Upon the Rock, Against Hell's Gates (Propoer 16A)

  

Upon the Rock, Against Hell's Gates

23 August 2026 10:00 am Sung Mass

Proper 16A

Episcopal Church of the Holy Spirit, Sutherlin (OR)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Exod. 1:8- 2:10; Psalm 124; Rom.12:1-8; Matt. 16:13-20

 

Today’s Gospel tells about Jesus giving Peter a new name and what are called “the keys of the kingdom.”  In popular imagination, that means Peter has become the doorkeeper of heaven, like in a story once told me by one of my Jesuit professors:

“Bill Gates dies.  When he gets to the Pearly Gates, there is a long line of people waiting to be interviewed by St. Peter before he’ll let them in.  He goes up to the front of the line and waits on the side close to St. Peter, who turns to him and asks him if there is anything he can do for him.  “I’m Bill Gates.  I was one of the richest men in the world and gave hundreds of millions of dollars for projects to help the disadvantaged and stop malaria.  Can’t you get me around this long, long line?”  St. Peter replies, “Oh no, no.  This is heaven’s door.  All are equal in the sight of God.  There are no favorites here, and certainly neither rich nor poor.  You must go and stand in the line and wait your turn like everybody else, Mr. Gates.”  After what seems an eternity, he is only half way up the line when from the rear comes a commotion, “Make way, make way for the Pope!”  At that a man in a cope and miter, croisier in hand, quickly goes to the head of the line, where St. Peter admits him into heaven him without further ado.  Bill Gates asks the woman in front of him to hold his place in the line, and goes back up to confront the Saint.  “Yes, Mr. Gates?” says Peter.  “I thought you said ‘there are no favorites here’ and ‘all are alike in the sight of God.’”  “Yes, that’s true, and your question is… ?”   “What about that guy in the funny hat with the shepherd’s crook?  He cut the line and you let him.  That’s not fair.”  St. Peter, with a look of sudden recognition on his face replies, shaking his head, “Oh no!  But he was the pope! It’s been a thousand years since we’ve had one of those get in up here!”

 

But Peter as the doorkeeper of heaven is not what today’s Gospel is about.  

The scene takes place in Gentile territory, near the city Caesarea Philippi, a city in the foothills of Mount Hermon, in what we now call the Golan Heights.  Now called in Arabic Banias, it was originally “Panea,” the City of Pan, because it was a center of worship of that Greek god.  This satyr, half man half goat, was a nature and fertility deity, usually represented in a state of sexual excitement and playing reed pipes, leading his devotees in drunken orgies. 

 

The temple was located at the mouth of a large cave which at that time had a spring that was one of the headwaters of the Jordan.  The cave’s mouth opens in a large face of exposed bedrock, upon which the Temple of Pan was built, a cave people thought looked like a spooky gate leading to the underworld.  

 

Jesus in today’s gospel takes a field trip to Caesarea Philippi with his closest followers, most of them in their twenties.  Later Rabbis would rule the city as totally off-limits for followers of God, a place seen as “Sin City,” where “What you do in Caesarea stays in Caesarea.” 

Jesus asks his followers, “Who do people say the Messiah is?” and “Who do you say I am?” 

Simon replies, “You are the Messiah.  The Son of the Living God.” 

Jesus replies by telling Simon that his recognition of Jesus’ identity did not come from publicly available data, but rather from God speaking in his heart and mind.   

Then Jesus gives Simon a new name:  Rock.  In the Aramaic he would have been speaking, the word is Qepha’.  It is where the name Cephas, one of the Greek names for Peter in the New Testament, comes from.  When you translate Qepha’ into Greek rather than just transliterate it as Cephas, it becomes Petros, our familiar name Peter. 

The rock image used in the name is important for two reasons.  In the Hebrew Scriptures, the Rock of Israel, the one reliable thing they can cling to when all else fails or fades, is God himself.  It is also the place where God puts you when he wants you safe, “the rock that is higher” than the turmoil you see about you.  It is from a stone that God makes water spring for the children of Isra’el in the desert.  It is also the foundation of the house built by the wise man in one of Jesus’ parables, as opposed to the fool’s foundation of sand.

So he is giving Simon a name to remind him of the source of his knowledge and of his strength. 

“You are Rock, and upon this Rock I will build my Church.”  The Greek here uses two different words, one masculine (petros “stone”) and one feminine (petra “massive outcropping of bedrock”).  But again, in the Aramaic Jesus would have been speaking, there is only one word—Qepha’. 

Now Roman Catholics have traditionally differed in their interpretation of this verse from Eastern Orthodox and Protestant Christians.  Rome has always insisted that it is the person of Peter, and the role he plays (the “Petrine Office”) in the Church that is the foundation stone Jesus refers to. They link it to Peter later becoming Bishop of Rome and say that Peter’s role as Bishop of Rome and leader of the other bishops, the papacy, increasingly monarchic over the centuries, is what is at issue.   Predictably, Protestants have always the “Rock” at issue is faith alone, apart from works—the confession of Jesus as Messiah and Son of God made by Peter in the story—that is the bedrock of the Church.   The Eastern Orthodox have generally said that the Rock is divine revelation, the act of God making Jesus’ identity known (“flesh and blood have not revealed this to you, but my Father in Heaven”). 

