For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father.
Jesus asks us who we say he is. The right answer is not something we can ultimately be told or which we can work out for ourselves. The witness of others and even of our own rational minds can point us in the right direction. But they can never carry us across the threshold of faith. For what we believe, though it does not conflict with reason, does transcend it
Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!
How inscrutable are his judgments and how unsearchable his ways!
We can learn from Peter to seek a higher form of understanding, one which does not come from flesh and blood, but by faith given by the Spirit of God. Paul too marvels at how different are God's ways of thinking from human ways. They are so different one might be tempted to just give up. But he does not despair and resign himself to knowing nothing.
“For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ (see First Corinthians 2:16, emphasis mine).
Our minds only truly work the way they are meant to work when the are operating from, in, and for God, for his glory. This is what it means to have the mind of Christ. This is the gift given by the heavenly Father that makes it possible for us to understand the identity of Jesus sometimes in spite of appearance and circumstance. It is faith, but it is not a faith that we can compartmentalize. It is allowing the whole orientation and working of our minds to be changed and made to refer to a higher point of reference than ourselves, higher than flesh and blood.
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.
It might seem like the mindset to which Jesus calls us would yield a highly individualistic faith. If we don't really get it from others, if institutions can't produce it within us, than why build a Church? Yet we must take Jesus at his word that he intended to gather a people around Peter and his successors, and that it would really be essential, that it really would hold the keys to the Kingdom. What purpose could such an institution serve? The Church could not give the gift of faith in the same way that the Father gave it to Peter. But the Church did and does faithfully propose Jesus Christ from one age to the next.
I will place the key of the House of David on Eliakim’s shoulder;
when he opens, no one shall shut
when he shuts, no one shall open.
Like Eliakim and his successors, the authority entrusted to the Church is of a divine origin. But the gathering Jesus created around his Church had a new central organizing principle. The gathering had a new mode of power, rather than those of military of political might.
The Church asks us again and again, 'Who do you say that Jesus is?' She herself, though not the source, is the channel through which the grace of faith is given. She is in a real sense the body of Christ, asking us to respond to her, and, through her sacraments, offering us the power we need to do so. The fact of the matter is that while the Church seems at first to be an institution, mere flesh and blood, hidden behind that appearance is a spiritual reality, the Mystical Body of Christ.
in the presence of the angels I will sing your praise;
I will worship at your holy temple.
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