Who Holds The Keys

Every one of us answers the question Jesus asks today, whether we ever say it out loud or not. We answer it with our calendars, our checkbooks, and the things we refuse to give up. Some answers are safe. Jesus is a good teacher. Jesus is a moral example. Jesus is the reason my grandmother had a rosary in her purse. Those answers cost nothing, which is exactly the problem. Peter’s answer costs everything, and Jesus tells him definitively that he did not think it up on his own. It was given to him. That is the uncomfortable and beautiful thing about today’s readings. The confession that saves you arrives as a gift, and once you have received it, you have to live as though it were true.

The Readings

First Reading: Isaiah 22:19-23

I will thrust you from your office, and you will be cast down from your station. In that day I will call my servant Eli′akim the son of Hilki′ah, and I will clothe him with your robe, and will bind your girdle on him, and will commit your authority to his hand; and he shall be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and to the house of Judah. And I will place on his shoulder the key of the house of David; he shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall open. And I will fasten him like a peg in a sure place, and he will become a throne of honor to his father’s house.

Gospel: Matthew 16:13-20

Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesare′a Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do men say that the Son of man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Eli′jah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it. 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.” Then he strictly charged the disciples to tell no one that he was the Christ.

Scriptural Analysis

The Steward Who Lost His Keys

The First Reading drops us into a palace fight. Shebna is the man over the household of King Hezekiah, and “over the household” is not a job title we have a good English word for. He was the chief steward, the highest official in the kingdom under the king himself, the one who ran the government while the king reigned. Isaiah names him elsewhere as part of the delegation that negotiates with the Assyrians during the siege of Jerusalem (Isaiah 36:3, 11, 22; 2 Kings 18:18, 26).^[1]

Isaiah’s complaint against him is small, petty, and painfully human. He carved himself a tomb in a high place. He built a monument. He wanted to be remembered (Isaiah 22:16). The man entrusted with the house of David spent his energy on his own name. So the Lord fires him. That’s what verse 19 is: a divine dismissal notice. “I will thrust you from your office, and you will be cast down from your station.” Aquinas places the deposition alongside Solomon casting out Abiathar from the priesthood (1 Kings 2:27), a removal from the throne that could not be appealed.^[2]

Then comes the installation, and watch how much of it is ceremonial, because the ceremony is the point. The robe. The sash. The authority handed over. Aquinas reads these as a vesting rite, the way priests were clothed for consecration (Exodus 28), and he notices the word Isaiah chooses for Eliakim’s new relationship to the city: he shall be “a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem.”^[3] A father. The office is paternal before it is administrative.

Then there is the key. Singular. “I will place on his shoulder the key of the house of David; he shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall open.” Ancient palace keys were large, and the steward wore his on his shoulder where everyone could see it. Whoever wore it decided who came into the king’s presence and who did not. Aquinas notes it was a key of gold, worn as an ornament as much as a tool, and that the man who carried it was the one permitted to enter where others could not.^[4]

One more detail that matters enormously for the Gospel: this is an office with successors. Shebna held it. Eliakim receives it. Isaiah 22 is a text about a chair that outlives the man sitting in it.^[5]

The Question Asked Outside Judea

Now the Gospel, and the first thing to notice is the map. Jesus takes the Twelve on a hike of more than twenty miles north from the Sea of Galilee into the district of Caesarea Philippi, near the headwaters of the Jordan at the foot of Mount Hermon. This is Gentile country. The city was Hellenistic, populated mostly by pagans, and it held a shrine to the god Pan carved into a cliff face. Herod the Great had been given the town by Caesar Augustus; his son Philip rebuilt it and stamped his own name on it.^[6]

Why march them all that way to ask a question? Chrysostom says Jesus led them far from Judea so that, freed from fear and surveillance, they could speak with boldness everything on their minds.^[7] Epiphanius the Latin pushes further and sees the geography as prophecy: the Son of God is confessed in Gentile territory, because it will be the Gentiles rather than the Jewish leadership who receive him, and it will happen in a city named Caesarea, through this same Peter, when Cornelius and his household believe (Acts 10).^[8]

Jesus first asks the crowd a question. Who do men say that the Son of man is? The answers come back respectful and completely inadequate. John the Baptist. Elijah. Jeremiah. Every one of those names is a compliment, and every one of them is wrong. Chrysostom points out the shrewdness of asking the easy question first, so the disciples might be drawn gradually to something higher rather than settling into the crowd’s opinion.^[9]

Then the question that matters. “But who do you say that I am?”

