"Who do people say that the Son of Man is?"
Jesus asked what others said about him to demonstrate that such indirect knowledge of him was prone to confusion and error. There was something accurate in making him out to be a prophet like others. But he was much more. And this more could not be found out indirectly. To discover it one would need to put the question to oneself directly. It would not be enough to mimic the opinion of another no matter what that opinion might be.
He said to them, "But who do you say that I am?"
The key thing he was doing in lives of his apostles was making himself known to them. It was self-revelation from the beginning. They had even confessed already, "Truly you are the Son of God" (see Matthew 14:33), and that he was the Christ (see John 1:41). But did they get it? Did they understand what they were saying or did the rush to make exulted confessions in moments of enthusiasm? If they were later asked, 'What did you mean by son of God?' would they have answered, 'You know, like Solomon' (see Second Samuel 7:14). Their confessions of the Christ could have been emptied out enough to be in line with that of the crowds, merely a prophet or a human king. The true answer went beyond anything flesh and blood could reveal, but it was something which those disciples who had accompanied him thus far were meant to be able to answer, because he himself, more than mere flesh and blood, had been working to reveal it to them.
Simon Peter said in reply,
"You are the Christ, the Son of the living God."
This answer was not found in the wisdom of the masses, nor the knowledge of the learned, but was only available by revelation. The leap from one who was merely son of God by analogy to the confession of the one who was one substance with God was not something that could be taken whole cloth from their Jewish background. The hints about the exultation of the Son of Man and the preeminence of the messiah had to be balanced against a strict monotheistic creed. No one could have deduced the Trinity on the basis of the existing Jewish revelation or from natural philosophy. But it was nevertheless precisely this Jesus had been instilling into the hearts of his followers, building to precisely this moment went it could give birth to the revelation of the truth.
Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah.
For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father.
As if to emphasize the qualitative difference between the way Jesus was the Son of the Father and the normal patrilineal descent of others Jesus called attention to Simon's own ancestry. It was as if he said, 'You who descend from flesh and blood have rightly seen that I am more than flesh and blood, that, though born of Mary, my true origin is from the Father alone'.
And so I say to you, you are Peter,
and upon this rock I will build my church
The Church could thus not be built upon popular opinion, nor consensus, but only revelation rightly received. Peter was therefore made to be the solid rock, the guarantee that such revelation would always be available to the people of God, the promise that the Church could never collapse into the netherworld. He would take the role of bishop of Rome and his successors would share in the promised gift of the keys and the power of loosing and binding. But this gift, great as it is, cannot become a substitute for our own confession of Jesus as God and Christ. The promise assures us that the Church will not fail but it does not make our own salvation automatic. It is not enough to be baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We must live by the faith we receive.
but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name (see John 20:31).
We know that in many ways the revelation of God is so transcendent as to be utterly beyond us, that his judgments are "inscrutable" and his ways "unsearchable". After all, no one has "known the mind of the Lord" or "been his counselor". And if it all devolved to our efforts and intellect alone this would be true. But as Scripture says elsewhere after quoting this passage, "we have the mind of Christ" (see First Corinthians 2:16).
We celebrate the gift of the Church and her deposit of faith best by taking the deepest questions of faith to heart so that we can make the answers safeguarded to her our own and build our lives upon them.
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