Homily This Sunday

The Keys He Placed in Human Hands

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, there is a moment in every life when a question stops being academic and becomes personal. Jesus creates that moment today.

He takes his disciples far north, to Caesarea Philippi, a city bristling with the shrines of pagan gods and a gleaming temple built to honor Caesar. Standing in that landscape of competing claims and rival lords, he asks, "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?"

The answers come easily. John the Baptist. Elijah. Jeremiah. Safe answers. Secondhand answers. The kind of answers we can all give without risking anything of ourselves.

Then he narrows his gaze: "But who do you say that I am?"

Notice, my friends, that the second question is the only one that saves. It is not enough to know what the polls say, what the culture says, what our grandmother believed, what we absorbed in a religion class years ago. Faith is not inherited like a family name. At some point every one of us must answer in the first person.

Simon speaks: "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." And Jesus tells him something extraordinary. "Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father." Peter's confession is not the fruit of clever reasoning. It is grace. It is a gift.

That should console us. If you have ever knelt in church and felt your faith flicker, if you have ever wondered whether you truly believe or are just going through the motions, hear this: faith is not something you manufacture by trying harder. It is something the Father gives. Our part is to keep showing up, keep asking, keep opening our hands.

Then comes the great reversal. Simon confesses who Jesus is, and Jesus reveals who Simon is. "You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church." The fisherman is given a new name and, with it, a new mission.

Here the first reading suddenly comes alive. Isaiah tells of Shebna, the master of the palace in Jerusalem, a man who used his office for his own glory and carved himself a magnificent tomb. God strips him of his position and gives it to Eliakim: "I will place the key of the House of David on his shoulder; when he opens, no one shall shut, when he shuts, no one shall open."

In the ancient royal court, the master of the palace was not the king. He was the king's steward, who wore the key on his shoulder as a badge of delegated authority. He opened the doors in the morning and closed them at night. He acted in the king's name, and he answered to the king.

So when Jesus says to Peter, "I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven," every Jewish ear present understood. Christ is the King. He is not resigning. He is appointing a steward for a household that will outlast every empire, and the office will not die with Peter. Isaiah's prophecy speaks of a succession, and so does Christ's Church, in the unbroken line from Peter to Pope Leo XIV.

Brothers and sisters, this is why Catholics are not embarrassed by the papacy. The keys are not a human invention. They are Christ's own gift, and they mean that our faith rests not on shifting opinion but on a rock he chose.

But consider whom he chose. Peter is the one who will sink beneath the waves. Peter is the one who, only a few verses later, will be called "Satan" for refusing the cross. Peter is the one who will swear by the fire, "I do not know the man."

Saint Augustine noticed this and preached that Peter was strong not in himself but in the Rock who is Christ, for "the rock was Christ." And Saint Leo the Great taught that the strength given to Peter through Christ passes on through Peter to the apostles. Peter is a rock only because he is anchored in a greater Rock.

That is our hope. God does not wait for us to become impressive before he entrusts us with something. He builds his Church out of people who fail, repent, and love again. If God can build on Peter, he can build on you.

Which brings us to the question underneath the question. Because the keys of the kingdom were not given to Peter alone in the sense that the rest of us are spectators. Every baptized person has been given something to open and something to close.

A parent holds keys. The way you speak of God at your kitchen table either opens the door of faith for your children or leaves it locked. A grandparent holds keys. Your rosary, your quiet witness, may be the only sermon your grandchildren ever hear. A friend holds keys. Your patience with someone who has drifted from the Church may be the hand that turns the lock.

And all of us hold the keys of mercy. When we forgive, we open a door. When we hold a grudge, we bolt one shut. Every day, in ordinary rooms, we are opening and closing doors on the kingdom of God for one another.

Which door has God given you to open this week? And is there a door you have kept locked far too long?

Then Saint Paul lifts our eyes higher. "Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How inscrutable are his judgments and how unsearchable his ways!"

Paul writes this after wrestling for three chapters with the mystery of Israel and the Gentiles, and he ends not with a solution but with a doxology. He does not solve God. He worships him.

That is the right posture before all of this. We do not fully understand why God chooses whom he chooses, why he entrusts eternal treasures to unreliable people, why he built a Church on a man who denied him. "For from him and through him and for him are all things. To him be glory forever."

My friends, we are about to see this same divine logic on the altar. Christ, who put the keys in the hands of a fisherman, now puts himself into the hands of a priest and onto the tongue of sinners. The God whose ways are unsearchable makes himself small enough to be held.

The Eucharist is Christ's answer to the question he asks today. He does not merely want us to say who he is. He wants to give us himself, to become the very life within us.

So as you come forward to receive, let your "Amen" be Peter's confession. When the minister says, "The Body of Christ," you are answering the question of Caesarea Philippi with your whole life: You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.

And then walk out those doors carrying the keys he has given you, and open something this week that has been closed too long. A conversation. A wound. A heart. Perhaps your own.

Christ has built his Church on flawed and forgiven people. He is still building. And the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.

Amen.

Sources Consulted

- Saint Augustine, *Sermons* on Matthew 16 and *Retractationes* I.21 ("the rock was Christ") - Saint Leo the Great, *Sermon 4* on the Anniversary of His Elevation to the Pontificate - *Catechism of the Catholic Church*, nn. 153, 424, 552-553, 881 - Vatican II, *Lumen Gentium*, ch. 3 (on Peter and the episcopal college) - Saint John Chrysostom, *Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew*, Homily 54 - Scott Hahn, *The Gospel of Matthew* (Ignatius Catholic Study Bible) on the Davidic office of Isaiah 22 - Pope Benedict XVI, *Jesus of Nazareth*, vol. 1, and General Audiences on Saint Peter - Pope Francis, *Evangelii Gaudium*, nn. 135-159 (on preaching)