The Continuation of Jesus’ Mission of Mercy on the Living Peter, Chair of St. Peter, February 22, 2016

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Feast of the Chair of St. Peter
February 22, 2016
1 Pet 5:1-4, Ps 23, Mt 16:13-19

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Like any ecclesiastical holy year, the Jubilee Year of Mercy is meant to influence everything the Church celebrates. Today as we mark the feast of the Chair of St. Peter, we can focus on two aspects of God’s mercy. We’ve been speaking throughout this Jubilee of Jesus’ five expressions of mercy in the Gospel, all introduced by the Greek verb splanchnizomai, describing how Jesus, sick to his stomach, not only fed, forgave, and healed, but taught and then asked us to pray for laborer’s to continue the harvest of mercy and called the very ones praying for laborers to be those laborers. Today we celebrate that the first one called from all those prayers beginning in the scene in Matthew 9, until today, through the rest of the history of the Church, was “Simon, who was called Peter.” He was chosen to continue Christ’s mercy as a disciple, as an apostle, and as the rock on whom Jesus would build his Church. We also celebrate, on this feast of the Chair of St. Peter, how Jesus continues his merciful mission of teaching through him.
• In liturgical history, the celebration of the Feast of the “Chair” of St. Peter recalls the day he took up his episcopal ministry in Antioch, where he served before coming to Rome. He was Pope from Jesus’ ascension, but he didn’t immediately go to Rome. The early Christians not only celebrated Peter’s heroic martyrdom as a feast but also celebrated the day in which he started to guide the first Christians in the place Jesus’ believers were first called Christians. But it also celebrates something else. The chair was the ancient symbol of teaching authority. Teachers would sit and all their students would stand, the exact opposite of what happens today. In the Gospel, the evangelists tell us on several occasions that Jesus “sat down and began to teach” the crowds. The chair became a symbol of teaching authority and in some ways that remains today, when we refer to the person who has the “chair of philosophy” or “chair of theology” or even the “chairman” of a particular meeting. To celebrate the feast of the Chair of St. Peter is to rejoice in the teaching authority Christ has given him for the sake of his body the Church. Jesus gave Peter the “keys of the kingdom of heaven,” to bind and loose on earth — something with a clear application to mercy in this Year of Mercy — and that even greater authority over the sacraments points to the authority he has to teach authoritatively in Jesus’ name. We retain the expression of the Pope’s teaching ex cathedra (literally “from the chair”) to highlight his most solemn teachings to us, applying Christ’s words and wisdom to the present age.
• At the beginning of Mass today, we prayed to God the Father, “Grant that no tempests may disturb us for you have set us fast on the rock of the Apostle Peter’s confession of faith.” This is a reference to today’s Gospel. After Simon, inspired by God the Father, confesses Jesus as the Messiah and Son of God, Jesus in return gives another, almost equally striking confession: You are kepha (the Aramaic means both the name “Peter” and the thing “Rock”), you are Rock and on this Rock, on you, I will build my Church and the gates of Hell won’t prevail against it. Jesus built his Church with an architectural plan and the foundation of the Church would be Peter. That means that if we’re going to be truly Christian, fully Christian, we need to build our faith in Christ on Peter. God has set us fast, made our faith steadfast, on the Rock’s confession of faith, and therefore our growth in faith, our deepening of the Christian life, is directly linked to Peter, to the office of the Papacy, and to the responsibilities Christ gave him he passed on to his successors.
• In St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, this theological truth is artistically depicted. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the greatest sculptor who ever lived, enshrined the chair that in the 1600s everyone said was the one used by St. Peter 1600 years earlier to teach the faith to the people of Rome. They were mistaken by a measly 800 years — history then wasn’t what it is now and archaeology basically didn’t exist — and the chair was actually given to the Pope around the year 800 by the emperor Otto II, but the reality to which the altar of the chair pointed was Peter’s authority, and Bernini illustrated the theology of that authority in this incredible sculpture. On top of the bronze-enshrined chair was the image of the Holy Spirit, showing that the Holy Spirit continued to guide Peter and through him the Church to “all the truth,” as Jesus promised during the last supper. Underneath the chair, pointing to and spiritually upholding the legs of the chair, are four great theologians, bishops and fathers of the Church, Saints Ambrose, Augustine, Chrysostom and Athanasius. Their presence shows how bishops and theologians are supposed to support the teaching authority of the Popes, not “chopping off” the legs by undermining that authority. And then on the front of the seat-back is a bas relief of Peter’s feeding Christ’s sheep and lambs, the commission Christ gave Peter at the end of St. John’s Gospel after asking him three times if he loved him. Peter’s love for Christ will be shown in his feeding Christ’s flock, and the first way he feeds the flock is through his authoritative teaching in Christ’s name. Just as the evangelists tell us that Jesus had pity on the crowds and began to teach them many things, so Peter, sharing in Christ’s compassion and in his name, teaches.
