Without Fail: 21st Sunday OT

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. That’s how I’d sum up the first reading, which begins with somebody called Shebna losing his job. “I dismiss you from your office; I remove you from your post,” says the Lord. I wonder if Shebna may be the only person to be personally fired by God. At least it came from the top. God is replacing him with someone called Eliakim. “I place the key of the House of David on his shoulder; should he open, none shall close, should he close, none shall open.” Sounds good, but the very next verse after our reading stopped prophesies that Eliakim will also end badly. Promising start, bad end. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

But the early Church Fathers recognized in these words a foreshadowing of an authority that would be good and true, never abused, always faithful: the authority of Jesus.

Before I was accepted into the seminary, I underwent some pretty intense psychological probing. Most of the report was pretty dull and obvious, but I remember it said I had a bit of a “problem with authority.” I thought, “who doesn’t?”

Authority is built into our lives. It’s hard to find a true anarchist, someone who really wants to live in a world without laws or government.  Anyone who says that, I have to believe they haven’t really given it serious thought. Even from birth, we’re under authority in the form of our parents. And that’s not an easy thing. I remember how often growing up I would just be about to explode with rage against the authority I was under. It does not come naturally to us. But it is right. It is how God has established the human family. And I think we should see it as part of our discipleship. Children, young people, let’s be honest: submitting to the authority of your parents sometimes means suffering. As you grow up, you realize something appalling: your parents are human. They don’t always know the right thing to do, and they sometimes get it wrong, and sometimes you’re pretty sure they’re making it up as they go along, and you still are under their authority. That can be hard to accept. But Christ asks his disciples to take up their Cross and follow Him, and I hope you will find strength and peace in knowing that living under the authority of your parents isn’t just a crummy thing you have to put up with until you escape. It’s part of the Cross you carry for Jesus. For some of you, at a certain age, let’s just be honest, it might be pretty much the biggest part of your Cross. If you can see it that way, when it’s hardest, you’ll find a certain peace, a certain strength to hang in there, and trust God that His way is your best option.

In today’s Gospel passage we have another kind of authority being addressed. I want to come at this from behind, so let’s back up for a moment, just clear your mind for a second and try to follow me through this. Have you ever played the “telephone game,” where you sit in a circle and one person whispers something into the next person’s ear, who whispers it to the next, all the way around the circle. And then the person who started announces what was first said, and what it had turned into by the time it got around the circle, and it’s usually hilariously different. There’s an important lesson in the telephone game. Haven’t you ever been amazed by how distorted the truth gets after just a few retellings by the local gossips? Let’s face it, we humans are terrible at reliably transmitting information.

So, based on our human abilities, how long do you think Jesus’ message stayed pure? Especially considering nothing was written down for at least a few decades after His ascension! Personally, I would expect the original teaching of Jesus to be significantly corrupted even within the first generation. I would expect it to be almost unrecognizable by the third.

The point I’m making is simply this: if it were possible for humans to mess up the teaching of Jesus as we handed it down, then the probability of it getting messed up is 100%. I think it would only be reasonable for us, in 2014, to assume that whatever the original Jesus said and did was lost to history many generations ago. Which really throws a wrench in the whole project. I mean, what’s the point of a Revelation if the Revelation is doomed to be lost? So if God really wanted to reveal Himself to the world, simply revealing Himself isn’t enough. He’d have to somehow safeguard that Revelation. He’d have to protect it over time. Because if it’s possible for us to get it wrong, we will.

Let me put it another way: either the Church is infallible, or whoever Jesus was, and all that He said, and all that He did, are nothing but question marks for you and I. After 2000 years, it would take a miracle for us not to have messed it up.

Catholics believe that God has done, and continues to do, that miracle. And this passage in Matthew 16 is part of the reason why. “Peter, you are rock, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.” At the end of Matthew’s Gospel He promises “I am with you until the end of the age.” In John 16:13 He promises that He will send His Spirit, who will guide us in all truth. We could go on. The New Testament tells us the same thing that simple logic tells us: if we’re going to know anything reliable about God’s revelation through Jesus, then God has to protect that revelation.

This might seem like something that separates Catholics from Protestants, but that’s only partly true. Every Christian who believes in the Bible believes in an infallible Church, whether they know it or not, and here’s why. A few centuries after Christ, a lot had been written. Some of it was universally accepted as Holy Scripture. Some of it was universally rejected. Some of it was debated. The Book of Revelation, for example, was hotly debated even a few centuries after Christ! Over time, the Church came to develop what we call the Canon of Scripture, that is, the list of books which belong in the Bible.

Ask any Christian today, why is the Gospel of Thomas not in your Bible? How do you know it doesn’t belong? How do you know that Gospel of John does belong? What if we’re wrong about which books belong to the Bible? Any Christian would probably answer that God has given us the Bible, that God guided that process of selection. Any Christian would agree that at least in this one process, in this one instance, God infallibly guided the Church. We believe that we didn’t get it wrong because God wouldn’t let us.

Catholics just extend that idea logically. The idea of the infallible authority of the Church is nothing more than the faith that God wouldn’t have given the world a Revelation only to watch us ruin it. Jesus wouldn’t have said in Matthew 24:35 that “Heaven and Earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away,” if He didn’t intend to safeguard that life-giving Word.

Returning to today’s passage from Matthew 16, Jesus goes on to tell Peter that the power of binding and loosing, and indeed the very Keys of the Kingdom, are entrusted to him. Because why? Because from this moment Jesus is going to make Peter perfect and infallible in all things, never to make a mistake, never to sin? Far from it! Jesus handed the Keys of the Kingdom to a man who would deny Him three times, who would often get things wrong, who would often fail to understand. What Jesus promises is that this imperfect, sinful man will have His help and guidance, indeed His guarantee, as he carries out the mission Jesus gives him.

If you look at the coat of arms of the Pope today, like all the Successors of Peter, you will see two crossed keys. Every one of those men was sinful and fallible like Peter, and some of them were downright villainous. People often like to attack the Church’s claim to infallibility by telling stories about awful things that Popes did. I usually know more Church history than them, so I can usually top their stories. “You think that’s bad? Listen to this!” But what they see as evidence against God’s guidance of the Church, I see as even more proof of it. Because this Church has been teaching the same thing for 2000 years. You can study the Church Fathers from the first few centuries, and you will immediately recognize the same Faith handed down today. Through all those awful Popes and corrupted hierarchy and self-serving Catholic kings and queens… you look at the history of the Church and think, if this bunch of clowns couldn’t mess it up, there has to be something divine behind it.

And that’s what we believe about the infallibility of the Church. It doesn’t mean the Pope can’t sin, or can’t make a bad decision, or can’t say something misleading or mistaken. It does mean that he can’t wreck the Revelation that Christ gave us and has protected for 2000 years.

And it means that if we want to follow Christ, we have to trust His Church. Otherwise, we’re just running after whatever teaching suits us, and what good is that? If we don’t acknowledge the authority of the Church, then what we’ve really got is a religion we made up ourselves. You pick and choose which teachings suit you. I don’t know about you, but I can’t imagine anything less interesting than a religion I made up. Like Chesterton said, “I don’t need a Church that’s right when I’m right. I need a Church that’s right when I’m wrong.”

We have such a Church, not by the power or excellence of human beings, but by the free grace of Christ. He has not left us orphans. His words have not passed away. He is with us until the end of the age. The Keys of the Kingdom are still among us. And against this Rock not even the gates of Hell will prevail.