What Christ says, then, is not, " On you and your successors in ecclesiastical office I will build My Church " ; not, " On what you have said I will build My Church " ; but, " On you as a man transformed by the power of an indwelling Christ, on you as the type of a long liue of humanity growing broader through the sweep and range of history, humanity transformed and changed
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by the indwelling of My own Messianic life, I will build My Church." This is the interpretation of the text afforded by its setting. This is also Peter's own interpretation. " Wherefore laying aside all malice, and all guile, and hypocrisies, and envies, and evil speakings, as newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby : if so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious. To whom coming, as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God, and precious, ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priest- hood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ."
Tj The change of person " on this rock," instead of " upon thee" is the natural result of the sudden transition from a direct to a metaphorical address ; and is in exact accordance with our Lord's manner on other occasions. He said not " Destroy Me " or " the temple of My body," but "destroy this temple" (John ii. 19). The change of gender from Petros to petra is the natural result of the change from a proper name to the work from which the proper name is derived. The French language alone, of all those into which the original has been translated, has been able entirely to preserve their identity. The Greek Petros, which for the sake of the masculine termination was necessarily used to express the name itself, was yet so rarely used in any other sense than a "stone" that the exigency of the language required an immediate return to the word pctra, which, as in Greek generally, so also in the New Testament, is the almost invariable appellation of a " rock." To speak of any confession or form of words, however sacred, as a foundation or rock, would be completely at variance with the living representation of the New Testament. It is not any doctrine concerning Christ, but Christ Himself, that is spoken of as being in the highest and strictest sense the foundation of the Church (1 Cor. iii. 11), and so whenever the same figure is used to express the lower and earthly instruments of the establishment of God's Kingdom, it is not any teaching or system that is meant, but living human persons. Thus the Apostles are all of them called " foundations " of the Church in Eph. ii. 20; Eev. xxi. 14; and, by a nearly similar metaphor, Peter, James, and John are called " pillars " (Gal. ii. 9), the faithful Christian a " pillar in the temple of God" (Eev. iii. 12), and Timotheus, by a union of both metaphors, " the pillar and ground " of the " truth in the house of God." 1
TJ Stier is suggestive upon this point : " The man is Simon 1 A. P. Stanley, Sermons and Essays on the Apostolic Age, 113. ST. MATT. — 19
29o MY CHURCH
Bar-jona the sinner : not upon him, therefore, is it to be built ; but upon this Peter such as grace makes him ; upon him because, and in as far as, he certainly corresponds to this name more than the others. Still for this very reason the co-ordinate stones and pillars are by no means excluded, and even the primacy of Peter rests at bottom only upon this, that he is called to begin the preaching of the Word as first among equals." So wonderfully does the Lord vouchsafe to build up the eternal fabric of the Church out of human stones, Himself indeed the chief corner- stone, and the twelve Apostles the twelve foundations, St. Peter the great basal stone of the fabric, while thereon is built up, as that very St. Peter himself testifies, out of living stones, a spiritual house.1
2. Jesus builds His Church upon average human nature. Who was this man of whom Jesus said that he was a rock ? He was the most unstable and shifting of the disciples, as little like a rock as a man could be. Jesus must have known this ; Peter must have known it ; and the fishermen with Peter must have known it also. He was quick to act and quick to reject. He was what the modern world calls a " quitter," a man who could not stand the strain of disapproval or suspicion ; a man who was more like sand than rock. Yet Jesus takes him just as he is, believes in him when he does not believe in himself, sees his underlying qualities of strength and leadership, and converts him into the rock which He would have him be. It was like the process of nature which tosses the sand up on the shore and then beats upon it and hardens it until it becomes converted into stone ; and we call it, by what seems a contradiction in terms, sandstone. So Jesus takes this unstable character and says to it : " Thou shalt be a rock," and by the hard friction and compression of experience Peter becomes that which Jesus saw that he could be.