• The teaching authority of the Pope has been so important throughout Church history. We see even in the Acts of the Apostles how there were disputes about whether Gentile converts needed to follow the whole Mosaic law and how Peter intervened in the Council of Jerusalem. Much later there were huge issues with whether Christ was fully God and fully man, whether he was two persons or one person and two natures, whether he had the full complement of a human body, soul and spirit, whether he had one will or two wills, whether the Holy Spirit was divine, what the sacraments were and whether they were necessary for salvation, which sacred writings were truly inspired and binding, and so many other concerns. It was the work of the Popes and the early ecumenical councils to guide the Church through this time of confusion and division. The Pope was the central reference point. After Pope Leo the Great intervened with a famous “Tome” to guide the deliberations of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, many said, in a phrase that has since become famous, “Roma locuta est. Causa finita est.” “Rome [Peter] has spoken. The matter’s been put to rest.” What a work of mercy this is!
• That teaching authority is just as important today. Whereas in the early Church, most of the disputes were about dogmatic issues, today most of the confusion concerns moral issues, what love for neighbor really means with regard to abortion and euthanasia, to love, marriage, sexuality and family, to care for immigrants and the poor and so on. There are many people, including some Catholics, who think they know better than the Holy Spirit what is the truth with regard to these issues. That’s why the Pope’s voice is so important. To be truly Catholic, we need to hold fast to the living Peter’s confession of faith, especially in the “tempests” of the world. It’s also why we need to pray for the Pope that he exercise his teaching office effectively, passing on with clarity and passion what he himself has received through the Church.
• I want to finish today by referring to another way the living Peter, the Pope, continues Christ’s work of mercy.  He feeds Christ’s flock not only by his teaching but by giving us Jesus’ body and blood. Peter, we know, is the one who gave the great confession of faith in Jesus’ real presence in the Eucharist. After Jesus told us that we needed to gnaw on his flesh and drink his blood to have life in us, after many of the disciples abandoned Jesus because they found that teaching too hard to endure, and after Jesus turned to the apostles and asked whether they, too, would abandon him, that’s when Peter stood up and said, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” Peter didn’t know better than anyone else how Jesus would give us his body and blood — he wouldn’t until exactly a year later when during the Last Supper he would totally change bread and wine into his body and blood and give himself to us to eat — but because he believed in Jesus, he believed in what he said. We hold fast to that confession of faith in Christ. At St. Peter’s Basilica this relationship between Peter and the Sacrament of the Eucharist is depicted artistically again. The tabernacle in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel is a replica of a famous Church dedicated to St. Peter elsewhere in Rome, called San Pietro in Montorio. Bernini and the Church wanted to show the connection between Peter and the Eucharist and thought that it wouldn’t be attractive, for example, to have a tabernacle shaped like a man with a key in the belly button and taking out the ciboria from the peritoneum. Instead they took a Church that symbolized Peter and placed Jesus within, to show that without holy orders, without the priesthood that finds its source of unity in Peter, there would be no Eucharist. So at the Mass, we have the double feast of the liturgy of the Word and the liturgy of the Eucharist and in both Peter’s authority is key. He nourishes us first with the Word of God and the applications of that Word to Christian life and then he nourishes us with the Word made Flesh. Peter was present at the first Mass and then celebrated the Eucharist for the early Christians with the table of the Word and the table of the Eucharist. And so today we thank the Lord for the gift of his work, his Church founded on Peter, his teaching through the Pope, his giving of the Sacraments, the merciful binding and loosing that happens through the Sacrament of Mercy, and we ask for the grace to hold fast to not only to Peter’s continual confession but subjectively to echo that proclamation of faith, that the one we are to receive is indeed the Christ, the Son of the Living God. And we pray in a special way for the 266th Peter, Pope Francis, that his faith may never fail, that he may strengthen us his brothers and sisters with Jesus’ teaching, and help us all to confess Jesus in the world to be the Messiah and Savior of the World. .

The readings for today’s Mass were: