Which is the 'rock' that Jesus wanted to build his church on?
June 29, 2025
Today we celebrate the feast of Peter and Paul, the two pillars of the early Church. The Gospel passage tells us of Peter’s well-known confession that Jesus is truly the Messiah. The general understanding of most Christians is that, because Peter acknowledged him as the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God, Jesus rewards (?) him by saying that he will build his community of disciples (i.e. the ecclesia or church) around him as the central rock and, moreover, that Peter will have the power to ‘loose and bind’ everything on earth. In this interpretation, doesn’t it look like Jesus is happy with Peter only because it helps him feel recognised - a recognition that he clearly was not getting from the Jewish establishment?
And if this were true, why then does one find just a few verses later, in a continuation of the same story in Mathew’s Gospel, Jesus angrily telling Peter: “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me, for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things. (Mathew 16:21-23)
Isn’t it strange that Peter who had just been praised and called the Rock on whom the Church would be built, and be the one who would have the power to loose and bind everything on earth, is almost immediately called Satan who is a hindrance to Jesus???
Unfortunately, most Catholics focus only on the first part where Jesus praises Peter and allegedly gives him special powers, whereas the next part is quietly shelved or ignored. In fact, based on this first part, there is a claim among Catholics that all the Popes, as successors of Peter, have this same power to be the central rock on which the Church is built and who have the power to make final decisions on all matters of faith and morals. Yet it is clear that the Gospel writer consciously kept both these parts together, for the Church itself teaches that the Evangelists consciously chose and adapted the language and contexts, as they put together their respective Gospels (Sancta Mater Ecclesia 1964). And so, as a I have said in multiple blogs of mine, interpreting passages in isolation end up with “eisegesis’ (reading into a passage what I want to read) and not true ‘exegesis’ (exploring the passage to find out what the author intended). So if we want to understand today’s Gospel passage and Jesus’ praise of and promise to Peter, we need to reflect on all these additional and related passages of the same Gospel.
So, the first question to ask ourselves is: Why did Jesus praise Peter when he confessed him as the Messiah? This was not some feeble validation that Jesus was seeking here that Peter somehow fulfils. By this point of time Jesus had been trying, for a long time, to explain to his followers that he is not a Messiah who is going to conquer a kingdom or fight with their enemies. However he has had little to no success. So this praise of Peter can be understood in the context of Jesus’ constantly frustrating experience of trying to get the Jews to understand the kind of Messiah that God had promised to send them - namely, that this Messiah was not meant to be a conquering king, but a suffering servant (Isaiah 52:13–53:12). And so when Peter who has been with him all this time finally confesses that he was indeed the long awaited Messiah, who everyone else thought would be an earthly type of king, Jesus is elated (and deeply relieved) that at least Peter has finally understood who this new kind of Messiah is meant to be, and in turn what this new kind of kingdom is meant to be. And it was this unshakeable understanding that would be the rock, on which he wanted to build his community/church. But then the Gospel continues: From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” (Mathew 16:21-23) And so Jesus realizes that even Peter had not really grasped what this kind of Messiah is called to be, and so, doubly frustrated, he angrily reprimands Peter for behaving like Satan for thinking not like God but like the rest of the Jews.
What Jesus says about Peter is probably true about most of us who also acknowledge Jesus as the Christ (i.e. the anointed one), or the Messiah, but like Peter, are still stuck in a way of thinking that sees Jesus as the divine king who will magically take away all our problems, and solve all our grievances, and not as the suffering servant of God. Furthermore, Catholics seem to have translated this idea of a powerful King and applied it to the Pope who alone, like a religious King, has the divinely delegated power to make final decisions on all matters of faith and morals, or to use Islamic terminology, the only one who can declare fatwas on religious matters. And the belief is that this power has been passed down from Jesus to Peter to all the Popes, so that whatever the Pope ‘looses and binds’ on earth will be ‘loosed and bound’ in heaven.
