(Audio)
He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?”
If we try to answer this question using our own wisdom we'll get it wrong just the crowds do. We'll say that he is John the Baptist or Elijah. We'll say that he was one more good person proclaiming a path to God, no different from any other religious founder. Our own wisdom tries to fit Jesus into our existing categories and frameworks for the world. This won't work because there has never been anyone like him before. He bursts our limited categories like so many old wineskins.
“You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
People say that faith is arbitrary. They tell us that it is something like a guess or a gamble that we choose in spite of the lack of evidence. This is wrong in many ways. But in particular it is wrong because Jesus is someone we would never have guessed or expected. The faith to which we are invited is precisely not the sort of thing which we or the world would imagine on our own.
Jesus said to him in reply, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah.
For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father.
The Father has revealed his Son to us. He wants to do so more and more. He wants us to know, to grasp, to believe, and to cling to the truth that Jesus is the Christ, the Son anointed by God, sharing his own Spirit. Nothing matters more than that we believe this and that we let our belief change our lives.
It is because faith is so important that Jesus gives the keys of the Kingdom to Peter, and that he builds his Church on him as a rock. Peter is the first to proclaim this revelation of the identity of Jesus. Jesus in turn ensures that he and his successors will always be present in history to propose this truth and invite people to believe. He allows others to believe safely within the boundaries delimited by the belief of Peter. The one revelation of the Father to Peter is ever present and ever fresh in the Church, guaranteed by the keys he is given. This is not to say it is always proclaimed with the same dynamism or even fidelity. It is not to say the Church even always speaks clearly or as often as it should. But it cannot defect from the truth it poses.
Peter learned from Jesus to watch over his people with the love of a shepherd. Just as Jesus gave his people repose in green pastures and fed them at his table so too did Peter, learning from the example he saw in Jesus, the example illuminated by the revelation the Father gave him. We too are meant to learn this love from Peter and from Jesus. It is meant, as we read yesterday, to be the natural consequence of our faith.
Do not lord it over those assigned to you,
but be examples to the flock.
Our flocks are thankfully smaller than that of Peter. That in itself is a good reminder to pray for his successor, Pope Francis. But we too do have flocks in our care, however small they may be. Let us follow Jesus and Peter in tending to them.
And when the chief Shepherd is revealed,
you will receive the unfading crown of glory.
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