Matthew 16:13-20
“God Builds His Church – Peter”
November 3, 2002 - All Saints Sunday

         Almost everyone likes Peter. He is the favorite disciple of many. Just as he repre­sented the disciples here in answering Jesus’ question, he represents those things we both like and find discouraging about our own Christian lives. Peter is bold and spiritually sensi­tive. He loves Jesus deeply and Jesus loved him. But the “big fisherman,” as Lloyd Douglas called him,[1] had plenty of faults. He was headstrong and brash, always rushing into things without thinking. At the most crucial moment of all, when Jesus was on trial for His life, Peter’s courage failed him completely and he denied his Lord. Yet after rising from the dead, Jesus gently forgave him and restored him to service.

         So we like Peter. His is the very same human mixture of strength and weakness, suc­cess and failure that we find in our own lives. As we read the Gospels, we cheer him on as he does well and ache with him when he messes up. Here in Matthew 16 we join him in a bright moment when everything comes together and he gets it absolutely right. Who is Jesus? He’s “the Christ, the Son of the living God,” that’s who!

         Yet as we read what follows in the text, we may be inclined to temper our enthusiasm for Peter. Lurking there in verse 18 are implications and a long history which made him something less than everybody’s favorite apostle. In both the countries we visited this sum­mer, Greece in its Orthodoxy and England in its Protestantism, Paul is much more admired than Peter. As we took a boat ride down the Thames we could see the huge shining dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. But “St. Peter’s” is a name given only to little parish churches in that city.

         This lukewarm embrace of Peter stems from the fact that verse 18 has been the favor­ite Roman Catholic proof text for their concept of the papacy. The name Peter means “rock.” In a play on words, “You are Rock, and on this rock…” it’s thought that Jesus as­signed Peter leadership over all the apostles and ultimately rule of the whole church on earth. For them, Peter was the first bishop of Rome, the first pope.

         So we Protestants read this text looking over our shoulder to see if a pope might be sneaking up on us. The first order of business always seems to be to rule out the Catholic interpretation. Many times we get so busy making sure we are not getting a pope out of this text that we don’t get anything out of it at all.

         A huge amount of Christian energy and study has been devoted to the words and phrases of verses 18 and 19. In 18 the issues have centered around the meaning and refer­ence of the word “rock.” In verse 19, scholars have exercised themselves endlessly con­cerning the tense of Jesus’ promise that what Peter binds on earth is to be bound in heaven and that what he looses on earth is also loosed in heaven. A future tense “will be” as in the NIV, suggests Peter’s authority is responsible for binding and loosing. A future perfect, “will have been,” implies that God is responsible and a human word only confirms what has already taken place.

         The fact is that there is no reasonable way to escape the conclusion that Peter is the rock upon which Jesus promises to build His church. I grew up hearing the explanation that in Greek the word for “Peter” is petros, which implies a small stone, while the “rock” Jesus speaks of is petra, something large. So the rock on which the Lord is building is Himself, Jesus, not Peter at all. But the idea doesn’t pan out.

         The difference in the two words Jesus uses for rock here is merely grammatical. The name for the man is Petros because it has to be masculine gender in order to be a man’s name. Petra is a feminine noun. The real Greek word for a small stone is lithos. Jesus would have used it if “stone” were what He meant. And besides, Jesus was speaking Ara­maic. There’s no difference at all between “stone” and “rock” in that language.

         Others have thought that the rock Jesus was referring to was not Peter, but Peter’s confession of faith. The church would be founded not upon the man, but upon faith like the man had. It’s a good idea, but it doesn’t jibe with verse 19 where the man is promised the keys of the kingdom. You can build an institution on a statement of faith, but it’s a stretch to imagine a statement of faith carrying keys.

         There’s no getting away from it. Jesus said just what the plain sense of the words im­ply: He would build His church on Peter. But as should be obvious from the rest of the New Testament, as should be obvious from the rest of this chapter, Peter was no pope. He was merely the first human on earth to recognize completely the nature of Jesus as the Son of God and to say so out loud. In I Peter 2 he himself would later say that Jesus is the founda­tion and that all Christians are like living stones built together. Jesus simply identified Peter as the first among equals, the first stone laid down in a huge structure. He represents us all, all the saints who follow after him.

         So the authority conferred here in verse 19 belongs not to one man, but to the church. It belongs to all the saints. The keys of the kingdom were given to us all. The power of binding and loosing has been handed down not through an episcopal ring on one man’s fin­ger, but through all the lives of the countless host we sang about at the beginning of the service. That power is not in decrees of absolution or excommunication. It is the power to witness – or not to witness – to others the saving grace of Jesus Christ.

