Beyond flesh and blood

A recording of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 16: 13-19) describes the scene in which the leader of the disciples makes his declaration of faith in the divinity of Jesus before the other apostles, and in which Jesus names him Peter, the rock, to whom He gives the keys of the kingdom. The text is foundational to the Church’s self-understanding and crucial to grasping Peter’s ministry. Let us, however, leave aside the dogmatic structures to which this scene is connected, and instead reflect on a line that passes by usually unnoticed: Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood have not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.

In one sentence, Jesus offers us a commentary on Peter’s journey to this point. It is a significant journey for us to. In one regard, Peter is all flesh and blood. His hot-headed behaviour will get him into trouble in the gospel on more than one occasion, pushing him at times into awkward corners from which he has not the grace to come out unscathed. He walked on the water like a proper charismatic, only to find the H2O gently yielding to receive his body like so many drowning fishermen before him. He wielded the sword in the face of what was practically a lynch mob in the Garden of Gethsemane, only to find his courage blunted by the pertness of a serving girl. Later he will boldly proclaim the faith to the people of Israel, only to lose his grip in an act of papal prevarication, acting ambiguously as if Christians had not been liberated from the strictures of the Mosaic Law (Galatians 2:11-14).  What were all these incidents if not Peter giving in to the waywardness of mere flesh and blood?

There is one further, notorious incident to mention in this regard, and it follows today’s scene in the gospel when flesh and blood led Peter to step boldly forward and make an ass of himself. Jesus had begun to prophesy His future sufferings when Peter rebuked Him and told Him He must never follow such a path. Jesus in that moment gave Peter yet another name which somehow never caught on:

Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.

Thus speaks Jesus, humble and meek of heart, in the face of his friend’s worldliness. Jesus could not have made His feelings any clearer if He had said: my Father in heaven has not revealed this to you, Peter; it comes only from your all too human, flesh and blood perspective. It will be an important lesson for Peter’s successors to remember; papal primacy is a ministry of service to the truth in season and out of season, not a privileged, arbitrary princedom, to be run according to the logic of human expediency. When, after all, was the thorny Paschal logic of death and resurrection ever in season for human calculations?

Finally, now, we can come back to the second part of Jesus’ observation to Peter which attributes Peter’s enlightenment to the work of the Father in heaven. Even if we take the expression flesh and blood in its most positive sense, meaning, for example, our minds and wills, the human being using human powers alone can never discover the divinity of the Son. The greatest philosophers on earth have told us many things, but their writings fail to rise to the insights granted by faith and by the gifts of the Holy Spirit. These all come instead from the hand of the Father in heaven, building on the faculties of mind and will, as grace builds on nature, to give them access to the fierce and fiery mysteries of God at least as much access as we are capable of here below. This is no strange and exotic possibility, reserved as a rare privilege to the greatest mystics. One of the most startling insights of mystical theology in the twentieth century was that progress in the Christian life should normally lead to this state known as infused contemplation when God feeds the soul directly using the gifts granted at baptism. Why else were those gifts given in the first place? In Peter’s case the action of the Father acclaimed by Jesus suggests that this moment of illumination and of Peter’s confession is the fruit of the gift of understanding, granting him an ever-deeper access to the mysteries of divine revelation. The theological gift of faith may be exercised voluntarily under grace, whereas the gifts of the Holy Spirit move us by His divine initiative, taking us to places that human powers, flesh and blood, cannot imagine.

And so, what is the conclusion but that all who have the faith and the gifts are thereby blessed by the Father, blessed to be lifted above the limited scope of flesh and blood, and blessed to be given a glimpse of the divine wonders that pour forth constantly from God, the wellspring of all goodness, truth, and beauty? Come further up and further in, says C S Lewis’s Aslan to the human children in The Last Battle, the final novel in his Narnia chronicles. But come further up and further in is what the Lord says to us all.

Such is His command: to be ready to step beyond our limited flesh and blood calculations, and to await the blessing of the Father humbly, the blessing that enables us to go further into the mystery of faith that by His cross and resurrection the Son of God has set us free; free - like Peter - to love Him to the end.