And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it (St. Matthew 16:18).
It is easy to imagine St. Peter, whose feast day we celebrate today, as a man ruled almost totally by his emotions. For centuries it was the custom when painting him to include dark furrows under his eyes where the tears of his remorse for his terrified, triple denial of our Lord had worn deep grooves into the flesh of his face. It is, likewise, easy to imagine St. Peter as a sort of “super Apostle” who ruled over the rest of the Apostles by virtue of some sort of special, divine commission.
The Scriptures, however, provide us with a quite different picture of St. Peter the Apostle from those delivered by the human imagination, and the Word of God always trumps the human imagination in matters of truth and falsehood. The Bible presents us with a man named Peter who was neither the slave of his emotions nor the slave master of his fellow Christians.
Instead, the Bible describes a tough, intelligent man, respected by the men with whom he worked as a “man’s man.” The Bible describes a man used to privations and exertions of physical labor, yet shrewd enough to hold together a fishing business with several partners. The Bible describes a man stubborn enough, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill, to earn the nickname “Peter,” the equivalent of the modern “Rocky,” which can imply both firmness of character and plain hard-headedness.
Most of all, the Bible describes a real man, with real strengths and real weaknesses, who in the Providence of God comes under the rule of Jesus Christ, so that Christ’s call and commandments transform him into a fisher of men for the sake of the kingdom of God and into a chief ambassador of that kingdom. Neither a mope nor a pope, he is declared in the Scriptures to be an important, a very important, part of God’s plan to establish the Church of his Son on earth.
Consider the incident recounted in today’s Gospel. Our Lord asks the disciples, “Whom do men say that I am?” (Matt. 16:13). They hem and haw, answering “some say this” and “some say that.” Our Lord then decides to press them a bit, to see if they will move beyond this noncommittal hedging of their bets. After all, they have heard Him preach, and they have seen Him do the miracles prophesied of the Messiah. So He asks them, “But whom do you say that I am?” (Matt. 16:15).
Simon Peter blurts out what every one of them should have been willing to declare: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God” (Matt. 16:16). This first confession of faith is the very same confession we make today in the Creeds, where “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God” is explained in some detail to avoid various errors and misunderstandings. This confession is the faith of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church acknowledged in the Creeds because the Church is one holy Body of Jesus Christ, the only Savior of the whole world, which maintains the faith as taught by the Lord and declared by the Apostles, beginning here with St. Peter.
Even Peter seems to be surprised that he has finally said out-loud what would become the universal faith of a universal Church because our Lord acts immediately to prevent Peter or anyone else from dismissing his confessions as an act of “misplaced zeal.” Our Lord says, “Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven” (Matthew 16:17).
St. Peter’s confession is neither just a personal opinion nor the exclusive product of his emotions or his intellect. What Peter has said is what God in heaven has chosen to reveal on earth. Thus, speaking on behalf of God, Peter qualifies as a prophet by the standards of the Old Testament. Just as important, because Peter has declared the truth about Jesus of Nazareth, God made man, Messiah, and Savior of the world, Peter has also set the standard for the ministry of all the Apostles and for all those who will succeed the Apostles in the work of the Christian ministry—the Truth of God in Christ.
Thus, Peter’s person, Peter’s faith, Peter’s confession, and the Lord himself that Peter identifies as the Rock of Ages, are taken together, the bedrock upon which Christ will build His Church: “And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” Anyone who holds to Peter’s faith with a stubborn integrity, and who repents with sorrow any denial of the Lord, is made, by the grace of God, a living stone in the Temple of God, with a proper place decreed by the eternal will of God.
As St. Paul teaches those who receive that faith by grace, “Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God; And are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone” (Eph. 2:19-20). And as St. John saw in his vision of the City of God, where God is worshipped forever, “And the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and in them the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb” (Rev. 21:14).
What becomes clear from studying the Scriptures, rather than imaginative theories about the Church, is that any effort to break the foundation of the Church into competing fragments is an insanity. Our Lord says that it is His Church that He will build, not Peter’s, or yours, or mine. Our Lord promises the “keys of the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 16:19), the authority of God’s stewards on earth to preach the Gospel, to administer the sacraments, and to maintain a godly discipline, but when He makes good on that promise and delivers those keys, on the evening of Easter Day, it is upon all of the Apostles that He breathes, and to all of the Apostles that He says: “Receive ye the Holy Ghost: Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained” (John 20:22-23). Likewise, the Holy Ghost descends upon Twelve Apostles on the day of Pentecost, and not upon just one.
In the revealed religion of the Bible, the “Holy Father” is our Father in heaven, and the Head of the Church is Jesus Christ. Of course, the Church must have governors and leaders, but they must lead and govern on behalf of the Father and the Son, or they have no right to govern at all. St. Peter is the first great leader and preacher of the Gospel in the Church, not because of some office that he received, but because of the grace of his calling and his place in the work of God’s kingdom. We can even watch Peter grow as a Christian leader. He does not, for example, insist on being the head of every local church. As we learned in today’s lesson from the Acts, it was James the brother of John who was pastor of the Church in Jerusalem, whom King Herod had killed with the sword to please the enemies of the Church (Acts 12). Also, in his first Epistle, St. Peter claims for himself no title more exalted than “your fellow elder” (1 Peter 5:1).
It is unfortunate, then, that men have heaped controversy upon St. Peter, since his greatest work was in showing us how to be Christians, and not just with the confessions of our lips. At the very end of St. John’s Gospel (starting at 21:15), our Lord asks Peter three times if he love Him because it was three times that Peter had denied Him. Peter answers, “yes” more and more fervently, demonstrating that each sin must be repented, hated, and rejected in the face of God’s mercy.
Each time that Peter repents and confesses his love, Christ gives him a commandment: Feed my lambs, Feed my sheep, Feed my sheep. Sin is not replaced with our will or with our weakness, but with God’s will and the power of God. Furthermore, our Lord’s commandments to Peter are not aimed at his self-improvement, but at his care for the sheep of Christ’s flock, his fellow Christians.
And what is it like to follow Jesus Christ whole-heartedly and to dedicate our lives to obeying His commandments? We don’t have to guess because our Lord told Peter what to expect, and through Peter what we should expect: “Most assuredly, I say to you, when you were younger, you girded yourself and walked where you wished; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish” (John 21:18).
And just in case we don’t get the message, St. John adds in explanation: “This spake he, signifying by what death he should glorify God. And when he had spoken this, he saith unto him, Follow me” (John 21:19). To follow Jesus Christ is to take up one’s own cross and to follow Him until death. St. Peter was a great leader in the founding days of the Church precisely because he followed Christ to the cross, a cross on which he insisted that he be nailed upside down as one unworthy to die as his Lord had died.
Let anyone who would follow Jesus Christ also follow Peter’s example. And let anyone who would claim Peter’s authority likewise embrace Peter’s confession, repentance, humility, labors, and self-denial. After all, “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church.”