Christ Jesus bestowed upon the Apostle Simon Peter a particular ministry, that he and all those who would succeed him as the Vicar of Christ on Earth would carry out. Since Peter was the first given this ministry by Christ, we have always called it the ‘Petrine Ministry’, and the three duties of the Petrine Ministry are found in the two confessions that Simon Peter made about himself and one that Jesus made about him, and there are responsibilities attached to each of these confessions.

The Gospel Readings that we will hear at the Sacrifice of the Mass today from Matthew 16:13-20 concerns the First Confession of Saint Peter. Attached to that confession is the duty for Simon Peter and his successors in the Petrine Ministry to be guided by the truth of God the Father, to obey the commands of God the Son, and to listen for and to act upon the promptings of the Holy Spirit. See Also: On the Second Confession of Saint Peter Chapter Six (the Fourth Didactic Mystery) of my book Cooperating with God: Life with the Cross is probably my favorite chapter in that entire book. In it I reflect upon Simon Peter’s two confession that he made about Christ Jesus and the two confessions that Jesus made about him, and how the marriage between those four confession lay the foundation and the boundaries of what Catholics call the Petrine Ministry. In that chapter I also reflect upon ‘Discerning the Cost and Value of Confession’, ‘The Chief Value of Confession’, and ‘Making a Good Confession’.

Being that the Readings at Today’s Mass (Isaiah 22:19-23, Romans 11:33-36, Matthew 16:13-20) all draw from Scriptures that I use to form my case for the Petrine Ministry; indeed, that the Catholic Church uses to point us to the Petrine Ministry, I decided to use an excerpt below from Chapter Six of Cooperating with God: Life with the Cross for today’s reflection. The First Confession

“But who do you say that I am?” Simon Kephas said in reply, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Jesus said to him in reply, “Blessed you are, Simon son of Jonah. For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Heavenly Father. And so I say to you, you are Kephas, and upon this kephas I will build my Church and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in Heaven; and whatever you lose on earth shall be loosed in Heaven. Then He strictly ordered his disciples to tell no one that He is the messiah. ( Matthew 16:13-20)

John

“We have disobeyed the law of love. Joyfully we have hated one another; joyfully we have killed one another. And now, at last, we have brought this great evil war to an end. But in order to restore peace to the world it was not sufficient to repent. We had to obtain God’s pardon through the offering of great sacrifice. . . . Let us give thanks that Nagasaki was chosen for sacrifice. . . . May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.”

The reason why the people (non-disciples) could only discern Jesus as being like one of the old human prophets is because they did not know Him and had not taken the time to get to know Him. For them, a general distant knowledge of Jesus was enough. Any more than that would have utterly shattered their system of belief (their worldview), because they knew exactly what the long-awaited Messiah was supposed to be like, and it was nothing like this peace and forgiveness teaching rabbi. After the Lord had been resurrected, even His closest disciples still had not conformed their worldview to what the Christ was actually offering to humanity.(Acts 1:6) In the Lord’s response to them, we see that it is the Spirit of Truth who helps conform our worldview to that of the Holy Trinity. Christ Jesus told them, “(Acts 1:7-8).Sometimes we get so consumed with focusing in on the results of our confessions, rather than on the processes, which actually brings them (our confessions) to life. We are very willing to worry about our death and judgment and other things that we cannot control, rather than to focus on living a holy life just one second at a time. We get more concerned about getting into Heaven than we do about focusing in on the processes of building a loving relationship with the King and Queen of Heaven. The results will always take care of themselves if we just joyfully work on the processes that grace permits us to engage in. ‘The Bridegroom’s Prayer’ in the seventeenth chapter ofis full of processes that God has given us, in his abundant grace, to fulfill. The task of focusing in on the processes, rather than on the results is the message that Jesus was trying to convey to His disciples when they were still worrying about the restoration of Israel.When we spend time building relationship with others, we learn who we are through them (knowledge of self); that is, through the process of relation, we learn who we are in relation to them and who they are in relation to us. When we fail to know and love one another, as we ought, it always leads to the objectification of each other.The reason why those young Americans, flying over Japan during World War II, were able to annihilate the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by dropping atomic bombs on them, is because they had not taken the time to get to know the children, women, and men below. Those human beings were just objects to them. Yet, the truth of the matter is that they were not just objects. They were real living and breathing people who had lives and who God loved and desired not to perish before they were able to know Him. And in the case of Nagasaki, the landmark that the bomber had fixed his target on was a Catholic Cathedral in the district of Urakami, which happened to be the home to a great number of Catholics.Japan got to know themselves very well in the light of America’s face of revenge, hatred, wrath, and pride. Having suffered greatly, the people of Japan came to discern and value peace. As Dr. Takasha Nagai most eloquently stated at an open-air Requiem Mass, just days after having discovering the charred remains of his wife in the ruins of their home and still tightly holding onto her Rosary beads:

Even when I was not In Christ, I was still able to see my ugliness in relation to my wife’s beauty and vice-a-versa, though very imperfectly. I was able to see the United States of America more clearly after I looked at her from abroad. I valued my relationship with my daughters and mother much more intensely after I had been locked away from them in prison. In the same way, we can only confess that Jesus is our Lord and God after we have come into the knowledge of ourselves in light of Him; that is, after we have realized that we are neither God nor our own master.

