Jesus said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter said in reply, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus said to him in reply, “Blessed are you, 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 Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall 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 loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” (Matthew 16.15-19)
When I was a boy, I was fascinated with keys. Any kind of key. I felt happiest when I had a bunch of keys in my pocket, preferably held together on some kind of ring. Obviously, the keys served no purpose, since they were given to me because they were no longer used. I remember asking my grandmother if I could have some keys she kept in a drawer. They went to her house. Since she never locked the doors to the house, day or night, she saw no reason not to let me have the keys.
Occasionally, I would take one of the keys to see if it truly had the ability to unlock a door. Since she had four doors, it took a while to find the right key, but the effort to find the right key was well worth the time. I scavenged for keys like other boys looked for rocks or worms or mud puddles. The more keys the better, even if my little pocket reached a point where it couldn’t really hold anymore.
I have no idea where my interest in keys came from. Truth be told, the interest stayed with me for years. If I were to offer a reason, I’d have to believe it was because I saw my dad with a ring of keys. Through some association, prescient for my preschool age, I realized keys meant authority, power, specialness. And I wanted part of it, collecting keys apparently the way to get a share.
Need I repeat that my keys opened nothing, with only a rare exception. And then, it was never used. No matter. I was superman. I didn’t need a cape or a swimsuit. All I needed was a ring of keys. My mom would occasionally remark that she couldn’t understand my keen interest in keys. However, being a mom, she simply went along with my fascination, letting me add to my collection whenever I saw another one.
When I hear Rabbi Jesus tell Simon Peter that he’s going to give the keys to him, I smile, thinking back to my early years, and I think what a lucky guy Simon was. And really, all he had to do was answer correctly the question that Jesus asked him, “Who do you say that I am?” Whereas his partners in apostleship had already thrown out some tried and tired answers when Rabbi Jesus asked them the question, Simon landed on the right answer, unusual for him, for sure.
We hear that story in the gospel today. In fact, Simon doesn’t only get the keys. He gets a new name. “You are Peter,” Rabbi Jesus says to him, giving him a nickname that will stay with him for the rest of his life. Well, even longer. We still call him Peter, which, all things considered, was much the same as Jesus calling him “Rocky.”
Naturally, I like the part about the keys more than I like the part about a new nickname, but, then, we all know I have a thing for keys. So, if you’ll allow me the indulgence, I think we ought to talk about keys today, although nine out of ten times everybody who hears this story wants to talk about the nickname. Sure, changing Simon’s name to Rocky is interesting stuff, but giving him “the keys to the kingdom of heaven,” well, that sounds like major news.
But just what does Rabbi Jesus have in mind when he says he’s giving Peter this important set of keys? That is a good question. Scholars, who, as a rule, can make a mountain out of a molehill, like to see a parallel in the Hebrew scriptures in a passage in the Book of Isaiah. The ancient prophet, speaking for the Lord God, says at one point that he’s going to remove Shebna the palace administrator and put Eliakim the son of Hilkiah in his position.
“I will depose you from your office and you will be ousted from your position,” the prophet says. Then, referring to Eliakim, Isaiah says, “I will clothe him with your robe and fasten your sash around him and hand your authority over to him. He will be a father to those who live in Jerusalem and to the people of Judah. I will place on his shoulder the key to the house of David. What he opens no one can shut, and what he shuts no one can open.”
I agree. It makes an interesting precedent and parallel. As to whether or not Rabbi Jesus had this text in mind, I have no idea. Again, I tend to go with the simplest explanation. He knew as well as anybody what the purpose of keys was. So he was telling Peter that he was entrusting him with the keys for the purpose for which they were intended, namely to open up a place.
As we’ve seen in the Gospel of Matthew, “the kingdom of heaven” is a phrase that Rabbi Jesus uses often, the words generally understood as a way of life, specifically living a way of life on earth in accord with the ways of God in heaven. When defining the phrase, difficult to do because of its plasticity, he often likened it to something else, drawing an analogy. The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure. Or like a mustard seed. Or like yeast that a woman puts into flour.
As I see it, the kingdom of heaven can easily be defined as living in the world in the way that Jesus lived in the world. With his words and with his works, he showed to others the will of the Most High God, the desire that the Creator has for his creation and for his creatures. His mission, as he saw it, was to tell others the secrets of God’s heart, in this way teaching them to live in the world justly, responsibly, and selflessly, all attributes of the Lord God.
