Have you ever applied for and/or been selected for a particular job only to find out once you actually report to work that the “duties” are not at all what you had understood them to be? Employers sometimes tend to use exaggerations and embellishments in job descriptions, perhaps to entice the applicants and/or to give the person who gets the position the sense that what they are doing in the job carries great importance and prestige. I’m not trying to be cynical here, but I myself wonder at my own job title as Education Program Consultant. First of all, although I do work for the State Department of Education, the “programs” that I work with are indeed USDA Federal Food programs. And, I’m not sure that “consultant” is the best term to use for a job that involves, to no small degree, documenting program non-compliance. That being said, for some, I realize that the “actual work” that goes into a job can be very different from what it is “called” and the way it may appear to others on the outside.
This could be one way of looking at today’s Gospel (MT 16: 13-23). This is Matthew’s account of Jesus asking his disciples “Who do people say that the son of man is?” First, the disciples answer with names like “John the Baptist, Elijah, and Jeremiah.” Then Simon Peter puts in his two cents, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God!” BINGO! You have the “job” Simon! Then Jesus gives a little bit of the job description…one that Catholics are familiar with as scriptural support for the authority of the papacy…although I believe there’s a little more than that there….
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. I will give you the keys to the Kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
This sounds quite “Impressive,” replete with security, authority and indeed some amount of prestige. I wonder how Simon Peter must have felt. It would be easy for that kind of a “job description” to go to your head or even cause some amount of consternation and perhaps confusion.
The Gospel then takes a BIG turn. After Jesus has just “congratulated” Simon Peter for his answer and conferred some type of authority upon him as a result, Jesus instructs the disciples “to tell no one that he is the Christ,” and furthermore, shows His followers “that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly from the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised.”
Simon Peter’s response is ““God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you.” In paraphrase, “First of all, how could You be talking about suffering and being killed, after just talking to me about ‘church’ and the ‘kingdom of heaven’? These things do not go together. There must be some mistake!” Jesus responds quite glaringly when he tells Simon Peter:
“Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”
It’s not a “job description” that Simon Peter has misinterpreted, but rather a LIFE description that he has mistaken. Jesus is frustrated to say the least that Peter has misunderstood what the “kingdom of heaven” is really “like.” Jesus is saying and showing that the “kingdom of heaven” is a way of life that involves giving your life away to others, which will most certainly involve suffering, and yet…there is more! The whole context for this suffering and death, which is most distasteful, is Life – real life, new life, and yes…being “raised” over and over again. It is the pattern of Christ – the one who saves – of life and love that is a reality that we can either welcome or try to deny!
We, like Peter, can be very obstinate “obstacles” to the “kingdom of heaven when we “think as human beings do” instead of “as God does.” Jesus is not shortchanging humanity here so much as hinting as to what human life is really about – Divinity. But here’s the catch…divinity is precisely the pattern of life giving itself away in love for others only to be raised up and created anew in a transformed unity with others – a pattern that is unbreakable. It’s a life of covenant relationship that demands nothing less than totally receiving the gift of Love and identifying it by flowing it out to others. In this way, we are all “rocks” who hold the “keys to the kingdom of heaven,” responsible for “binding” and “loosing” one another. It’s not glamorous, but it’s real and in Love!
The Evangelist Matthew and the Prophet Jeremiah have been “strolling” together in the daily readings for quite a stretch lately, and today they are both telling us something about how all of us are already in relationship with God and that means with each other. Jeremiah puts it this way (JER 31: 31-34):
“…this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD. I will place my law within them, and write it upon their hearts;
I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer will they have need to teach their friends and relatives how to know the LORD. All, from least to greatest, shall know me, says the LORD…”
We all have access and therefore responsibility within the “kingdom of heaven,” because (for some reason that we cannot explain) the very pattern of our lives is to be inextricably related to each other, and this connection is in Christ – Life designed in suffering, death and resurrection, over and over again! This is the Life of Love that gives us our name, i.e., the same name that Peter gives when asked by Jesus “Who do people say that I am?” Beyond task or “job” or “occupation,” We are in Christ, the children of God. And that is divine humanity!
Peace
Thomas