Aquinas asks the obvious thing: why does Jesus ask when he already knows? Christ willed that they should merit by confessing, because “with the heart, we believe unto justice; but with the mouth, confession is made unto salvation” (Romans 10:10).^[10] The asking is itself a gift to Peter. God puts questions to us so that we will say the answer out loud.

You Are The Christ, The Son Of The Living God

Peter’s answer is two claims welded together, and the second one is what makes it explosive.

“Messiah” alone would have been a large statement. The title means “anointed one,” and in Israel priests and kings were installed by anointing (Leviticus 8:12; 1 Kings 1:39). The hope ran back to God’s covenant with David in 2 Samuel 7:8-17, where the Lord promised an everlasting throne and a son who would be treated as God’s own. After the Babylonian conquest in 586 BC, that kingdom lay in ruins, and the prophets kept the hope of a new David alive across the centuries (Isaiah 11:1-5; Jeremiah 23:5-6; Ezekiel 34:23-24).^[11]

But Peter says more than “the Christ.” He says “the Son of the living God.” Cyril of Alexandria caught the force of the definite article: Peter did not say “a christ” or “a son of God,” because there are many who are christs by grace and who have received the rank of adopted sons. There is only one who is Son by nature.^[12] Aquinas makes the same distinction, and it is why Peter is singled out here when others had used similar words before. Nathanael had called Jesus the Son of God (John 1:49), and so had the men in the boat (Matthew 14:33). The others confessed an adoptive son; Peter confessed the natural Son, and so he is blessed before the rest, because he was first to confess the divinity.^[13]

Notice too the small word “living.” Aquinas says it’s there to exclude the error of the pagans, who called dead men gods and worshiped the elements of the world (Wisdom 13). Man is called living because he participates in life. God is called living because he is the fountain of life (Psalm 36:9).^[14] In a town built around a shrine to Pan, Peter names the God who does not die.

Jesus answers with a blessing and a diagnosis. “Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.” Aquinas reads “flesh and blood” two ways: the traditions Peter grew up with and the opinions of his neighbors, or the visible humanity of Christ standing before him. Either way, Peter did not judge by what flesh and blood showed him. He judged by what the Father revealed.^[15]

On This Rock

Then comes the naming, and it is a real name change, the kind Scripture reserves for people whose lives are about to be reorganized: Abram to Abraham, Jacob to Israel.^[16] Before Christianity, the Greek word behind “Peter” (petros) was an ordinary noun. It meant rock. Jesus gives a man a common noun for a name and thereby announces what that man is for.

English hides a wrinkle here that the Greek shows. The text uses petros for Peter, masculine, and petra for the rock on which the Church is built, feminine. The masculine form is used for Peter’s name because it would have been strange to give a man a feminine name. And in all likelihood Jesus spoke this in Aramaic, where he would have used one word both times, kepha, meaning a massive rock. That is why Paul and John keep calling him “Cephas” (John 1:42; 1 Corinthians 15:5; Galatians 2:9).^[17]

Build on a rock, and you have a temple. The messiah, shaped by the oracle of 2 Samuel 7, was expected to do what the first son of David did: construct the house of the Lord (2 Samuel 7:13; Zechariah 6:12-13). Peter’s confession sets up Jesus’ counter-confession: I am going to build, and you are the foundation stone.^[18]

“And the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.” In Israel’s picture of the world, the gates of Hades opened downward into the pit where the dead sank and where the powers of death were housed. Later rabbinic tradition held that the foundation stone of the temple capped the shaft leading down to that underworld.^[19] Aquinas gets concrete about who those gates are: heretics, tyrants, demons, sins. Just as a gate is how you enter a house, these are how one enters hell. And then he says the thing a deacon in 2026 finds bracing: that other churches have been corrupted by heretics, but the Church founded on the rock was not, because Christ prayed for Peter that his faith would not fail (Luke 22:32).^[20] The gates keep coming. They keep losing.

