Matthew 16:13-20
They used to make a big thing about names. They still do, in many parts of the world. Some of the tribes of Native Americans would give different names to a person as he or she passed through different stages in life. Little Squirrel would eventually become Soaring Eagle, and so forth. Giving a new name to someone often meant being endowed with new powers, with new authority, with new responsibilities. We see some traces of that in our own Catholic traditions. When we baptize someone, we baptize them by name; it’s as though we name them in the presence of God. When someone is confirmed, he or she traditionally takes the name of a saint. Mine was Thomas after Thomas Aquinas. One of my classmates wanted to take the name Arthur, because he really liked the stories he’d read of King Arthur. In those days we didn’t have Google, so Sister Mary Susan made him take another name. But Google showed me that there was a Saint Arthur of Glastonbury, who was one of the English martyrs. Finally, it’s traditional in many religious orders for those who profess their final vows to take a new name. Growing up, almost all the nuns who taught me were Sister Mary Something or Other. If you called out “Sister Mary” many heads would turn.
Taking a new name in our tradition means that we recommit to leading a holy life. We in a sense turn our backs on the past and fix our gaze on the future, keeping in mind that we are always getting closer to that point in time when the opportunity to grow in holiness, in closeness to God, in friendship to Christ, will no longer exist. At my age I can feel this moment approaching.
Jesus gives Peter a new name in today’s gospel. He calls him “Peter”, Petros, in Greek, and Cephas in Hebrew. He might have called him “Rocky” in English. And Jesus makes a little pun on that name, he says Blessed are you, rock, upon this rock I will build my church. The Greek word for Church is ekklesia, which means drawing people out. Peter’s job is to be used by Jesus to gather people together out of the world’s population.
Not everyone is saved. We’d like to think so, and sometimes we turn to scripture to support our view. But it’s a thin support. There's a lot more to support that those saved are in a sense drawn out of the human race. We don’t know what percentage. If you go by Sister Faustina, everyone gets three chances after they have died to accept God’s mercy and therefore his salvation. If you go by Saint Theresa of Avila , she had a vision in which she saw souls falling into hell like snowflakes. And Jesus himself tells us that many will enter through the wide gate that leads to destruction.
The point is not that we should worry about how many souls are lost. The point isn’t even that we should have an opinion about this. It’s not a question we can answer. The only question we can answer is whether we are working on our salvation and whether we are in any way being obstacles to other people who are seeking salvation.
I’m sure many of you have read the recent pastoral letter from Bishop Strickland of Texas who offered seven statements which he holds are unchanging truths handed down from the apostles. His concern is that several of these truths are being threatened by modernist tendencies in the church, including the forthcoming synod on synodality. I hope you will read it and see if you agree. But the very first statement is that “Christ established One Church—the Catholic Church—and, therefore, only the Catholic Church provides the fullness of Christ’s truth and the authentic path to His salvation for all of us”. The sixth statement begins “The belief that all men and women will be saved regardless of how they live their lives (a concept commonly referred to as universalism) is false and is dangerous, as it contradicts what Jesus tells us repeatedly in the Gospel.”
The bottom line is that the Church Jesus established at the moment we read about in this gospel is still around, and still has as one of its main purposes to draw people out of the world onto the path to salvation, using you and I, who have been called by name, at baptism, at confirmation. The gates of the netherworld, or hell, will not prevail against the Church, Jesus promised that. But each of us can decide whether we are part of that mission or whether we will stand aside passively. So today let us pray that like Peter, we will know how to answer our Lord when he asks us, “Who do you say that I am?” Because we Catholics believe that Jesus is the head and the Church is his body, and they can’t be separated. Pray for the future of our church and for the strength and wisdom to uphold what Jesus, the Messiah, the son of God, teaches through her.
