"Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah.
For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father.
And so I say to you, you are Peter,
and upon this rock I will build my church,
and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.
I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven.
Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven;
and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."
As a young man reading the Bible, I noticed something that I found rather troubling at the time. Rarely, in any of the sacred stories does God do anything. We read the Bible as Salvation History and we know that God is the One who saves us; and so we expect him to play a very active part in most everything that happens. He is not only the Creator; he is the Lord of History, and its principal agent. If something is worth doing, God is doing it. Or so it would seem.
But, more often than not, he lets someone else stand in for him, act for him, and speak for him. After he made the woman Eve from Adam's rib, he never appears. If he were human we’d say he is "the man behind the curtain," but we should pay attention to him.
In later stories he speaks to Cain, Noah, and Abraham; and then to Moses and the prophets, and they always know who is speaking although they do not see him. If anyone else wants to know what God said, they’ll have to ask, “What did God say to you?”
For instance, the Book of Exodus begins with the ominous words, “A new king came to Egypt who knew not Joseph.” You remember that the Patriarch Joseph, Abraham’s great grandson, had saved Egypt from starvation. But Joseph had been dead for four hundred years when this new king came to power; and how many heroes do we remember from four hundred years ago?
But, had the new king remembered that ancient story, he might not have persecuted Joseph’s people, the descendants of Jacob’s twelve sons. And Egypt might have been blessed because God promised Abraham that those nations who honored and welcomed the Jews would be blessed, while those who cursed them would be cursed. Had he remembered that, Egypt might still be the world’s most powerful nation.
Instead, because he did not know Joseph or Joseph's God, he and all his chariots and charioteers, with all their horses, were drowned in the Red Sea. He had never seen either one face to face or heard their voice. The God of Heaven and Earth never visited the man who pretended to be the god of Egypt. He used shock and awe on him to show him who’s in charge; but that had no effect on the foolish young ruler. Nor had God ever displayed his seraphic armies with chariots of fire, flaming swords, and blazing saddles.
He only spoke to Moses, and sent him to speak for him; and according to some accounts, Moses had such a terrible stutter people regarded him as a fool. The moral of the story is, “Be careful who you ignore! They might be God’s spokesmen, or spokeswomen!”
Christians, of course, believe that Jesus of Nazareth is the incarnate son of the Virgin Mary. He is God in Person and the Word of God in the flesh; and every word he speaks is God’s word. So we’re kind of used to thinking God says and does a lot.
But Jesus appeared only as Joseph’s son. And his public ministry was very short. And then, after fortys and several appearances to a few people, he ascended into heaven. And hasn’t been seen in public since! And so we come to today’s gospel:
Simon son of Jonah… I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven.
Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven;
and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."
My point is: God speaks to us only through other human beings; and specifically, the Church. What the Church binds in God's name is bound; and what the church loosens in God's name is loosened.
However, many unhappy people habitually believe, and listen to, no one. They distrust their parents, their spouses, and their children. They do not listen to teachers, preachers, judges, politicians, or police. And they are certainly not willing to believe in Peter and his successors, the popes; much less bishops, priests, and Catholics in general. Because they believe in no one, they do not believe in God who speaks to them through the Church.
The Book of Revelation describes our Church with a marvelous vision of the heavenly city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven. Its walls are built upon the foundation of the apostles. Our faith and our teaching are like rock, solid, hard, and dependable. Once you set a rock in place, it stays there! If it’s big enough you can build a house on it, or a city!
I remember when that unfamiliar, almost-unAmerican – truth came to me. I had made my solemn vows as a Franciscan, and finished one year of theology. I was learning about the opinions of many theologians, both Catholic and Protestant. The Protestant Rudolph Bultmann taught what any American might believe: that the Gospels are wonderful stories about the Truth, even when they tell us about things that might not have happened. Because Jesus' birth and death and Resurrection are so important, he said, and so necessary for our salvation, even if they never happened – even if Jesus was not born of Mary or died on a cross or was raised up – we should believe them – because they’re good stories! The stories -- or "myths" -- will free us from guilt, sin, and sham; make our lives meaningful; and lead us to salvation. Believing these stories we will honor the godlike dignity of every person.
It almost makes sense, but it doesn’t. It can make sense only to those who think that salvation, purpose, meaning, and human dignity are also imaginary, or spiritual; and don’t actually happen, and make no difference in the real world.
I realized then, at the tender age of twenty-two, that our belief in Jesus is rooted in human history and began with the Apostles. If they fabricated their Gospel about Jesus’s teachings, life, death, and resurrection, then nothing we believe is built on the rock of truth. If they stretched the truth and told people what they wanted to hear, then we have lost touch with Jesus, His Word, and His God a long time ago; and everything we say, no matter how good it sounds, is just speculation. It might be so but; as Sportin Life sang “It tain’t necessarily so.”
Our Catholic faith, with its belief in the sacraments, the teachings, the authority, and it apostolic foundations, is more than symbolic. The Ten Commandments are not ten suggestions. They are laws just as real as the law of gravity, and just as fatal to those who ignore them.
The king of Egypt had never heard the story of Joseph, a man who had died four centuries before. And because he knew not Joseph and would not listen to the stuttering of Moses, he and his nation were condemned. We know Jesus, who died twenty centuries ago, because honest men and women have told the truth for that many centuries. We’ve suffered scandals, hypocrites, and crimes; we’ve survived persecutions, schisms, heresies, protests, and reforms that changed nothing. The Spirit of Truth has not abandoned us; He binds us to God and to one another.
We tell the truth. And if the world is saved, it's because they listen to us.