But even this interpretation doesn’t hold water. Firstly, because this power to “loose or bind” was not just given to Peter, but to all the disciples (i.e. the community of his followers as a whole) as we read just two chapters later in the same Gospel (Mathew 18:18), which would mean that perhaps Jesus believed that after his subsequent teachings, that they all finally understood what this new kind of Messiah or kingdom was meant to be. So, first of all, this power was given to the whole community of disciples. Secondly, the phrase to “loose” or “bind” is taken from Jewish tradition and referred to the power of the High Priest to allow people freedom from following a particular Jewish law (i.e. loosed them from the shackles of that particular law), or alternatively to create a law/rule that was binding on the Jewish people. It is this power given to the High Priests down the ages which explains the large number of laws that were added to the Ten Commandments given by Moses. So, by using that same language (imagery) of binding and loosing, Jesus is telling the disciples that if they have internalised what this Messiahship and Kingdom was meant to be, then they could themselves make the rules, and not worry about carrying the burden of laws that had been built up by the Jews over centuries. And by implication all those who lived their lives based on this internalisation would have this same right. This understanding was what allowed the early Church to ‘loosen and ‘bind' - and it was not done by the Apostles alone but by the whole community of Christians. Thus at the Council of Jerusalem, (Acts 15) it was as a group that they released (loosened) the Gentile (non-Jewish) Christians from having to follow the rule of circumcision and many other Jewish laws, but bound the community to four things only: to abstain only from food offered to idols and from sexual immorality and from whatever has been strangled, and from blood. (Acts:15;20b). But that loosening and binding also did not remain static, for it is also a fact that three of these four approved ‘bindings’ were also loosened by Christian communities down the ages. Today, many Catholics in India, both among the clergy and laity, do accept ‘prasad’ shared with those present at Hindu rituals (which is food offered to idols); Christians are not required to limit themselves to halal / kosher foods (i.e. non-strangulated food); and it is not uncommon for Christians to eat blood (e.g. in steaks that are done rare) or even receive blood transfusions (unlike the Jehovah’s witnesses who on the basis of this very teaching and others in the Old Testament refuse such transfusions). At the same time newer rules (attempts to bind) have been introduced in the Catholic Church (e.g. the prohibition about the use of artificial means of birth control), which were not present in the early Church.
So today’s Gospel reading taken in the context of other related passages, gives us two important messages from Jesus. First is the teaching that Jesus is not a Messiah who is come to rule all the world, but one who tried to teach us how to be the suffering servant of others. And secondly that our church is not meant to be a an inviolate establishment encased in unchangeable rock as it were, and ruled by a king/Pope, but a living, moving breathing entity that grows in dialogue with all of God’s revelations - wherever these revelations come from - so that we as a community learn to loose and bind as we receive newer revelations and insights from a God who comes to us in many different ways. Somehow these messages have gotten lost in the euphoria of an interpretation of today’s Gospel that made Peter a gatekeeper, who alone has all the religious powers to decide what is right and wrong.
First Reading: Acts 12: 1-11
The very night before Herod was going to bring him out, Peter, bound with two chains, was sleeping between two soldiers, while guards in front of the door were keeping watch over the prison. Suddenly an angel of the Lord appeared, and a light shone in the cell. He tapped Peter on the side and woke him, saying, “Get up quickly.” And the chains fell off his wrists. The angel said to him, “Fasten your belt and put on your sandals.” He did so. Then he said to him, “Wrap your cloak around you and follow me.” Peter went out and followed him; he did not realize that what was happening with the angel’s help was real; he thought he was seeing a vision. After they had passed the first and the second guard, they came before the iron gate leading into the city. It opened for them of its own accord, and they went outside and walked along a lane, when suddenly the angel left him. Then Peter came to himself and said, “Now I am sure that the Lord has sent his angel and rescued me from the hands of Herod and from all that the Jewish people were expecting.”
But the Lord stood at my side and gave me strength, so that through me the message might be fully proclaimed and all the Gentiles might hear it. And I was delivered from the lion’s mouth. The Lord will rescue me from every evil attack and will bring me safely to his heavenly kingdom. To him be glory for ever and ever. Amen.
They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
“But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”
Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”
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