The Keys, And Isaiah’s Fingerprints

Now Isaiah comes back, and this is why the Church puts these two readings side by side today.

“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.” Matthew is quoting Isaiah 22:22 with his eyes open. There the key of the house of David passes from Shebna to Eliakim, and of Eliakim it is said that when he opens, no one shall shut, and when he shuts, no one shall open. Peter is being installed as chief steward, but the house he stewards is no government under an earthly head of state. He is made prime minister of the universal Church under the Davidic Messiah. And because the office in Israel was held by a line of successors, and because Isaiah 22 is precisely a text about the handing on of that office from one steward to the next, it follows that Peter’s authority is meant to be handed on too.^[21]

Aquinas saw the same link seven centuries before the modern commentators, and he quotes Isaiah 22:22 directly when he reaches this verse. Then he makes a distinction I keep coming back to. Why keys, plural? Because absolving requires two things, power and knowledge, and “knowledge” here does not mean a habit of the intellect but the authority to discern. A judge may lack expertise and still hold authority; a scholar may have expertise and hold none.^[22]

And why are they keys at all, when a key opens, and Jesus speaks of binding? Aquinas answers that heaven is already open. “I looked, and behold, a door was opened in heaven” (Revelation 4:1). The obstacle was never on God’s side. It is on ours, and it is sin, because nothing unclean shall enter (Revelation 21:27). Christ removed that obstacle by his passion, washing us from our sins in his blood (Revelation 1:5), and then handed on a ministry by which sins are taken away. So the key works on us. It loosens the man who is bound, so that he can walk through the door that is already standing open.^[23]

There is one more thing Aquinas notices, and it’s a lovely piece of attention to grammar. Jesus says “I will give,” future tense, because the keys did not yet exist, and a thing cannot be given before it is. They were forged in the passion. He promises them here at Caesarea Philippi, and he hands them over after the resurrection, on the shore, with three questions and the words “Feed my sheep” (John 21:17).^[24]

Binding and loosing is rabbinic vocabulary with three settled meanings: teaching authority, the power to declare what is lawful and what is not; juridical authority, the power to admit to the community or exclude from it; and spiritual authority, the power to forgive or retain sins.^[25] Which is to say the confessional, the catechism, and canon law all live inside this one sentence.

Then Jesus tells them to keep quiet about it. Chrysostom explains why: the word “Messiah” in first-century Palestine carried freight Jesus had no intention of hauling, dreams of a militant deliverer who would break Rome and make Israel great. Better that they preach him once the cross had happened and the power of his deeds could plead in support of their claims, so the truth could be engraved pure and unmovable in the minds of the hearers.^[26]

Daily Application

Here is what I want you to sit with today. Peter did not earn that confession. Jesus tells him so in the same breath he blesses him. “Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you.” Peter did not reason his way to Christ’s divinity through careful study. He was given it, and then he opened his mouth.

That should be a relief to anyone who has ever felt like a fraud in the pew. If your faith feels less like a possession and more like something on loan, you are reading the situation correctly. It is on loan. And Aquinas says something startling about that: blessedness lies in knowledge, and in this life a person is more blessed the more he is able to perceive of this knowledge. Peter is told “blessed are you” because, as Aquinas puts it, you are beginning to be blessed.^[27] Beginning. The knowledge that made Peter blessed at Caesarea Philippi is the same knowledge that will make him blessed forever; he has just started to receive it.

So ask for more of it. That’s the first practical thing. When you pray this week, stop informing God about your schedule for sixty seconds and ask him for what he gave Peter, an increase in the knowledge of who his Son is. It is the only thing in the spiritual life you can ask for without any risk of asking wrongly.

The second thing is harder, and it comes from the shape of Isaiah 22. Shebna lost the keys because he used the king’s house to build his own monument. He was not a heretic. He was not a traitor. He was a man with real authority who quietly redirected it toward his own name, and God removed him for it. Every one of us has been handed keys of some kind. Parents hold the keys to whether their children ever meet Christ as a person rather than as a policy. Teachers hold keys. Employers hold keys. Anyone with a vote, a paycheck, or a family holds keys. And the temptation with them is always to carve a tomb.

