The Power to Bind, the Power to Free: A Reflection on Matthew 16.13-20

For those of us who call ourselves Christians, literally ‘Christ-lings’, or ‘little christs’, there are few questions of greater importance than who and what the Christ was and is. That question takes centre stage in today’s Gospel reading, Matthew 16.13-20, which includes Jesus’ famous question to his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” But it’s a story with a few layers that are easy to miss, especially if we either treat it like the answer portion of a workbook or allow ourselves to get tripped up by later Church debates about the papacy. So today I’d like to do a closer reading and see if we might pick up on some of these pieces.

The story starts with Jesus and the disciples arriving at Caesarea Philippi. The name may not mean much to us, but it was location rich in symbolism. It was home to a sacred spring that had a long association with polytheistic worship, serving as a site of Ba’al worship and, after the Macedonian conquest, a long-standing cult of Pan, which gave the site and the surrounding area their names, Paneas and the Panion. In Jesus’ day it had been renovated to serve as a regional capital under a new name, Caesarea Philippi, named by King Herod’s son Philip in honour of Roman power. (Put into today’s corporate language, the city’s rebrand would have been something like “Caesar’s City, presented by King Philip.”) So Jesus is having this conversation at a place rich in both religious and political meaning for Jews of his day: the home of worship their traditions considered an affront to their God, and now a monument to both foreign oppression and the collusion of Judea’s political leadership with their domination.

He begins, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” While we don’t think much about this title now, normally just glossing it under the broad category of messianic titles, it had a very specific origin and signification in Jesus’ day. It comes from Daniel 7, which records an apocalyptic vision of four beasts symbolizing the succession of empires that conquered Judea. Before these beasts, the throne of God (here under the guise of ‘the Ancient of Days’) appears to judge them. Then we come to the important part of the vision for our purposes today:

I saw one like a Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven. And he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. To him was given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed. (Daniel 7.13-14)

Here, the strange figure of speech ‘one like a Son of Man’ most likely stands in contrast to the four strange beasts from the first half of the vision: Four monsters appear in strange forms, but then a fifth figure shows up, who looks just like a human. At any rate, this oracle serves up a typical apocalyptic message: The people of God are going to be oppressed for generations, “but the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom for ever—for ever and ever” (7.18). In other words, things are going to be hard, but God is in control. (Or as Jesus later puts it, “In this world you will have trouble, but I have overcome the world” (John 16.33).)

With all this in mind, the pieces of what’s happening here start to come together. Jesus brings his disciples to a place loaded with religious and political significance and it’s here where he asks them who ‘people say’ this apocalyptic figure, ‘one like a Son of Man’, is. In other words, what’s the gossip about the identity of the one who will end the Age of Empires and inherit the earth? The answers provided all surround great prophets, both ancient (Elijah and Jeremiah) and contemporary (John the Baptist). Considering the general thrust of Second Temple Judaism and its focus on martyrdom, it’s no surprise that these are all figures who spoke truth to power and suffered for it at the hands of the powerful.

Jesus then changes the question: “Who do you say that I am? Peter gets it on the first try: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” In comparison to the specificity of the ‘Son of Man’ language, ‘Messiah’ was a very general term that carried a broad range of ideas at the time of Jesus. It means ‘Anointed One’ (hence its translation into Greek as Christos, ‘Anointed One’, from which we get our word ‘Christ’), and referred to a murky figure in Jewish national expectation who would restore the people of God to political freedom or religious purity (and often both). I say this was a murky term because different groups expected the Messiah to look and act very differently. To some he would be a conquering military hero and king, a New David; to others he would be a zealous prophet who would defeat the infidels, a New Elijah; still others expected someone who would restore the Law, a New Moses; and others someone who would cleanse and restore the Temple, a Great High Priest. And, many people mixed and matched these ideas in different ways. So, Peter’s claim that Jesus is the Messiah identifies him with Jewish expectation, but was in itself still open for a lot of interpretation. And a constant theme in the Gospels is that the disciples get ahead of themselves and try to put Jesus into one of the typical messianic boxes. But Jesus refused to conform to any of these expectations in his messianic identity, and they — and we along with them — had to learn to let Jesus reveal just what kind of Messiah he would be.

As he so often does, he simultaneously fulfills and subverts expectation. He had a lot to say about politics and power, but refused to take up arms or allow himself to be crowned as king (except at the very end, ironically, on the cross). He had a lot to say about living for God and God alone, but did not take this out on outsiders — he healed the centurion’s slave and Syrophoenician woman’s daughter, chatted with a Samaritan woman, and set up a Samaritan as the hero of one of his most famous parables. Jesus had strong opinions about the Law but turned the common ideas of religious purity on their head, only using the Law against legalists. And Jesus had big ideas about the Temple, but railed against the exploitative, ‘Temple Industrial Complex’ that had grown up around it. This is to say, Jesus certainly stepped into all of these different arenas of faith, but refused to be defined by what they’d looked like in the past. Rather than recreating or purifying the facts of Israel’s religious history, Jesus identified most strongly with the gaps in it, the prophecies and visions whose fulfillments had been a little disappointing. And if there was any mantle of the past he stepped into without reservation, it was none of the ones around whom messianic expectation centred, but was rather Isaiah’s; he goes so far as to take Isaiah’s words as his own manifesto or mission statement:

‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’ (Luke 4.18f; quoting Isaiah 61)

It is not just Jesus’ identity as the Messiah, but also what kind of Messiah he was, then, that ends up being the blessing Jesus gives to Peter:

Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this [i.e., my messianic identity] to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

It’s interesting — and sad — that so much of the interpretation of this blessing has been about the ‘binding’ or ‘locking out’ part of it rather than the ‘loosening’ or ‘opening up’ part. For throughout Jesus’ ministry, the entirety of his message is about loosening chains and freeing captives (see the quote above from Luke/Isaiah), not binding them. Where he mentions doors or gates, or gatekeeping, it’s always in a context of opening them, not closing them on people:

The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. …Again Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture (John 10.2-3, 7-9)

There is one other place where Jesus does use the ‘binding’ and ‘loosing’ language, in a passage about the forgiveness of sins, but even here it leads into Jesus’ teaching about needing to forgive people, not once or twice, but ‘seventy-seven times’ (Matthew 18.15-22), and then a parable whose message is the need to forgive others just as God has forgiven us (18.23-35).

The point of all this is that the great blessing given to Peter is his knowledge that Jesus is the key to opening the doors of salvation, forgiveness, and freedom.

So what we have here in this passage is a fascinating set of ideas, far more nuanced than a simple case of ticking the box of Jesus’ messianic identity. Jesus takes his disciples into the heart of imperial power in the region, a place with a long history of Gentile religion, and here asks his disciples about the mysterious apocalyptic figure who would tear it all down and restore the people of God in freedom and true worship. He then links this figure to himself, but in his teaching and example, he subverts most of the expectations surrounding the Messiah. He then offers this truth as the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven.

This is who Jesus says that he is: the Messiah, but a Messiah who rejects the sword and religious purity but works to restore peaceful and peace-making relationships as the condition for both politics and religion. And this is a message as challenging today — especially for his followers — as it was two thousand years ago.