Jesus answered and said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven. And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it. (Matthew 16:17-18)
In the Hebrew Scriptures that preceded the New Testament, only three times did God ever unambiguously change a person’s name, and all three times indicated a transformation of that person into a forebear of God’s people.
All three times were also directly connected to blessing, or the imparting of life to and through that person. The transformation in them prefigured the transformation brought by God’s blessing and the consecration of a whole people to God.
These three were Abram, whose name was changed to Abraham (“father of nations”); his wife Sarai, who became Sarah (“princess”); and their grandson Jacob, who was renamed Israel — “a prince with God,” or “one who prevails with God.”* In these names are themes of authority, royalty, and the headship of a whole people.
Within this larger scriptural picture, for Jesus to change Peter’s name — which he does for no one else** — is a significant action. It foreshadows the coming of a whole people, for whom Peter is a foundation and forerunner. And in fact, Jesus declares the coming of this people in the same breath — “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.”
The word church, ekklesia, also has biblical significance. It is best translated assembly, and it was the name given to the assembly of Israel at the foot of Mount Sinai in Deuteronomy 4:10 (LXX); that is, it described the people of God in the moment when they became a people as such, united and defined by their formal covenant with God.
Jesus, who gathered followers throughout his ministry, now declared his intention to build a church, a people in covenant with himself, and prophesied that they would be founded in some way on Peter and on his confession.
Peter the Rock
Church history, of course, has made this declaration one of the most controversial in the New Testament.
A majority of Christians in the West have understood the position of Peter in Matthew 16 to be one handed down to his successors, specifically through the position of bishop of Rome, making Peter “the first pope” and the continuing head of the Church. This is the dogmatic understanding of Roman Catholicism today.
A significant contingent of Western Christians took issue with this in the 1500s and broke away from the Roman church, creating the Protestant churches, which do not acknowledge any special authority in the bishops of Rome, and generally not even in Peter himself. Rather, they hearken to an interpretation of this verse that makes Peter’s confession, itself and alone, the “rock” on which the church is built.
This debate colors our reading of the rest of this passage as well; it encompasses the conversation around “the keys of the kingdom” given to Peter and just what the power of binding and loosing may be.
I’m not going to settle this argument here or even really weigh in on it — except that I do want to push back against schools of thought that would happily make Peter disappear from this passage entirely. When we do that, I would argue, we lose something of deep significance to all Christians everywhere.
A Real Church Built on Real People
The oldest commentary we have on this passage, that of St. John Chrysostom in the fourth century, unambiguously declares that Peter’s confession is the “rock” on which the church is built. Whether the term could also apply to Peter himself isn’t a question Chrysostom bothered to address.
As will be clear from the last post, I believe that Peter’s confession of Jesus as God and man is the foundational confession of the Christian faith; it’s the locus of Christianity and marks out the boundaries of truth against all contenders.
Nevertheless, Jesus did change Peter’s name to rock and then declare that he would build his church on “this rock,” and for the love of our forebears in the faith we should not gloss over this too quickly.
In the modern world we have a strong tendency to over-intellectualize Christianity: we make it something that only exists in our heads or in our feelings, in the mental spaces where we live on the inside. But the Christian faith has always been rooted in history, in real people in real places doing real things.
The Christian church was built on the truth that Jesus is God and man, but it was also built on Peter, a man who lived in first-century Galilee and who rose to be the leader among Jesus’s followers.
Just as Abraham became the father of Israel, not in some theoretical sense but in actual, physical reality, so the church was built on Peter not just in a metaphysical way but in the events of his life.
We see this clearly in the book of Acts. It was Peter who preached the first sermon after Pentecost, throwing open the doors of the church and overseeing the baptism of three thousand new believers in Jerusalem. It was Peter who first preached the gospel to the Gentiles and baptized them as Christians, and Peter’s witness to God’s work in them gave legitimacy to the work of Paul, such that the new Gentile believers were able to be united to the Jewish believers — the church, taking shape, built on the foundation not only of a confession but of men, and of this man in particular. Peter was among those who authorized the first “full-time ministry of teaching and preaching” when the need came to separate the ministry of the apostles from the work of “serving tables” in Acts 6, and he spoke with the voice of judgment when Ananias and Sapphira lied to the Holy Spirit in Acts 5.
Whether or not we believe that Peter was ever bishop of Rome, whether or not we believe that his authority passed down through succession, his role as a foundation stone is clearly seen within Scripture itself. Peter gave stability, form, and fatherhood to the first generation of believers.
The name Jesus bestowed on him was more than a nickname: it was a real prophecy, borne out in history, just as Abraham truly became the father of many nations and Israel truly became a prince with God.
