The Homily

This page is not intended as a homily preparation aid, but as a resource for those who would like to continue reflecting on the Sunday readings in the days that follow.

Homily for the 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time, 2008

Today’s Gospel is familiar since it is one of the three passages in the New Testament used to support the primacy of the Pope. Peter is declared the rock on which Christ will found his Church and according to catholic tradition the bishop of Rome succeeds him in that office, inheriting as well some of the special privileges and prerogatives promised to the Apostle. I would like to highlight two aspects of this text today.

First, it comes at a crucial moment in Christ’s relationship to his disciples. Having asked them who they say he is, Peter responds for all, declaring that Jesus is the Messiah awaited by the Jews. In return he receives the promise of Christ that he will become the rock of the future community. We can scarcely imagine what that must have done for Peter’s ego. To be assured that he had been gifted with special revelation, that whatever he bound and loosed on earth would be validated in heaven was powerful stuff indeed. It is hardly surprising that it went to Peter’s head and later on to the heads of some of his successors. It is written up in Latin and Greek, in massive gold letters around the dome of St. Peter’s basilica in Rome, along with the two other texts declaring Peter’s privileges.

Yet in the passage immediately following this one, to be read next week, Jesus paints a very different picture of the future. He speaks of his betrayal and crucifixion. Peter the rock, the newly appointed leader, takes the Lord aside to have a quiet word in his ear, telling him that it isn’t really in the plan for a Messiah to get crucified. For that he gets a stinging rebuke from Christ: “Get behind me Satan! Because the way you think is not God’s way but man’s ” The theologian Hans Kung once said that they should also have written Peter’s three denials around the dome of his basilica, right underneath the three promises he received.

I wouldn’t want to go that far myself, but it is important to note the point: betrayal lies very close to the heart of discipleship, for Apostles and Popes as much as for the rest of us. When Peter is joined to Christ, when he thinks like Christ, then he really is a rock. But when he follows the desires and dictates of his own heart, then he becomes a dead weight, sinking beneath the raging storms around him. So has it ever been in the history of the Church, for no one, least of all the Popes, can be dependent on their own strength. Christ alone is the Church’s one foundation, and only by his grace can the building be maintained.

And yet the wonderful truth is that it will be so maintained because it is founded on the rock of Peter, who learnt the hard way to place his trust in Christ. That the Church is often sinful, lazy and frequently corrupt, that it has sometimes betrayed its Lord as much as it has served him, that it has all too often arrived at the stop when the bus is already moving off, is clearly evident to anyone who reads a page or two of Church history. That is often taken as a reason for leaving it, or just refusing to join it. But it is really something of a spiritual red herring.

Christ is the treasure contained in our earthenware vessels. All the cracks, foibles and follies of his ministers and his community are never enough to stop the flow of grace, for the Church is founded on a rock. So, for every Renaissance Pope there is a John the XXIII, and for all the faults and sins and failures, there is the certain promise of the one who loved us and gave himself for us: the gates of hell shall not prevail. But not because of anything we do ourselves, but because Jesus Christ is the faithful witness, the first-born from the dead. He is the real life of the Church and the guarantor that grace and truth will, in the end, never fail.