22 February 2022
Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter, Apostle
“…who do you say that I am?”
In Caesarea Philippi, where Jesus and his disciples are today, there was a temple to Pan; he was the god of fertility, of wild places. One might say that when Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden, they entered Pan’s realm. When Jesus, there in the midst of a place where Pan was worshiped, asks His disciples who they think He is, He’s essentially asking them “Do you belong to the world, or do you belong to me? Am I your God, or is the world your god?”
Peter confesses His belief that Jesus is the Son of God; “…flesh and blood…”, the domain of Pan, has not revealed this to Peter, but God Himself has done so. Thus “…upon this rock…”, upon Peter and his divine confession, will Christ build His Church, a new temple to the True God wherein Christ—The Word Made Flesh—stands as the living object of worship. It stands atop of and over the world, in the world but not of it, a gateway and a bridge between Heaven and Earth. There in between the two realms sat Peter in that moment of confession, at once Simon “He has heard” and Peter the “stone”; there between Heaven and Earth sits the successor of Peter today, the pontiff—“bridge-builder”—striving to unite the Church, to unite peoples, nations, that the prayer of Peter’s best friend, Jesus, might be answered “on earth as it is in Heaven”: “…that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be brought to perfection as one, that the world may know that you sent me, and that you loved them even as you loved me,” (John 17:22-23).