Those of us who grew up in the Roman Church, this passage from Matthew is all too familiar. At one time we could have substituted Pius XII for Peter with the triple crown on his head and the ostrich fans waving over him. And we claimed: there you are; it's all there in the scriptures. The problem, of course, is that it's there. A consequent problem is that we tend to ossify one state of the Petrine ministry, Pius XII for me, and say that is normative. And that's not the case either. And so it is really important that we know there has been a long history of development that would give us the papacy as we have it today. We even have the present incumbent asking the world to help him figure out what the papacy is supposed to look like in the next millennium. We have John Paul II’s Ut Unum Sint, the encyclical letter on the papacy to which several people have responded. That is one of the things that will help us, even if obliquely, to figure out what really is going on in this text.

One of the first questions we can ask of it is, is it historical? Did the historical Jesus say to this to Peter? I suspect not. Scholars vary on this but I think that the majority of scholars would say that this is a scene retrojection of their later understanding into the career of Jesus.

But what is happening here then? Well, a number of interesting things. Peter, whom we also saw in the gospel of Matthew, is anything but a rock. He's the one who starts falling under the waves when he starts walking to Jesus. He's the one on the water who explicitly betrays Jesus three times. So this notion of Peter as rock needs to be seriously qualified. Even this business of giving Peter the keys to the kingdom needs to be qualified too because later, in the same gospel of Matthew, the keys are given to the entire community, not to this one person. All of these data are important for us to try and understand what the Petrine ministry might be.

But I'd like to focus most of all on one of the most peculiar things in this text. It is the only time, in all the four gospels, that the word "church" is used. Now Paul will talk about the Church. It is very clear that for Paul, as I've said over and over, the Church body of Christ, another Pauline figure, is simply another form of Judaism, the most authentic and the latest and the most appropriate form of Judaism. So when Matthew uses the word "church" we need to be very, very careful that we understand what he is talking about. The Greek word is ecclesia means "called out". It is an almost literal translation of the Hebrew word, which I'm sure he had in mind, Qahal. It also means "called out". In other words, this group of people were "called out" by God. The problem, of course, is filling in the details. What does it mean to be "called out" by God?

First of all, it's almost certainly that, the historical Jesus saw himself creating a new Israel. We have the 12 tribes in the old Israel, so Jesus picked 12 disciples. It is also clear that Matthew wants to cast Jesus as a new Moses. Remember, Moses was miraculously spared when Pharaoh wanted to kill all the little Jewish boy babies. Jesus gets miraculously spared when the King of the Jews, Herod, wanted to kill the Jewish boy babies. The Jews escaped from Egypt for their safety. Jesus had to escape into Egypt. In all this, Matthew is doing his regular thing, which is to say that the Jews who do not accept Jesus as Messiah are not the up to date Jews. They're not the Jews who are responding to what God is most recently doing.

So, our the text has to do with the creation of a new Israel. What was the destiny of the first Israel? What was the problem with the first Israel? Why were they called out? They were called out, to use the phrase that occurs over and over, to be a light of revelation to the Gentiles, to be the agency of God's mercy to everybody. The Jews, therefore, unlike every other religious group in the ancient world, were not to exist for their own sake but they were to exist as a channel for God's mercy for everybody. And that was to be the uniqueness of the Jews, the whole point of their calling. And the problem was that many of the Jews, for all kinds of good reasons, instead of opening their arms to everybody, closed their arms and created all kinds of barriers between people, and hoops that people had to jump through in order to join this people of God. And Jesus was about precisely reversing that whole process. So we get that familiar litany of Jesus' odd behaviour: with women, the handicapped, the poor, public sinners, crippled people, ritually impure people. Therefore when we talk about the church, we need to be very, very clear about what it is we are talking about. We will misunderstand what a church is if we do not understand it in this totally Jewish way - as the Qahol Yahweh, the assembly of God which exists not for its own sake.

That is the unique mark of the church. Among all other institutions on the face of the earth, including religious ones, the Church exists for the sake of the world, not for its own sake. Or to put it in more modern theological language, it exists essentially as a mission, sent by God to announce God's forgiveness, God's mercy , God's love. To point out into and to a world, that often enough seems to be quite God-free, the presence of God.

So, we can take another passage from Matthew to fill this out. Where is that presence to be found? "I was naked and you clothed me. I was in jail and you visited me. I was hungry, you fed me. Etcetera, etcetera."

In general the naked, jailed and hungry can be safely ignored. And are. But the uniqueness of the mission of the church is precisely to see and respond to them. But then, Matthew does a very interesting thing. If you remember this famous judgement scene, the people ask: "When did we do all that to you?" We'd like to say the Church is above all, the place where concern for the hungry, the naked, is shown. But that's not true. In fact, often enough, we are indifferent. The Church, like all institutions, tends to feed itself and simply seek its own self-preservation. Matthew's view of things is that the Church is called by God to be the new Israel, God’s elect. But Matthew points out, and he does this in a number of places in the gospel, that the Church will fail to be faithful to that election.

There is another very important passage, also peculiar to Matthew regarding the Church " Call no one father. Call no one teacher." And finishing up, he say that those in authority make their power felt among the pagans. But that's not the way it's supposed to be with the Church. Why did Matthew insist on that? Precisely because the church of Matthew's time, around the year 85, had become so organized and institutionalized that the danger of the abuse of authority had already set in in its earliest stages. It is a danger, normally, that we all experience, in every sphere, namely, of wanting to overpower the other. It's not to be that way in the Church.

Of course, we can finally connect this with this passage from Romans. What is this, the depth of riches and knowledge of God. What is moving Paul? This is the eleventh chapter of his letter to the Romans. The end of his long discussion about his fellow Jews that we heard a couple of weeks ago; his agonizing about the Jews who did not accept Jesus. We see today Paul’s attempt to make sense of that in the providence of God. If God calls these people, if God goes to all this trouble to get these people tooled up to be God's agent in the world, why have so many of them failed? And so these famous three chapters in the letter to the Romans, are Paul's attempt to make sense of that. And at the end of that he says... I can't figure this out. So he's not just saying, "Oh God is terrific." He's just saying : God's ways are not my ways and I can't figure out how this is supposed to work. So there is a connection, however remote it seems, between this passage and the Romans and the thing from the gospel of Matthew. Because Paul can't see why these people, his fellow Jews, have failed, have failed to respond adequately to God. And that is, of course, what we see echoed in a variety of places in the gospel of Matthew.

We will see next week, as soon as Peter makes his big confession regarding Jesus’ identity Jesus says: "Okay Peter. You’re right" But Peter immediately starts arguing with Jesus over whether he should suffer and die. There too we hear again the same message. The warning we are unfaithful, failing to really be God’s new Israel.