Understood in this way, the kingdom of heaven may not have anything to do with a place and much more to do with a way of life. Or said another way, if we live rightly in this world, we will bring the kingdom of heaven down to earth. And when we are able to do that, then we truly become sons and daughters of the Most High God who called us into being to spend his love recklessly and generously on others, especially the last, the least, the lost, and the lonely.
So, when Rabbi Jesus is giving the keys to the kingdom of heaven to Peter, he is not passing on to him a set of physical keys, but a set of principles that will be the keys to a good life, a life lived in harmony with God, a life that reflects the image of the Lord God that has been imprinted upon our souls, an image that we have a bad habit of hiding.
I shy away from arguments about the particularity of Peter getting the keys, preferring to see Peter as Matthew portrays him, that is, always as a representative of the apostles as a whole. So, when he chastises Peter for having little faith when Peter thinks he is sinking into the sea, he is not saying the disciples in the boat have great faith. We know they did not. In the same way, here the keys are not singularly Peter’s, but belong to all those who follow in the footsteps of Rabbi Jesus. Each disciple has the keys to the kingdom and each one is called to open the door to that kingdom so that any and all might enter and find life, life to the fullest.
It is not coincidental, I think, that near the end of the gospel Rabbi Jesus castigates the Jewish religious leaders for doing just the opposite. Rather than opening the kingdom of heaven for others to enter, they slam the door in their faces. Matthew records Jesus saying to them, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut up the kingdom of heaven before people. For you yourselves do not come in, nor do you allow those coming in to enter” (23.13).
I think it is a fair representation of the gospel to hold these two statements in tandem. Rabbi Jesus, entrusting the keys to the kingdom of heaven to his disciples, wants them to open the doors to the kingdom, inviting in stragglers off the street, prostitutes worn out by life, and lost causes who can’t find their way out of the darkness. He wants them to have a place at the table, feasting on a way of life that is not snack food or fast food, but promises to be a banquet if one takes to heart the ways and the words of Rabbi Jesus.
The opposite, then, are the Pharisees and the scribes, hard-knuckled and hard-nosed people who act like bounty hunters, quick to judge, equally quick to condemn, always ready to string up people who don’t measure up to their standards. Rather than opening the doors to the kingdom of heaven, they locked them tight, refusing admittance to all but a few. Like the rich man at his table, eating alone, they enjoy a hearty meal while Lazarus starves on the other side of the door.
As followers of Rabbi Jesus, we all have the keys to the kingdom of heaven. But with the keys comes the duty and the responsibility to open the doors, not to lock them. We are to offer to the destitute, the despised, and the depressed a safe place, a free zone where they can come to know the mercy, the goodness, and the love of a God who calls one and all his children, regardless of culture, class, or favorable clicks.
The gifted writer and preacher Fred Craddock once told a story about a small church somewhere in the South. At a meeting of parishioners one evening, an argument broke out among the attendees over who had keys to the front doors of the church. The nexus of the problem seemed to be that some felt there were too many keys out there.
One man, bothered and heated by the situation, stood and asked, “How are we going to control who gets in if everybody has keys?” Apparently, he failed to see the incongruity of his concerns, wanting a church that was not open to everybody, but only open to a certain few. His stance on keys was very much like the Pharisees, not like Rabbi Jesus who gave Peter the keys with the understanding that all would be welcomed.
My mom had a lifelong habit of stepping inside the nearby church to say a few prayers, usually in the late evening hours. In her younger years, when we were underfoot, she’d wait until we were in bed before walking the half-block down the street to spend a few quiet moments in prayer. Sometimes it would be midnight before she finished her household chores and was able to go.
Regardless, the church doors were always open. All she had to do was pull on the door and step inside the silent sanctuary, the only light coming from the flicker of a few votive candles burning, giving her enough light to find her way. Granted, we lived in a small community and in a safer time, no one locking their doors at night, not even the church.
Still, there was something very right about those open doors of the church. To my way of thinking, it was what Rabbi Jesus had in mind when he handed over the keys to the kingdom to Peter. He didn’t want him to lock up the place. In fact, the opposite. He wanted him to open the doors. Unlike the Pharisees, he wanted everyone to know the bounty and the beauty of a God who welcomes all his children into his sacred abode.
In other words, so long as we’re keeping the doors to our hearts open to one and all, we’re using the keys to the kingdom of heaven as Rabbi Jesus intended when he entrusted them to his first followers. But the opposite is also true. When we start locking doors to keep out people, we’re using the keys in a way Rabbi Jesus never wanted.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 