Christianity and the Saints
From early times, Christians honored their forefathers in the faith as “saints,” literally “holy ones.” They understood themselves as a “holy people,” yes, a corporate body wherein everyone is a saint, but they never hesitated to remember and honor those who exemplified holiness in their lives, who worked the works of God in the world and left an example for us all to follow.
They also recognized that even after “the saints” had left this world, they were not dead, but alive in Christ — as Jesus promised, “those who live and believe in me shall never die” (John 11:26). Therefore, from early times Christians felt free to honor the saints who had gone before them with special honor and even to ask for their prayers and intercession.
This too has been become contentious within church history, and sometimes for good reason. But if we step back and take a broader look at its underlying theology, I suggest there is something in the Christian idea of saints that illustrates a truth revealed here in Matthew 16.
Most world religions (Judaism and Islam are an exception) teach a future in which souls are released into the ether, so to speak; they lose their person-ality and become part of the universe, or else they are reincarnated as new persons. The ultimate goal in systems like this is to lose oneself, to merge into “the one” that exists beyond the illusion of individuality.
Christianity, by contrast, insists on personhood that is historical and yet eternal. The historic Christian faith insists that who we are as individuals lasts into eternity, because we are made in the image of a God who is personal and whose trinitarian persons are distinct from one another.
In this way, the classic Christian idea of saints testifies to a deeper biblical understanding of creation, salvation, and destiny: we were each made uniquely by God, we are saved as ourselves, and we are destined to reign with Christ not as undifferentiated pieces of universe merged into a single consciousness, but as individuals united through a union of love.
The saints, as they have been historically understood, testify that eternity is a marriage.
All of this is why Saint Peter, the rock, is not a “Buddha” or “an ascended master,” or someone we too can become. He is himself, eternally Simon Bar-Jonah, made Peter, of Galilee in the first century AD. His place in the history of the church is unique; his role in salvation — our salvation — is his alone.
Yes, if Peter had not existed, or if he had fallen away, Jesus would have worked through someone else to attain the same ends. But he didn’t. He used Peter. And so Peter is worthy of our remembrance, our honor, and our thanks.
If we are part of the church, according to Jesus, we have been built on him.
That’s why we shouldn’t just erase Peter from Matthew 16, burying him under his confession as though that is all that matters. Peter’s life mattered, just as yours does.
Us Too
Like Peter, you and I have a role in the life of the church that is unique. No one else will do what you do, even if someone else theoretically could. No one else can love God with your love or obey him with your will. No one else can parent your children, love your spouse, help your neighbor, speak your words.
We are all being built together, as living stones in a temple — Peter said that — and each of us has a place that no one else can fill. Jesus’s words in this passage make that clear.
The conversation began when Jesus asked Peter, “Who do you say that I am?” But when Peter had answered it, Jesus replied, in essence, “Now let me tell you who YOU are.”
It always works this way. We discover ourselves when we discover God, because our ultimate identity is in him. We discover not only our work, what we are to do, but who we truly are, now and eternally. We discover in him the power to change us, to shape us like a potter shapes clay, and the wisdom to know how we should be shaped, in accordance with his vision.
In the world today, at least in Western culture, we have systematically torn down many of the structures that used to give us a sense of belonging and peace about our identities, about who we are. Family, duty, social constructs, even gender norms have gone by the wayside, and as a result, many are suffering from a lack of knowing who they are. We don’t know where we fit.
Into this vacuum, Jesus asks, “Who do you say I am?” And he promises that, when we answer this question, truly and honestly, when we engage with it and allow it to shape us, we will find out who we are as well. We will find where we belong in this temple of saints, of living stones fitted together as a holy habitation of God.
Your place is not mine, and mine is not yours. But we each have one. God knows what it is.
And he will show us — one step, one day, one word, one name at a time.
*A fourth is not, in my opinion, a name change, but a kind of pet name — David’s son Solomon (“peace”) was also given the name Jedidiah (“beloved of Yahweh”) by God in a prophecy through Nathan.
**Although it may seem to us that multiple people in the New Testament Scripture had their names changed – Saul/Paul, Silas/Silvanus, and Epaphras/Epaphroditus, for example – these were not name changes, but the result of different languages being spoken and people being called by different forms of their names, the equivalent of Peter (Greek) and Cephas (Aramaic). Others, like John Mark, had two names to begin with, or gained nicknames. But these aren’t the same as what we see with Peter.
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This is Part 243 in a series on the Gospel of Matthew, which you can access here. Unless otherwise marked, quotes are from the Holman Christian Standard Bible.
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