Holy Mary, Mother of the Church, Mother of the Eucharist, pray for us, lead us to Jesus, help us to surrender to Him fully in faith, hope and love and to share His Truth, His light, His Love, HIM with the entire world. He is our Rock, help us to build our firm foundation on Him and on His representative on earth. Help us to answer His question of “who do you say I am?” by responding, “Jesus you are the Eucharist and the Eucharist is You…You are God and so the Eucharist is God and God is the Eucharist. Amen.

Matthew 16, 13-20, Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time. August 24th, 2014

It interesting that just last week I was listening to a Christian Radio station and this very passage from today’s Gospel was the point of discussion. The commentator, who wasn’t Catholic, was fielding a question about what this passage meant with regard to the Catholic Church’s claim about the Papacy. The Catholic Church of course uses this passage to support its claim that the “rock” that Jesus is referring to is the very person of Peter, the first pope, as well as to Peter’s successors, the popes throughout the ages; that Jesus intended to build His Church on Peter and give the popes as the successors of Peter the power to bind and to loose sin in the sacrament of confession; as well, as to teach the truth in the name and with the authority of Jesus and to do so with the charism of infallibility, that is to teach the truth that Jesus came to save and set men free without error for all men and woman to hear. All of this is included in the promise of Jesus that the Church founded on the Rock of Peter would never fall, for the gates of hell would not prevail against it.

The radio commentator said wrongly, that in no way was Jesus referring to the rock as Peter, but instead Jesus was referring to Himself as the Rock. The commentator said in the original Greek language in which Matthew was written this is clear. I don’t have the time to break down the commentator’s argument, but the main problem with it is that Jesus didn’t speak Greek, he spoke Aramaic. In Aramaic Jesus is literally saying, Peter thou art rock and on you Peter, a name which literally means rock, I will build my Church. In other words Jesus is saying, “Thou art Rock and on you Rock I will build my Church.” And so it is clear, that on the profession of Peter in which He was the first to publicly proclaim Jesus as the Son of God on earth, God Himself in the flesh, it is on this profession on the Rock that is Peter” that Jesus builds His One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.

Yes, it is true as the commentator said, that Jesus is the ultimate Rock of our faith, the rock on which we must build our house, that is our lives, in order that the storms of this life will not tear us down. But Jesus has given us a visible representative of Himself, His Vicar, in the person of Peter, the first Pope and His successors. If we are to be sure that our lives are built on Christ, then our lives have to be built on the Rock of Peter, the Head of the true Church of Christ. As the saints have said throughout the ages, “Where Peter is there is the Church, there is God…there is eternal life!”

In light of this reality, today Jesus too asks each one of us personally, “who do you say that I am?” To answer this question correctly we must say with Peter, with the Pope, that “Jesus you are indeed the Son of the living God, God himself!” And so we can only answer this question fully in and with the One Church that Jesus founded on the person of Peter. It is in this Church and through her teachings that we receive, without error and unadulterated, the truth which we absolutely need for our salvation. It is in this Church and through Her Sacraments that we receive the Grace to live out this truth in our lives with faith, hope and charity, for it is in this Church that we encounter the living resurrected Jesus, the very person of Jesus in His Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity in the Holy Eucharist, in order to believe, adore, hope and love Him as the living God, offering ourselves to Him in love and receiving Him worthily through the confession and remission of our sins in order to become one with Him in the unity of love and through Him one with the Father and Holy Spirit.

When Peter made his proclamation of faith in Jesus as the Son of the living God, Peter’s life began to be radically transformed. He began to move from seeing the world as revolving around himself, to seeing the world and his life as revolving around Jesus and His Church and Her teachings. With us, Jesus wants to work this same type of radical transformation in our hearts and lives. However, our faith must take more and more a hold of our hearts and allow us to be stretched beyond whatever we could have imagined.

We too must be of the same attitude of Peter, one of total surrender to our Lord and to His truth, to His Church, allowing Him permission to change our hearts, our minds and our lives more in conformity to His truth. The teachings of the Church come to us through the authority of Peter and His successors; it is an authority that comes from Christ himself. Our eternal salvation is dependent on our acceptance of this authority and the truth that it proclaims and whether or not we struggled to live this truth with every fiber of our being assisted by the grace of prayer and the Sacraments.

The truth can be hard but not as hard as living a lie…lies lead to slavery and death but the truth to freedom and life. Only by our full acceptance of the truth of Jesus Christ which comes to us in the teachings of the Church through the God given authority of the popes and the bishops in union with the pope do we fully profess to Jesus in the Holy Eucharist; “You are the Christ the Son of the Living God.” To reject the truth, to reject the teachings of the Church, is to reject Jesus who is the Truth; to embrace the truth is to embrace Jesus Christ and eternal life with Him forever.

Let us pray: Holy Mary, Mother of the Church, Mother of the Eucharist, pray for us, lead us to Jesus, help us to surrender to Him fully in faith, hope and love and to share His Truth, His light, His Love, to share Him with the entire world. He is our Rock; help us to build our firm foundation on Him and on His visible representative on earth, the Holy Father the Pope. Help us to answer His question of “who do you say I am?” by responding, “Jesus you are the Eucharist and the Eucharist is You…You are God and so the Eucharist is God and God is the Eucharist!" Amen.