Peter wasn’t his given name. The disciple that Jesus named Peter was named Simon by his parents. The story (found in Matthew, chapter 16) goes something like this.
Jesus and his closest friends were travelling one day, walking and talking as they do. Jesus had been preaching, healing and teaching for a while, so he asked them what people were saying about him. There was no social media in those days, so Jesus couldn’t check for likes/dislikes, how many stars he got or what the reviews were. He had to rely on what others heard. They said they’d heard people thought he was Elijah or John the Baptist come back to life or one of the prophets. A holy man, in other words. That all sounds not too shabby, but then he asks them who they think he is. It doesn’t say this in the Bible, but I think this was a little trickier and I imagine there was the sound of crickets for a minute, and several of the disciples might have looked at their feet or just generally avoided eye contact. They’d been with Jesus for some time now and they might well have been a little embarrassed that they had to think about it. I’m not sure, though, I wasn’t there.
But then, Simon says “you’re the messiah” and they’re all relieved because this is clearly the right answer. Jesus blesses him and says God has revealed it to him. Then he says he’s going to call him Peter from now on and says “on this rock I will build my church.” That sounds pretty conclusive. Peter means rock so, obviously, he’s the rock, the foundation on which this thing we call the church is built.
Hang on a minute. There’s a couple things there, a couple of pretty important things that might be helpful to remember when we wonder about the contemporary institution we call church.
In the oldest versions of this text in Greek, the word we translate as church is “ekklesia” which simply means a gathering or an assembly. Fair enough, there’s no qualification of size on that so it could be anything from two or three to “all my relations.” For me, it’s reminder of inclusivity, but one could see where one might be more defining, especially in the context of an institutional structure. Except Jesus doesn’t qualify it in any way, which gives me pause to wonder if Jesus had any idea at all of the institution we’d make and what it would do. For someone who was such a vocal critic of the divisive, restrictive and exclusive structures of his day, I wonder what a Jesus of today would say about the structure we built on the rock.
And about that rock. I don’t think Simon’s the rock. I think Jesus gave him that nickname because he seemed to be the first one to realize what the rock really is. It’s what he said, Jesus is the messiah, the christ. That’s what we should build on.
Likewise, I think Jesus would also point out that it’s not Jesus the person, it’s everything that Jesus is, everything Jesus lived, everything the christ should be, everything that makes up The Way. Everything that Jesus shows us that we’re capable of, too. Love, grace, compassion, care, everything that connects us, whether it’s two or three or all my relations. That’s a pretty solid rock to build on.
