Who do you say that I am?
Really none of the disciples at Caesarea Philippi needed advanced qualifications in rocket science to answer this question. For them, and for readers of St. Matthew’s Gospel, the answer must be stark staring obvious. That is, unless you believe with the Pharisees that Jesus is a blaspheming imposter, or else possibly a raving madman: in either case he would have to be acting with the power of all the demons of hell. But you have only to look at him, and those possibilities just vanish away: and the disciples lived with him. And they could see, every day, and all the time: this man is deeply, utterly good. He walks with God. He is holy. He is beautiful. He is utterly attractive. He is quite unlike anyone else you have ever come across or heard of. And he speaks with such authority: quite unlike the Scribes, and unlike even the greatest of the old Prophets. Yet, everything he says and does is marked by the most profound and authentic humility. Who could fail to be captured by him, and to love him?
St Matthew begins his Gospel setting out the genealogy that establishes the Messianic pedigree of Jesus, as son of Abraham and son of David, and then he narrates the miraculous birth from a Virgin, according to the prophecy of Isaiah. Can the disciples have been ignorant of all this? They most certainly anyway knew of the powerful witness of St. John the Baptist. He was universally recognised as a prophet – we say the last and greatest of all Old Testament prophets. And John explicitly explicitly pointed to Jesus as the Messiah. Then there were so many miracles: and Matthew takes care to show how these correspond to so many Messianic prophecies in the scriptures of the Jews (cf. Mt 11:3; cf. Is 35:5; also e.g. Is 26:19, 29:18, 61:1). These miracles included not just healing the sick, but demonstrations of power over demons; power over the storm; power over uncleanness, as with the leper, and over sin, as with the paralytic; finally power even over death, as with the little girl whom he raised up. Then several times the afflicted call out to Jesus, giving him the Messianic title “Son of David!” Then as the cap stone on all this there were the clear Messianic signs. By miracle Jesus fed the hungry in the desert, as God did to ancient Israel after the Exodus: and he walked on water, as God in the Psalms was said to do (cf. Ps 76/77:19).
So Peter says, for all the others: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God”. And very solemnly Jesus tells Peter that he could not have reached his conclusion by natural power alone. Why? Because faith is always a gift of God, a gift of the Holy Spirit, and among his greatest gifts. We can’t confer faith on ourselves, any more than we can baptise ourselves: we have to receive faith as a gift of God, through his Church. Not everyone has this gift: and we should be sad for those who don’t, especially those who are close to us, and long for them to receive it. But if you have this gift, blessed are you: and you should give thanks for it to God every day. Of course we all want natural gifts for ourselves and those we love: things like long life, good health, success, fulfilment, security, happiness. Thank God when we have any of these things. But none of them is to be compared with the supreme gift of knowing and loving Jesus. When the martyrs were faced with the choice between one or the other, they rightly chose to lose everything and die with Jesus, rather than to keep what must be lost anyway and can only ever have relative value.
As for Peter: presumably Jesus spoke to him in Aramaic, giving him the name “Kepha”, rock. When transcribed into Greek that becomes Cephas – so St. Paul several times refers to Peter as Cephas in Galatians and 1 Corinthians. In Greek translation Rock is “Petra”, or in its masculine form “Petros”: in Latin, “Petrus” – hence our Peter.
But how odd that our Lord should have made such a flawed, fragile, frail man the rock of his Church! Although of course it is Jesus himself who will build his Church on this rock: making use of fragile human instruments. From that day to this Church leaders have been a mixed bunch. Some have been real Saints with wonderful virtues, though always subject to human weakness, and wholly reliant on divine power for any good that they do. Others, like Peter himself, have been prone to discouragement, loss of nerve, inconsistency, and even failure and betrayal.
Nevertheless, in spite of all that, the Church built by Jesus has stood. She still stands; she can never fall. What is she? She is the assembly of the new Israel. She is the community of faith, hope and charity. She is the living Temple of the Holy Spirit. She is the mystical Body of Jesus, always united with her head in heaven. She is also the lovely Bride of Jesus, already betrothed to him, and always preparing for the final consummation of her marriage in heaven. The Church is all those who are adopted sons of God in Jesus Christ our Lord, and all those destined for eternal life in heaven. The rock on which she stands is Peter, yes, but ultimately it’s the Person of Jesus, and confession of the truth of his identity. So who is Jesus? He is the Lord: our Lord. He is the Son of God, and Messiah, and King: the one foretold in all the scriptures. He is God the Son Incarnate; both fully human and fully divine; our Saviour, our teacher, our guide, our inspiration and model, our brother, our friend, our lover. So we too stand on this rock, on this faith; we hold to it, and are ready to die for it; we profess it each Sunday especially through reciting the Creed.
The gates of hell cannot prevail against Christ’s Church, because her divinely given task, endowed with divine power, is precisely to break open the bonds of sin and of death, and to fling open the gates of heaven to all who would enter. The business of the Church is to get people who should be lost into eternal life; to mediate the forgiveness of sins in Christ’s blood; to undo the power of the devil; to put love where there is no love; light where there is darkness, hope where there is despair.
But stand by. Because next week we shall have what follows in Matthew’s Gospel. There Jesus will explain how it will all happen: by the way of the Cross; by his own suffering and death. This way all of his disciples must also go, if they would follow Jesus to life.