The fact that Jesus here follows his play on words with an immediate statement of Church authority (“what you bind on earth, God will bind, what you untie, God will untie”) and ultimate success (“the gates of Hell shall not prevail against you”) has lead most modern scholars from all these traditions to agree that the story in Matthew is indeed about the leading role of Peter in the early Church rather than later papal presumptions, salvation through works alone, or Eastern Christian mysticism.  

Within three decades of Jesus’ death, Christians were divided between Jewish congregations who saw James the brother of Jesus as the natural heir to Jesus as leader and wholly gentile congregations who saw Paul, the missionary who had converted them, in this role.  Matthew’s story here is, as it were, taking the “compromise candidate” for Church leader.  Rather than either of the favorites of the two major parties in the early church, Matthew’s source says it is Peter. 

James came to believe in Jesus only after the resurrection, and the Jewish communities he led wanted to turn gentile converts into Jews of one kind or another; Paul became a Christian long after Jesus’ death, after an infamous career of persecuting the followers of Jesus.  He then seemed to go to the opposite extreme by insisting that Gentile converts and even fellow Jews not observe Jewish Law.  Peter, however, was the one who was personally close to Jesus during his lifetime, was the leader of the inner circle of the Twelve that spent the most time with Jesus, and was a Jew who came to accept and even embrace the outreach of this originally strange sect of Judaism to non-Jews and non-observers of Jewish Law.

 “You are Rock, and upon this Rock I will build my Church.”  From all the other stories we read in the New Testament, this “Rock” was not all that solid to begin with.  “Rocky” might be a better way of describing his impetuousness, and extremes in devotion followed by extremes in failure.  In Mark’s version of this story, immediately after the confession of Peter, Jesus does not give him the keys to the kingdom, but rather criticizes him for not accepting his prediction of the coming passion and scolds him and says, “Get behind me, Satan!”  (Mark 8:27-30; 31-33).   Elsewhere, we read of Peter’s silly reaction to the marvelous epiphany on the Mount of Transfiguration.  We elsewhere see him walking on water through faith and then, faith faltering, sinking into the waves.  We see him sleeping through Jesus' prayers at Gethsemane, and then disavowing Jesus three times during the Passion.  But finally, after Jesus has appeared to the women, Peter is the first male disciple (at that misogynistic time, the first legally acceptable witness) to see the Risen Lord.  One of the earliest fragments of early Christian tradition found in the New Testament is preserved in St. Paul’s formulaic recitation, “For I passed on to you what was first passed on to me, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised again on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared, first to Cephas and the Twelve, . . . then to James and the apostles” (1 Cor. 15: 3-7).

So the name “Rock” reminds Simon of who it is that is his rock.  It is this connection that gives authority and power to Simon’s ministry. “I will give you the keys of the kingdom.”   The image of keys that open irrevocably or close definitively is taken from a series of passages in the Hebrew Scriptures and Intertestamental literature.  The idea is that Peter’s actions will be definitive and reflect the will of God (cf. Isa 22:22, 23; Job 12:14; 1 Enoch 1-16).    

“What you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, what you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”  This passive construction is a euphemism for “What you declare as binding, God will bind.  What you declare as loosened, God will loosen.” So in Matthew’s view, it is Peter’s ruling on the terms and conditions of gentile entry into the Church that take priority over Paul’s or James’, and this because Peter’s rock was God himself, as shown by his early confession of Jesus as Messiah and Son of God.  

The Church built on this Rock, says Jesus, will be able to defeat even the “Gates of Hell.” The image is a common Old Testament image for death itself (Isa 38:10; Job 38:17; Psa 9:14; Wis 16:13).    

But set here in Caesarea Philippi, the reference could also be an image of the Church’s ultimate defeat of the evils of the world, as represented by the Temple of Pan at the Gates of Hell, in Sin City.  Gates were a symbol of defensive military action, not attack. So here the church is seen are seen as a vanguard in an effort to reclaim this enemy-occupied territory we call our world.  Based on the Rock of our Salvation, we simply cannot be defeated by the horrors of the world we see before us, including sick religion and death itself.    

Friends, Jesus here is asking not just Simon, but all of us, “Who do people say I am? And who do you say I am?”  He is offering us new names and true identities, the authentic names and selves we were created for but which we have wandered far from.

 

Faith is trust in unseen truth, and looks beyond the visible, beyond the temptations and distractions around us, beyond the Temple of Pan, the Gates of Hell, and beyond the messed-up lives we see about us and which we lead.  It looks even beyond suffering and Death.  If we rely on our Rock, and build upon the firm foundation of Jesus Himself, then our unstable, unsteady selves, our “rocky” selves, will be transformed.  And together, as community in Him as He is in community with the Father, we will be unstoppable in charging up the rocky slope, breaking down the gates of Hell and Death, and changing ourselves and the world.  

 

In the name of Christ, Amen.