         When you and I become like Peter and say out loud what we believe about Jesus, then the world around us can be set free. Men, women and children may believe in Him and find the freedom of God’s kingdom. They are freed from fear and sin and death. But when we keep quiet, when we fail to tell of our Savior, then those around us remain bound. Without the message of Christ our friends and family and neighbors remain tied up in their sins and still in need of the loosing only Jesus can give. We bind them by our silence.

         Today on All Saints day I want you each to remember your own sainthood, your own role as a living stone in the church Jesus is building. As wild and crazy as it can appear, the church of God’s saints is the instrument which God is using to save the world. Those who are already saved are the way God communicates the Savior to everyone else. He used Peter and He wants to use us to send along the good news that real freedom, real loosing is to be found in His Son, Jesus the Christ.

         A little girl who grew up attending one of those big old churches with lots of stained glass was once asked, “What’s a saint?” Looking around her at the shining images of apos­tles and prophets and martyrs, she replied, “A saint is someone the light shines through.” She was right on. Saints are people through whom the light of God in Jesus shines into the world and illuminates darkened and despairing lives. The light doesn’t come from them, it comes through them, through them in spite of all their weaknesses and faults and failures.

         Let me tell you about the church I grew up in. As churches are usually evaluated, it was pretty pitiful. It’s attendance peaked many years ago and it has declined steadily ever since. We never met our budget and were constantly struggling just to pay a pastor and keep the lights on. Discord and division were constant. As a teenager I thought a church business meeting was as entertaining as a prize fight. All these people who were supposed to love each other argued loudly about what was wrong with our church. Our attempt to help start another congregation fizzled, as did a bus ministry and any number of other bright ideas. I remember one good pastor and two or three crummy ones. All in all, you would think we were a poor excuse for a church.

         As I reflect, however, I have to believe that Christ built that church. In a time when many Christians looked down on divorced people, they gave my divorced, single mom a place and let her be a leader. Faithful Sunday School teachers showed up week after week, sometimes to teach only a child or two in each class. Some poor kids from a ghetto did ride our bus and heard that Jesus loved them. Our one African American member went and found ten young men at loose ends in East L.A., brought them to church and made them into a basketball team. When I invited a good friend to church, one of those not-so-good pastors took him aside, led him to Jesus and changed his life. And I found Jesus and heard Him calling me to be a pastor, because of Christians there who loved and witnessed to me. Despite all their faults, God was at work among those people, the light of Christ was shin­ing through them. And because of God’s work that church is still there, a handful of people struggling on to shed some light as best they can.

         While on the fishing trip I mentioned last week, someone repeated that bit of angling lore that “a bad day fishing is better than a good day at work.” As hard as it might be to believe sometimes, even a poor church can offer something better than our world would have without the church. Without people transformed by the grace of Christ, without the hope we share because Jesus is the Son of the living God, the world would be a much darker place. A window doesn’t have to be perfect for the light to come through it. It merely has to be there and be open – the light does the rest.

         Yes, Peter wasn’t much of a rock to begin the church with. As you read on in this same chapter you will find Jesus rebuking him for words which came more from the devil than from the Spirit of God. But Peter represents the utterly mind-boggling enterprise which Jesus came to create in us. Using sinful, selfish, silly people, God created a living body which keeps bringing light and hope to the world.

         So we remember the saints today. Not as shining monuments of perfection which we can never hope to attain, but as men and women just like Peter and just like us, imperfect and faulty creatures to whom God has given the grace of Jesus Christ. The famous saints of the past, Peter and Paul, Mary and Monica, Francis and Teresa, are remembered for their great examples of how to live. But the primary reason to remember them is that they re­mind us of how Jesus Christ lives – shining in and through His people.

         A few weeks ago I told you about the great Byzantine preacher Chrysostom being ex­iled by the emperor and empress of Constantinople. While in exile he wrote these words in a letter to a friend:

When I was driven from the city, I felt no anxiety, but said to myself: If the em­press wishes to banish me, let her do so; “the earth is the Lord’s.” If she wants to have me sawn asunder, I have Isaiah for an example. If she wants me to be drowned in the ocean, I think of Jonah. If I am to be thrown into the fire, the three men in the furnace suffered the same. If cast before wild beasts, I remem­ber Daniel in the lions’ den. If she wants me to be stoned, I have before me Stephen, the first martyr. If she demands my head, let her do so; John the Bap­tist shines before me… Paul reminds me, “If I still pleased men, I would not be the servant of Christ.”[2]

And Chrysostom himself has joined that great procession of saints he thought of in his worst hours. They remind us like they reminded him of how God keeps working and shin­ing through His people. May we also join them as rocks laid down in the great line of faith which stretches through time and space. Let everyone of us aspire to be a saint, to be a rock, to be a window for the light of Christ.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2002 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj