyrdom by the sword. That also took place outside the City walls, some distance away, on the Via Ostiensis. These great buildings, and their successors, and all they represent, exude strength, confidence, triumph, achievement, glory.
Personally, I’m all in favour of all that. Such things are designed to lift one’s spirits, and confirm one’s faith, and proclaim the Gospel, and strengthen the Church, and they do. But though we can rightly take heart from the many wonderful achievements of Christendom, our faith does not ultimately depend on them. They are good, and to be defended, but they are not of the essence. If new times of marginalisation and even open persecution come our way, and if all such structures and sources of affirmation are taken away from us, then we are back, as it were, with SS. Peter and Paul at the time of their martyrdom. Times of prosperity for the Church are certainly a great good, and to be rejoiced in. Then she is able to carry out her mission openly, and many weak souls are ushered along the pathway to heaven. Times of adversity for the Church are certainly bad, and to be deplored. But in God’s inscrutable providence they have their own advantages. In such terrible times, great things are done for Christ, sometimes by the most unexpected people. Christians who wish to remain faithful in face of official intolerance are almost constrained, then, to put their trust ever more exclusively in Him, in pure faith; to depend utterly on His saving help; to look forward in supernatural hope to the fulfilment of all His promises.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus pronounces a benediction over Simon Peter. Blessed are you, he says. It was not flesh and blood that revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. Knowing Jesus, St. Peter must also by divine inspiration have known God the Father. St. Irenaeus, whose feast falls on 28 June, famously defined Jesus as “the visibility of God”. He is the Son of the Living God; or of the God who is life, and who gives us life through his Son. Earlier in this Gospel Jesus had cried out: No one knows the Son except the Father; and no one knows the Father, except the Son, and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him (11:27).
This privilege of divinely granted insight is claimed by St. Paul, no less than by St. Peter, and even using the same words. Paul writes to the Galatians: He who set me apart before I was born, and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me... I did not then confer with flesh and blood (1:15-16). That is: my faith, like Peter’s, and ultimately like that of each Christian believer, is pure gift of God.
We who also have this faith grieve that so many others do not. We grieve also to see so many storms nowadays battering against the house of the Church. Quite a potent symbol of the weakness of ecclesial institutions we have long been used to is the lock down of our Church buildings everywhere. We perceive all around us a Church resolutely carrying on, though also apparently diminished, impeded, on the back foot. Many members of the faithful might feel at times like Peter sinking beneath the waves. With him, then, they must cry out to the Lord. In the words of the Psalm:
Have mercy on me, Lord... You who raise me up from the gates of death - qui exaltas me de portis mortis - so that I might announce your praises in the gates of the daughter of Sion, and so that I might exult - forever - in your salvation (Ps 9:13).