In this passage we reach the pivot point on which the whole Gospel of Matthew turns. Up to this point, everything has had one orientation; from this point on what follows has another orientation.
As usual Matthew alerts us to this broad division with an editorial key phrase: "From that time ..." Its only other occurrence in his gospel has been at 4:17 where he said, "From that time Jesus began to preach saying, 'Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.'" That was a heading in bold type, so to speak, over the Gospel up to this point; all that Matthew has written from then till now has been an expansion of that statement: chs. 5-16 have shown us Jesus doing just that, and as we have seen, it has been a ministry to the crowds.
Now the thrust of the Lord's ministry takes a turn and moves in a different direction. "From that time on, Jesus began to show His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things ... and be killed, and on the third day be raised." Everything that follows now will be an expansion of that statement; chs. 16-28 will show us Jesus doing just that. His ministry now will concentrate on the disciples rather than on the crowds. From here on the theme of the Gospel is the Cross and the Way of the Cross. That is made quite clear by the thing Jesus says at once: "If any man would come after me, let him take up his cross and follow me ..." v. 24. It is a preface, so to speak, to this second half of the Gospel which takes us to the Cross, unfolding the Way of the Cross in which disciples must follow.
That is the first point. We are at a watershed in the Gospel of Matthew.
Second, notice where it comes. It follows immediately upon the recognition by the disciples who Jesus was. Until they saw that, they were not ready to hear what He would now teach them. I have a feeling that this was a moment Jesus had been waiting for, with real longing. The way He said it ... "Blessed are you Simon Bar-Jonah! Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you but my Father in Heaven" ... sounds almost like, "At last!"
Jesus will ask no-one to follow Him until they see Who He is. Before we can give Him the costly loyalty He asks of us, we have to be sure of Him. He knows that.
It was a great moment for Peter, this - one of those 'moments of truth,' when you see a thing with absolute conviction. You don't 'believe,' you know.
And so vital was this flash of illumination that in the light of it Peter would come eventually to see everything under the sun - God, man, life and the world. Not at once; as we shall see, he was quite one-eyed for a while. But his vision would widen with time, and he would see all of life whole. The two letters he wrote, I and II Peter, are the evidence of it. His vision of life would come to encompass the entire range of it, from the depths of human anguish to the heights of human joy, from its worst degradation to its noblest purity, and from beginning to end of time.
It happened at Cæsarea Philippi ... an interesting place, about 20 miles north of the Lake of Galilee below the foothills of Mt Hermon which lifts its snow-clad peak 4,000 feet above it. One of the sources of the Jordan River leaps out of a rock-face there. For as long as men could remember it had been a place of worship: of Baal first by the Canaanites and later, by the Greeks, of Pan, the nature god with a human torso. It was named Paneas then (corrupted to Banias today). Later Herod built a temple there to the Cæsar who proclaimed himself divine, and named it Cæsarea Philippi. It was a place on the edge of the world ... where men were seen as gods, and gods were seen as men. There is where Jesus asked His friends, "Who do men say the Son of Man is?"
"We've been together two years or more now: what do the people make of me?"
"They can't make you out," they said. "A man sent from God, that's for sure. A prophet ... like John, the most uncompromising ... or like Elijah, the most impressive ... or like Jeremiah, the most human and compassionate. They see in you a blend of all that has been best in the long history of men sent from God ("trailing clouds of glory" - William Wordsworth, 'Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood') ... but they're not sure."
"And you?" He asked them then.
Peter it was who blurted it out. It had been trembling, surely, on the edge of all their minds, but he came out with it: "The Messiah! God's appointed representative on earth: the One in Whom God takes the stage of this world Himself: the One we've all been waiting for: the One in Whom all our dreams come true ... the dreams the prophets dreamed and we after them." You would have to have centuries of Hebrew blood in you to feel what Peter felt when he said it. "The Son of the Living God." It was an awesome thing to say. You could only say it with great daring. But they had seen in Him what had never been seen in a man before: authority - over disease and death, over nature, over super-nature; such authority as belongs only to a man who has mastered life entire, completely and convincingly: the authority that belongs only to final truth. All their intuitions jelled. "You're not just from God: in You rather, God has come, Himself."
At last, the truth was out.
"Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in Heaven." It was not intellect or intuition; it was inspiration.
It is always a blessed thing to see God ... so as to say with Job, "I had heard of Thee with the hearing of the ears, but now mine eye seeth Thee." (Job 42:5) Do we want to see Him for ourself, with our own eyes? It is a thing more to be desired in life than any other. Jesus was given to us so that we might. Son of Man is He? ... all the best that is man? Yes, a thousand times! But when we have said that, we have to say, "But there is more. He is more than man. He is all that God is, not just all that man is."
That is the crucial confession. Jesus of Nazareth is God, manifest in human flesh.
Now at last Jesus can speak of the Church. He could not do so until now, for the Church consists of those who see and acknowledge Him to be the Son of God.
Now we come to a crucial saying. What did Jesus mean when He went on at once to say, "I tell you, you are Peter and upon this rock I will build my Church"?
Let us understand the words Jesus used, first.
The word for Church is ekklesia. It means 'congregation.' In the Old Testament (the background against which Jesus used it) it meant the Assembly of God's People - the whole company of those who are His by redemption, election and covenant.
The words for 'Peter' and 'rock' in Greek sound very similar. The Lord was clearly using a play on words, of the kind the Hebrew people loved and which the prophets especially had all used to good effect. 'Peter' in the Greek is petros, 'Rock' in the Greek is petra. A petros is a stone, of the kind used to build a garden rockery; a petra is a huge outcrop of rock, like Ayers Rock near Alice Springs. Jesus was saying, "You, Peter, are a stone in the cairn, a brick in the wall, a block - in fact, the first block - in the building I am going to build." Peter later wrote a thing himself which clearly reflects what he understood Jesus to mean that day: "Come to Him, to that living stone - rejected by men, but in God's sight chosen and precious - and like living stones be yourselves built into a spiritual house." (I Peter 2:4-5)
The meaning is the same as that conveyed by a different metaphor which is often used to describe the Church in the New Testament - the body. We are all members of the Body of Christ, and we understand that to mean, "Christ is the Body, the whole organism, and we are all members of it." In exactly the same way, Jesus means here, "I am the rock, the whole thing, and you are all stones in it." How often had the psalmists spoken of God as a rock; Psalm 62:6 for example: "God alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress." When Peter 'saw' Jesus to be the Christ, the Son of the living God, something happened to him: he became a real bit of that rock, so as to be built in to it. He became a 'living stone.'
And he was the first! Nothing can ever take away that honour from him. But he was only the first - in a growing tally of living stones by which the church grows toward completion. The Church is made up of 'Peters': confessing men. That is what Jesus meant. "I will build an ekklesia of men and women who confess Me as you have just done."
If I so confess Him I too am a petros, a 'Peter,' a living stone in the church Christ is building.
Then Jesus went on to say, "The gates of Hades shall not prevail against it."
The word is Hades, not hell, nor Gehenna. There is a difference. In Jewish belief, Hades was not the place of punishment to which only the wicked were sent, but the place to which all the dead went, good or bad, where "they slept with their fathers." It was simply the abode of the departed where death reigns with timeless sovereignty.
What Jesus said requires us to see the gates of that place under attack. Gates do not prevail by lifting themselves off their hinges and flinging themselves at advancing columns of soldiers, so as to "prevail against them." Gates keep people out ... or they keep people in. The gates of Hades keep the dead in. It is as though there were written over them: "Abandon hope all ye who enter here."
And then Jesus went in. And the gates of Hades could not hold Him in behind them. When He rose from the dead He burst them open. As Peter would say, "The pangs of death were loosed because it was not possible that He should be held by it." (Acts 2:24) The gates of hades could not prevail against Him.
Jesus was saying, in effect, "You know now that I am the Son of the living God. The time will soon come when I will be crucified, and the gates of Hades will close behind me as they close behind all men else. But they are powerless to shut me in. They will not prevail against me. And when I burst back through them I will bring out with me all who confess me as you have done. Death will not shut the door on them. The gates of hades shall not prevail against those who are in my assembly. Because I live, they shall live also."
"I give unto them eternal life, and no man shall pluck them out of my hand." (John 10:28) "Over such the second death has no power." (Rev. 20:6) "He has the keys of death and of Hades." (Rev. 1:18)
Because Christ is our life, we share His triumph over death.
