Shortly after I was ordained, I got friendly with a couple in the parish, and my first visit to their home happened to fall on today’s feast; and the husband, who was a Protestant, joyfully told me how stupid Catholics were for worshipping a piece of furniture. Sadly, the Catholic wife, didn’t have enough knowledge about her religion to inform her husband that today’s feast is about so much more than a piece of furniture. We do not honour a chair, but rather we recognise the authority and the power that Our Lord gave to Saint Peter as the head of his Church. In our 21st century society most people don’t appreciate the significance of a simple thing like a chair had in years gone by, and what it meant to own or sit in a chair. In Jewish tradition whenever a rabbi sat down, that meant the teaching he was about to impart was with authority, but if he remained standing, that meant it was just his own opinion and nobody needed to listen to him. That’s why in the Gospels, over and over again, we are told that Jesus ‘sat down and began to teach’. It doesn’t seem to make any sense to us why the evangelists would tell us that Our Lord was sitting down, except for the fact that it implies to us that what He was about to say was with authority.
Now the authority of Saint Peter we recognize very clearly in what Our Lord says to him, that it is upon Peter that Jesus is going to build His Church. Our Lord gives to him the keys of the kingdom of heaven, the keys being the symbol of the prime minister, of the authority of one who has complete authority to run the kingdom of God on earth; Our Lord tells Peter the extent of the authority that is given to him: Whatever you hold bound on earth will be held bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. In other words, God is going to make Himself obedient to this man, which is an absolutely astounding thing to say, except for the fact that God is also going to give to Peter His Holy Spirit, so that Peter will not be able to lead the Church into error. Therefore, of course, God Who is perfect and cannot get it wrong and cannot lead into error is not going to be held bound to something which is not true. So, we have the guarantee of the truth that is going to come forth from the formal teachings of the Holy Father. What a great blessing that is for all of us, that we can have an objective source we can look to, that we can know we are on the right track. As long as we are in union with the See of Peter, then we know we are in good order.
But we also need to recognize what Peter understood, that this authority was given to him by Christ as authority to serve, not as power to keep people under his thumb. The power Peter is given is power to serve. And that’s precisely what Saint Peter is telling us in the first reading, that those who share in the shepherding task have to serve the people willingly, and that they are not to be doing this for any kind of profit, they are not to be doing it for any kind of power trip, but rather they are to do it to serve so that the reward they will receive will come from the Shepherd Who came to serve and not to be served. He is the example that all the shepherds of the Church are to follow.
One of the Holy Father’s titles is Servus Servorum Dei (“Servant of the Servants of God”) because he is the one who is the highest; he is the one, as Our Lord Himself tells us, who must serve the rest. All of us are servants of God, and the Holy Father is the Servant of the Servants of God. The Pope is given this immense authority so that he can serve the needs of all, and that as a good and faithful shepherd he will lead us to our One True Shepherd and bring us to the eternity which is promised to us if we are obedient and faithful. And then we will have union with Him forever.
Dum Tacet Clamat 