Today’s readings: Is. 22, 19-23; Rom. 11, 33-36; Matt. 16, 13-20.
Today’s Gospel sounds contradictory. On the one hand Jesus is commending Peter and investing him with authority for his confession of faith, but on the other hand he is giving strict orders to the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Christ.
In Matthew, we have one of the key papal texts where the papacy in the person of Peter is understood as the rock on which the Church is founded. But in the light of Church history and our modern sensibility, we can easily get confused as to the rock on which faith rests.
Eamon Duffy, an Irish professor of the history of Christianity, rightly refers to the Church as the “institution whose mindset and structures derive from the sacred books of ancient Israel and the law codes of ancient Rome, yet which has evolved into one of the world’s most successful global corporations”.
Our understanding of the Church-world relationship since the Enlightenment has been one of conflict and antagonism. We are now at a point in time when, looking back, we can also acknowledge that what modern society reacted to mostly, even aggressively, was not what the Church stood for, but the translation of that into an excessive power exerted on society and its mores.
The great Cambridge medievalist Walter Ullmann argues that whereas in the first millennium the papacy evolved a mature understanding of itself as the sole source of order and authentic teaching in the Christian Church, over the second millennium the story of the popes, and indeed of Europe, was the struggle to embody that self-understanding in a universal code of law and the theocratic organisation of society under papal government.
Until the 20th century, the Church’s self-image was that of a monolith. It was with reluctance that it acknowledged freedom of conscience, the right to religious freedom, and human dignity as the only source of inalienable rights.
For the Church, truth was absolute, and in the name of truth, namely Catholic truth, violence was rampant even in the Church. There are endless stories of people condemned for their ideas and burnt.
For centuries the Church was in the grip of power struggles with the outside world and within itself. The institution was always upheld at the cost of the individual. This was a distortion of the Church’s mandate. Jesus’ promise that “the gates of the underworld can never hold out against it” did not mean that power and might reside in the institution.
What the Church has been going through in modern times is what Israel experienced in the Old Testament in circumstances addressed by the prophet Isaiah in today’s reading. The prophet had to remind Israel’s leaders that “The Lord of hosts is the Master of the palace”.
Isaiah, voicing the Lord’s will, was adamant: “I dismiss you from your office, I remove you from your post”. These words assume deep significance for the Church in our time. These can be the worst of times. They can also be the best of times.
The Church still has much to look forward to. It is moral authority that the Church needs to recover in society at large, but particularly in people’s lives. This no longer happens in terms of power and exertion.
Isaiah admonishes, but he also proposes the remedy: “I invest him with your robe, gird him with your sash, entrust him with your authority; and he shall be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem”.
Robing, girding, entrusting are words pregnant with meaning which seem to recur also in today’s Gospel account of Peter’s investiture. Christ’s mandate to the Church is not one of transference of powers.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky was very realistic in his ‘Legend of the Grand Inquisitor’ in The Brothers Karamazov, where the Grand Inquisitor shuts out Christ because the institution he represented knew better.
Again, the real issue ahead is not the definition of Church but the identification of the true Christ who can save the world.