Job actually did not know that he thought himself to be his own god and master until God probed him with several transformative questions. “Gird up your lions now like a man; I will question you, and you will tell me the answer!” (Job 36:3) It actually turned out to be the case that Job was without a single answer to any of God’s questions, but rather confessed openly what he had just realized to be true in his heart – that his human littleness is nothing in the light of who and what God is. Job confessed, “Behold, I am of little account; what can I answer you? I put my hand over my mouth. Though I have spoken once, I will not do so again; though twice, I will do so no more” (Job 40-4-5).

Who we believe that we are always shapes our worldview and vice-a-versa, and our worldview shapes our confession. Our worldview is our filter for information and our guide to how we move and function within society. Satan desires for our worldview to be like his – that we hate those whom we ought to love or think less of others based upon their skin color, gender, education, or any other number of temporal status symbols. Indeed, this shallow and superficial worldview is the very same one that billions of people use to negotiate their Spiritual Boat through life, in distrust and fear.

I believe that every man, woman, and child deserves to have their own unique worldview that serves as the source of their answers, contentment, passion, joy, and peace in life. I also believe that every worldview, in which Christ Jesus is not an active, interested, and merciful King, deserves to be shattered, and the only way for our worldview to be shattered is by discovering that all of our old answers no longer work; that what we thought was real – is not, and what we thought was not real – actually is. Simon Peter discovered that Jesus was not Elijah or Jeremiah or John the Waymaker, but that He is actually the Messiah. Job and his four friends not only discovered that all of their standard answers about suffering no longer worked, but that, in relation to God, none of them had any good answers.

As willing as we are to confess to God what we know to be true, He is just as willing to confess to our soul what He knows to be true. As Scripture says, “For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Heavenly Father.” Therefore, we ought to confess as often as we pray, and pray as often as we confess. This is why Our Lady Mary constantly reminds us to pray, read the Bible, and receive the fullness of the Holy Spirit.

Inasmuch as the Bible is a great start to knowing ourselves in relation to God, as I stated in Dead on Arrival: the Seven Fatal Errors of Sola Scriptura and Cooperating with God – The Bridegroom’s Prayer, it is not the ‘end-all’ to knowing God. On the contrary, it is the Spirit of God who searches the deeper things of God, (Cf. 1 Cor. 2:10) and it is the Spirit of God who guides all of us to truth. (Cf. Jn. 16:13) This is why Jesus pointed not to the Bible, but to the Church (the Temple of the Holy Spirit) as our definitive source of Truth on earth. “You are Kephas [[Rock]], and upon this kephas [[rock]] I will build my Church.”

As we discussed in the opening of this Chapter, the Jews understood God Himself to be Kephas (Rock), but here Jesus deigns to give His human disciple that very same name. The Jews also knew God to be their Shepherd, but, in the Johannine Confession, Jesus moves to make Kephas our Shepherd. (Cf. Ps. 23; Exo. 34) To clarify, Jesus was not calling Simon God in either case, but He was saying that the Church, of which Jesus is the head, (Cf. Eph. 1:22) would be established through Simon, and that Church would be our source of life (i.e., truth, freedom, Salvation, God). From this point, and until all is completed, Simon would no longer belong to himself. Through this decree of God, Kephas and his ministry would be fully configured into the mystical Body of Christ; that is, Kephas is only Kephas through the Kephas; Shepherd through the Shepherd; Priest through the High-Priest. All that Kephas is and all that he is called to do flows out of the Body of Christ (the Church in the Circle of Grace).

This too is why sacred Scripture flows from out of the Church, and why that same Church, from out of which Scripture flows, has always held the authentic (true) interpretation of it, because it is the house of Kephas the Shepherd. This is in contrast with the false interpretations of men, as Jesus demonstrated in His question, “Who do people say that I am?” They replied, “Some say. . . .,” instead of ‘The Church teaches’. I once heard a wise priest confess that, “Truth is not a thing, but rather is an actual person – Jesus Christ.” If you want to find the authentic and consistent truth, then find the pillar of truth who is the Church. (Cf. 1 Tim 3:15)

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A CONFESSIONAL PRAYER

Jesus I confess that when I lean on my own understanding, I always fail into sin.

Jesus I confess that when I do not acknowledge you as my King and source of all that is good in my life, I always fail into sin

Therefore Lord, give me to trust you with all my heart so that my path will always be straight. Amen.