Word to the Wise
Thursday, August 4, 2016 - Thursday in the 18th Week in Ordinary Time
[Jer 31:31-34 and Matt 16:13-23]THURSDAY, AUGUST 4, 2016 ST. JOHN VIANNEY, priest [Jeremiah 31:31-34 and Matthew 16:13-23] "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah. For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Heavenly Father. And so I saw 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." Every saint portrayed in art has some kind of symbol on their person to signify their status, such as a palm branch, or, in St. Dominic's case, a dog with a torch in its mouth, signifying the "Domini canes" - "the hounds of the Lord." In St. Peter's case, it is a key or set of keys because of the words of Jesus in today's gospel scripture, which make Peter the head of the Church. Peter is told that his confession of faith: "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God" is something that God has revealed to him and not something he dreamed up. However, Peter is not by that fact perfect in his thinking because at the end of today's passage, Jesus rebukes him: "You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do" because Peter reacted negatively to Jesus prediction of his (Jesus') suffering. Those keys however were entrusted to Peter and the popes have called themselves the "successor of Peter" down through the centuries. The job of being successor of Peter is a big one, to put it mildly, and to entrust that kind of binding and loosing power to a single human person seems more than anyone can accept. Yet, for better or for worse, Jesus set it up that way and the Church has survived saints and scoundrels in the job. The very fact that Jesus chose a humble impulsive fisherman should be a reminder to us that God chooses all of us as baptized persons to bear a powerful message about his Son, the same message that Peter (formerly Simon) blurted out when Jesus asked, "Who do you say that I am?" That message - "you are the Christ, the Son of the Living God" - in itself is the key to our faith. AMEN
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