The Rock on Which It is All Built

[Jesus] said to them, “But who do you say that I am?”  Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”  And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.  And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.” (Mt. 16:15-18)

There are two general ways to interpret this exchange.  One is what I call the institutional interpretation, that Jesus was naming Peter personally and his successors as the rock on which the church was to be built far into the future.  The only problem with that, though, is that Jesus did not seem to have expected there to be any need for a church to be built.  He seemed instead to expect the imminent end of the world as we know it.  Indeed, he once proclaimed, “there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”  (That’s next week’s Gospel.)  But while Jesus was planning for the immediate coming of the reign of God, the church is planning on the long haul. This is the interpretation of institutional power.

An alternative line of interpretation is that this is somehow about Peter’s individual faith as the rock against which the powers of hell shall not prevail.  The problem with that is that Peter’s faith was, shall we say, not so rock solid.  It is only three verses after the passage for today ends that Jesus says to Peter, “Get behind me Satan!  You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”  (That’s next week’s Gospel, too.) 

And it gets worse.  On the night before Jesus’ death, it was of course Peter who denied him.  At the foot of the cross, Peter was not to be found.  On the morning of the  Resurrection, Peter was down the list in the order of those to whom the good news was announced.  By any stretch of the imagination, Peter was not the most solid of foundations for much of anything. 

So what did Jesus mean, then, if the rock on which everything stands is neither the institution that the church has become or Peter’s individual faith.  If it is not Peter the individual or church the institution, might there be something in between those two extremes?  Might it be the church in the true meaning of the underlying Greek word, ekklesia, the community of those called out.  Is it not the community, with as little institutional trappings as possible, that is the rock on which Jesus builds?  Not the individual.  Not the institution.  The community. 

Community is the antidote to individualism, the sin so rampant in the western world of which we are a part.  Community glorifies not the isolated individual but the virtue of mutual submission, something the world has a hard time understanding.  Community is also the antidote to what is institutional.  The community, after all, is the only reason the institution exists, and the community reminds us of what is supposed to serve what. 

That, I suggest is the rock that the gates of Hades will not prevail against.

Peace,