Fr. Fintan Lyons: The gospel passage we have heard has, at its centre, the exchanges between Jesus and Peter, about who Jesus is, and then who Peter is to become. It’s easy to do what we tend to do, move quickly through the text to its centre paying little attention to the first words: ‘Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi…’.
The sequence of events in Matthew’s account indicates that Jesus and the disciples travelled some distance northward by boat after the miraculous feeding of a crowd, before undertaking a trek across towards the Golan heights to reach the district of Caesarea Philippi, far north of the sea of Galilee, the furthest north Jesus ever went. Afterwards, he would turn south towards Jerusalem, and speak on the way about his forthcoming passion and death there. The significance of where they had arrived can be missed.
They were in the ‘district of Caesarea Philippi’ – it doesn’t say they entered the city, which was the exemplar of Roman power, built over the ruins of Greek and earlier pagan cultic sites, the principal building being the Temple of Augustus, the divinised Roman Emperor, indicating that the Roman empire was now dominant and there to stay.
Pope Leo, in his homily at the inaugural Mass of his pontificate with the Cardinals in May last year, said they went into the city with its gleaming marble palaces. He said that in such a setting the question of who Jesus was would be answered by judging him to be a completely insignificant person, at best someone with an unusual and striking way of speaking and acting. Pope Leo went on to talk about how Jesus is seen today.
More significant, however, in the whole incident is not the city, but the massive bulk of Mount Hermon behind it, with an ancient spring which was one of the sources of the Jordan, emerging from the mouth of a cave said to be the gateway to the underworld. Pagan rites had involved throwing infants as sacrificial victims into its depths to worship the Greek god Pan, half goat, half man. This was the backdrop to the city, and apparently a frightening place associated with demonic, even obscene rites, with no Jewish population in Jesus’ day. Approach to it would violate Jewish purity laws. Why then did he go to this remote place? Remember his saying earlier in Matthew’s gospel: ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.’ (Mt 15.25)
We know the answer. It was the appropriate dramatic setting for the dialogue which began ‘Who do people say that the Son of Man is?’ He was obviously a real man, but the question was meant to cause his disciples to reflect on what they recognised was his mysterious identity. And Peter seems to have understood, at least partially: ‘You are the Messiah’, the one long awaited to overthrow the Roman dominance.
Peter was rewarded in a way which he did not, could not, really understand. He was to be the rock on which the new kingdom would be built, but it was to be a spiritual edifice. The gates of the underworld – symbolised by where they were standing – would not prevail against it.
We can speculate about Jesus’s movement and motivation, but the fact is that the unusual location for the enormously important exchange between him and the disciples, and Peter in particular, must be highly significant.
Sadly, that location marked also the beginning of Jesus’s journey to Jerusalem and his prediction of his passion on the way, and Peter’s protest against his prediction, leading to – ‘Get behind me Satan’, showing that Peter had much to learn about Jesus and about his own calling, with stages such as ‘Depart from me, for I am a sinful man’, ‘I know not the man’, ‘Lord, you know that I love you’. As it turned out, it was for him the work of a lifetime.
I believe that for us, knowing Jesus and ourselves – our calling – is also the work of a lifetime.