Peter the Rock Sometimes knowing the geography of the Holy Land helps a lot in understanding the bible. This is certainly the case for this Sunday’s gospel. In this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus asks his disciples “Who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter replied, “You the Christ, the Son of the living God.” In response to this Jesus says, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah. For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father. And so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld [Greek: “hades”] shall not prevail against it.” What does this have to do with geography? Well this passage begins by stating that this happened in “the region of Caesarea Philippi.” Caesarea Philippi was a city built right up against a huge rock face. And in that rock face is an ominous cave formerly filled with water descending deep into the earth. (Unfortunately an earthquake has since plugged up the bottom of the cave.) If you were a pagan living in this pagan town at the time of Jesus, wouldn’t you have thought of this cave as the “gate of hades”? With this backdrop, we can now imagine this scene in its full drama: Right in front of this huge rock race and the “gate of hades”, Jesus makes Simon Peter the rock on which the Church will be founded and guarantees that it will be so unshakeable that that the gates of hades (i.e. the powers of hell) will never be able to destroy it. We experience the reality of this promise though the papacy. Whether saints or sinners, the successors of Peter (i.e. the popes) have always been the stable rock that have prevented the Church from being destroyed by enemies from within or without. (Yes, there are enemies of the Church within the Church – Judas being the first one.) If you look at how quickly and how often other Christian groups divide and splinter over time, you can begin to appreciate how extraordinary it is that the Catholic Church is the same Church as it always has been and teaches the same faith that it always has taught. This is not something for us to toot our own horns about though, because what is remarkable is not that we have made the Church last so long. We have not. It is rather that God has so often prevented us from ruining the Church in spite of ourselves. We shouldn’t be too surprised by this though, since, after all, Jesus chose to found his Church on a bumbling sinner from the start. -Fr. Sandquist