Homily for the 13th Sunday after Trinity (22nd Sunday of Ordinary Time)

In case there was any misconception about how the Church understands the Petrine ministry – the office of the popes as the successors of St. Peter — the continuation of Matthew 16 today offers some important correctives. So often critics of the papacy balk at the idea of infallibility, imagining that Catholics think the pope is perfect and can make no mistakes. And far too often this criticism happens because of Catholics who hold exactly this naive view. In fact the teaching on infallibility is very limited. Pope are aren’t infallible in everything they say or do; they are only infallible precisely in the way that Jesus suggests in last week’s passage from Matthew 16: whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven. The pope is able to bind, which is to say declare certain matters of faith and morals in a binding way. Popes do this very rarely, in fact. Which makes sense if you think of the basic contours of history, which is to say that it is only in recent decades that we were able to even know what the pope was saying on a regular basis. It is a little ridiculous to imagine that being a good and faithful Catholic requires us to take notes at every papal press conference or follow the papal twitter account. If the way we understand Church authority does not make sense in the Church of five hundred years ago or the Church of a thousand years ago, it is likely that we have mistaken certain modern habits of assumption for the perennial actual way that Church has always understood herself.

But back to Matthew 16. After the glorious promises that the Lord makes to Peter, the downward turn feels all the more abrupt. When Peter hears Jesus speaking of his impending passion, suddenly his great confession of faith is clouded with a very this-worldly understanding of Christ’s mission. “God forbid, Lord!” Our translations attempt to convey the idiomatic sense of the Greek, which is something more like “have mercy,” but the way that Matthew pairs the dialogue highlights the irony of Peter’s desire to hold on the one hand a believe in Jesus’ divine mission, and on the other hand his desire to invoke divine assistance in order to impose on him a rather different mission. The response is immediate and hard: “Get behind me, Satan. You are a hindrance to me; for you are not on the side of God, but of men.” Rather than being a true follower of Christ, a disciple, he sets himself up as the leader not of the other disciples, but of the Lord himself. But he does not belong in that position, which turns him from a rock to a skandalon, in Greek – an obstacle, a scandal, a stumbling block.

That same word — stumbling block, scandal — is used by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians do describe the Cross. It is, he writes, a “stumbling block” to the Jews. Peter obviously sees it as such. But to refuse the cross is to become in turn a scandal to the witness of Christ and his Church. If Peter is to truly be the rock, he must truly be a disciple, which means taking up his cross.

Stanley Hauerwas writes, “The church learns from Peter that our faithfulness begins with the confession of sin.” So the Church’s perseverance has been guaranteed by the Lord through the ministry of Peter, but the true meaning of that ministry is always to ensure our fidelity to the Cross. The Lord rejects any form of discipleship that seeks to avoid suffering or death, that seeks to somehow guarantee our success by any means other than him.

You know, like many of a more traditional bent I sometimes lament the modern popes’ refusal of the classic triple tiara. I do personally still think it was a good and beautiful symbol and would welcome its return, but I will say this at least as a positive way of reading that development: the laying down of that crown was perhaps the acknowledgment by the popes that their faithfulness and stability, their exercise of the Petrine ministry of the “rock,” does not depend in any way on worldly success or political power. And, for our personal discipleship, we dare not convince ourselves that being faithful requires winning political victories or being in charge. Very often it seems to require the opposite.

The Lord’s use of the term “Satan” here might be distracting. He does not mean that Peter is under demonic influence, but that he is literally “satanic,” which means an adversary. “Satan” does of course refer to a person, the leader of the fallen angels, but it is more a title than a name. Misinformed and defective love can be “satanic” if it opposes God. Most readers have seen in this passage also an echo of the Lord’s own temptation by Satan in the wilderness. What Peter offers is one of the things that Satan offers: a victory and a salvation without sacrifice, an easy way that fails the test of love. And the Lord’s response to them is the same.

Like Christ, we are asked to “offer our bodies as a living sacrifice,” as St. Paul tells us in Romans 12. He also tells us not to be “conformed to this world,” but to be “transformed by the renewing or your minds.” We do this by taking up our cross and following Jesus, rejecting the easy loves and pleasures of the world for the sake of the greater life, beauty, and joy that is available only through the Cross. Like Peter (and in fact like many of the popes no doubt in their personal discipleship), we will often fail, but Jesus is always there to restore us, and his mercy never fails.