Death in the Bible is "the last enemy." (I Cor. 15:26) Of all the powers that spoil our life and defeat us it is the grimmest and the strongest. It is the last stronghold of the enemy to go down. But go down it will. When comes our time to come to those gates, it will be to find that they have gone down before us, and we shall march through: not wading through a swollen river as some old hymns suggest, but dry shod into the Land of Light with not a thread of our garments wetted. The Church Christ will build is the Community of the Resurrection.
And then Jesus went on to say, "I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."
This saying of Jesus is the mistaken origin of all those stories about Peter at the Pearly Gates meeting those who have died: he has the keys of those gates, to open them or close them to all who arrive there. But that is nonsense. The power given to Peter was to be exercised on earth, for one thing, not in heaven. Then notice two more things:
The power to bind and loose was given, not to Peter alone, but to the whole Church.
Here in Matt. 16:19, Jesus used the singular, meaning Peter himself. But only a few paragraphs later, in Matt. 18:18, He said exactly the same words and used the plural: "Truly I say to you (all), 'Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.'" So whatever the phrase means, it means that the power was given first, but not exclusively, to Peter. Given first into his hands, and thereby to the whole church, it was a power to be exercised by the whole company of Christ's people.
The 'power to bind and loose' is a very simple concept. Peter and the disciples would have had no difficulty in understanding what Jesus meant. It was language which the rabbis used all the time. "Shammei binds this," they used to say, "but Hillel looses it." And they meant simply, "Shammei makes this obligatory, but Hillel makes it optional."
What is 'bound' is what must be done, because it is commanded ... by God. What is 'loosed' is what may be done, but does not have to be, because it is not specifically commanded. What is bound has binding force; what is loosed does not. It is as simple as that. Jesus used this language again when in Matt. 23:4 He said of the Scribes (the interpreters of the Mosaic Law), "They 'bind' heavy burdens, impossible to bear ..." The paragraph 15:1-9 is a clear example of the scribes 'binding' things which they never should have bound because they were only traditions of men, not requirements of God.
So the power to bind and loose is the authority given to Christ's Church (to Peter first as its first leader, but with him to the whole ekkesia), to say what is binding upon the followers of Jesus and what is not; to follow through with the metaphor of the keys - what we are 'locked into,' and what we are not.
It is worth pointing out a grammatical point frequently overlooked, because it helps to nail down exactly what Jesus meant: the verbs 'shall be bound' and 'shall be loosed' are future perfect periphrastics, a form of a verb which makes these phrases mean, "Whatever you bind on earth shall be whatever is first bound in heaven, and whatever you permit on earth shall be whatever is first allowed in heaven." That means very simply that apostolic pronouncements like those made at the first Jerusalem Council, and later by all the apostles in the ethical sections of their epistles, were a matter of inspiration by God. They made pronouncements about forbidden and permitted behaviour for the people of God by direct inspiration of God the Holy Spirit "from Heaven."
We must further point out that what Jesus goes on to say in the discourse section of this Book IV, whose theme is the Church, is that the rule of God which is to prevail in it is the Rule of Grace, of forgiving love. That is what the ekklesia is locked into. He will say it in language that leaves no room for doubt at all.
Finally, Jesus said, "Don't tell ..."
You would think that once the truth about Him had been grasped He would want the world to know. But He did not ... or not yet. To Peter, James and John only a day or two later coming down from the mountain after the Transfiguration He gave the reason: they were not to broadcast the truth until after the Cross and the Resurrection (17:9).
Not until the Cross and the Resurrection had happened could that truth be rightly understood. Messiah He was - but a suffering Messiah. The Christ He was - but the risen Christ Who once was crucified. They must not shout aloud, "He is the Messiah," until they could make it clear what they meant. Before the Cross and the Resurrection, the Jews had a shockingly false understanding of what it did mean. For them it meant that the Christ would be an earthly, military, political ruler who would destroy the opposition of the wretched Gentiles and make Israel top nation. But that is not what God meant. What God did mean they would only be able truly to see when they had seen the Messiah suffer and die for the sins of the whole world, and rise again to reconcile all peoples to Himself.
The Messiah of the Jews is the Saviour of the world.
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