Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity
“Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church”
The Church does not own this text; this text owns the Church. It is Jesus’ statement about Peter (whose name means rock) in response to Peter’s confession about Christ: “thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” It is a powerful and yet poignant exchange between Peter and Jesus. What Peter has said, Jesus says, is heavenly knowledge: “for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.” The Church is built upon Revelation, upon what is engraven upon rock, as it were, the refined petroglyphs of salvation, we might say.
The Petrine primacy, as it sometimes called, meaning that Peter has a kind of place of first-standing among the apostles, belongs to the life and history of the Church, to the debates and discussions about what it means to be the Church, and especially to the conflicts and controversies between different churches within the idea of the universal church, the catholic church. But this text cannot be relegated simply to church politics and polities. It speaks rather to the catholicity of the Christian confession of Faith.
Peter’s confession must be our confession. And so Jesus’ response to Peter speaks to the very ground of our faith and life in the community of confessing Christians; namely, those who confess Christ as the Son of the living God.
There is in this confession more than mere assent to a proposition, far more than taking sides in the issues du jour, far more than mere opinion. It is about the truth of a living faith. It means the Church but it means the Church as defined by this confession. Remove that from the picture and there is no church, no faith.