So look honestly at the authority you actually have, and ask what you have been doing with it. The real, small, unglamorous authority: over a household, a classroom, a shift, a parish committee. Shebna’s sin is available to all of us at every scale.

August 23 is Saint Rose of Lima’s day on the calendar, and though the Sunday takes precedence at Mass, she is a bracing companion for this. The first canonized saint of the New World is admired far more often than she is imitated, mostly because some of her penances were extreme. She rubbed pepper on her face because people praised her beauty. She wore a silver circlet studded on the inside like a crown of thorns. Her parents forbade her to enter a convent, so she stayed home, worked the garden by day and sewed at night to pay their debts, and joined the Third Order of Saint Dominic. In her last years, she set up a room in her parents’ house and cared for homeless children, the elderly, and the sick, the beginning of social services in Peru. She died at 31, and the whole city of Lima turned out for the funeral. Prominent men took turns carrying her coffin.^[28]

Set her next to Shebna, and the contrast does the teaching for you. She had almost no authority at all. No office, no title, no convent, no permission. And she spent everything she had on other people’s names instead of her own. The thing worth remembering about Rose is a love of God so fierce that it survived ridicule from her own family, violent temptation, and years of sickness.

You do not need her penances. You do need her direction. Take one key you actually hold this week and turn it for someone else. Absolve a grudge you have been carrying. Make the phone call to the person whose door you have been keeping shut. Get to confession and let a priest use the keys Christ forged in his passion, so that you can walk through a door that has been standing open the whole time.

And when the question comes to you, and it will, in a hospital corridor or a hard conversation or the silence at three in the morning, answer it out loud. Say what Peter said. You will find you did not think it up on your own.

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Notes

1. The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, commentary on Isaiah 22:15-25. ↩
2. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Isaiah, ch. 22, §540. ↩
3. Aquinas, Commentary on Isaiah, ch. 22, §§541-542. ↩
4. Aquinas, Commentary on Isaiah, ch. 22, §543. ↩
5. Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 209. ↩
6. Mitch and Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, 205. ↩
7. John Chrysostom, The Gospel of Matthew, Homily 54.1, in Matthew 14-28, ed. Manlio Simonetti, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, New Testament Ib (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 43. ↩
8. Epiphanius the Latin, Interpretation of the Gospels 28, in Matthew 14-28, ACCS NT Ib, 43. ↩
9. Chrysostom, The Gospel of Matthew, Homily 54.1, in Matthew 14-28, ACCS NT Ib, 44. ↩
10. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, ch. 16, lect. 2, §1373. ↩
11. Mitch and Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, 206. ↩
12. Cyril of Alexandria, Fragment 190, in Matthew 14-28, ACCS NT Ib, 45. ↩
13. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, ch. 16, lect. 2, §1378. ↩
14. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, ch. 16, lect. 2, §1375. ↩
15. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, ch. 16, lect. 2, §1380. ↩
16. Mitch and Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, 207n5. ↩
17. Mitch and Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, 207. ↩
18. Mitch and Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, 208. ↩
19. Mitch and Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, 208. ↩
20. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, ch. 16, lect. 2, §1385. ↩
21. Mitch and Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, 209. ↩
22. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, ch. 16, lect. 2, §1388. ↩
23. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, ch. 16, lect. 2, §§1387, 1389. ↩
24. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, ch. 16, lect. 2, §1387. ↩
25. Mitch and Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, 210, sidebar “Binding and Loosing (16:19).” ↩
26. Chrysostom, The Gospel of Matthew, Homily 54.4, in Matthew 14-28, ACCS NT Ib, 46. ↩
27. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, ch. 16, lect. 2, §1379. ↩
28. “Saint Rose of Lima,” Saint of the Day, Franciscan Media, https://www.franciscanmedia.org/saint-of-the-day/saint-rose-of-lima/. ↩

Books Cited

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• University of Navarre, The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2005
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Isaiah, Latin-English Opera Omnia vol. 30, The Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic
• Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2010)
• Manlio Simonetti, ed., Matthew 14-28, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture NT 1b (InterVarsity, 2002)
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew 13-28, Latin-English Opera Omnia, The Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic