Matthew 16.13-20

There is a way to be near Jesus for years without ever answering the question he actually asks.

You can grow up in the building. You can know the songs by heart and know roughly where the passages are. You can hold a set of opinions about Jesus that you inherited from your parents the way you inherited their eye color. A borrowed answer holds for a long time. It holds through the easy years. It holds until the diagnosis, or the funeral, or the marriage that comes apart, or two in the morning when the question comes back with teeth in it.

Then you find out whether what you had was a conviction or a habit.

Where the question gets asked

Matthew tells us exactly where Jesus asked it.

Caesarea Philippi sits about twenty five miles north of the Sea of Galilee, at the foot of Mount Hermon, near one of the springs that feeds the Jordan. This is not the Jewish heartland. It is as far outside the familiar as Jesus takes them.

It is also a crowded religious place. There is a cave there with water pouring out of it, and long before Jesus arrived the Greeks had dedicated it to Pan, the goat god. They called the region Paneas. Herod the Great built a temple of white marble there in honor of Caesar Augustus. Philip the tetrarch rebuilt the city and named it for Caesar and, while he was at it, for himself.¹

A grotto for a dead god. A marble temple for an emperor publicly styled the son of a god. A city named twice over for men who wanted to be remembered.

In that region, surrounded by the signs of pagan and imperial devotion, Jesus turns to twelve ordinary men and asks who people say he is.

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Every answer is flattering, and every answer is too small

“Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets” (Matthew 16.14).

Every one of those is a compliment. Nobody says he is a fraud. Nobody says he is dangerous. John was the most compelling preacher in a generation. Elijah was the promised forerunner. Jeremiah wept over a city that would not listen.² These are the highest categories the crowd has.

And every one of them is too small.

It is possible to say very complimentary things about Jesus and still be entirely wrong about him. The categories are not hostile. They put him in a line of people. A remarkable line, but a line. And a prophet, however great, points away from himself toward God.

Then the question turns. “But who do you say that I am?” (Matthew 16.15). In Greek the “you” is emphatic, and it is plural.³ He is not asking Peter. He is asking all of them. And the little word in the middle cuts the conversation in half. We are finished with what people say.

The confession nobody talked him into

“You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16.16).

Two titles, and neither one is decorative. Not a christ among several, but the one the whole story has been leaning toward since Matthew opened with a genealogy running from Abraham through David down to Jesus.⁴ And notice the word Peter chose for God. The living God. Standing in a town full of shrines to gods who never drew a breath, Peter says that Jesus is the Son of the God who is alive.⁵

Then Jesus answers the confession with a beatitude. “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 16.17).⁶

Peter did not work this out. Nobody argued him into it. The Father showed him.

That cuts two ways.

It takes the pride out. If you believe Jesus is the Christ, that belief is not a credential. It does not mean you are sharper than your neighbor who does not believe it. Peter got no credit here. He got a blessing, and the blessing was for receiving.

It also takes the panic out. Some of us carry a quiet fear that our faith is only as strong as our ability to defend it, that if the right skeptic asked the right question the whole thing would come apart in our hands. But Peter’s confession did not originate with Peter. Your faith is not a rope you are gripping. It is a hand that has hold of you.

Which matters, because nine verses later the same man takes Jesus aside and rebukes him for talking about the cross, and Jesus says, “Get behind me, Satan” (Matthew 16.23). Same man, same chapter. Whatever Jesus is building, he is not building it on Peter’s consistency.

On this rock

“And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church” (Matthew 16.18).

People have read that sentence three ways. Some say the rock is Peter, since the words sit side by side and in Aramaic Jesus would have used one word for both.⁷ Some say the rock is the confession Peter just made, which is how Chrysostom read it in the fourth century, long before any Reformation argument.⁸ Some say the rock is Christ.

Whatever one concludes about the immediate referent of ‘this rock,’ the New Testament is clear about the church’s ultimate center and measuring stone: Christ himself. Paul writes that the household of God is “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone” (Ephesians 2.20). Peter is in the foundation, and so are the rest of the apostles. But the cornerstone, the stone that sets the line every other stone is measured against, is Christ.⁹

Peter settles it himself. Years later he picks up the stone language and does not apply it to himself. He applies it to Jesus, quoting Isaiah: “Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious” (1 Peter 2.6). Then he calls his readers living stones being built into a spiritual house. He had every opportunity to claim the foundation. He handed it to Christ and put the rest of us in the wall.

And Psalm 118 adds the line that hurts. “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone” (Psalm 118.22).¹⁰

So the foundation of the church is not Peter’s resume, and it is not our certainty. It is a stone that got thrown away.

The gates that could not hold

“The gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

Think about gates. Gates do not march. Gates do not attack anyone. Gates hold. The gates of the realm of the dead exist for one purpose, to keep the dead where they are.¹¹ Jesus tells twelve men who are going to die that those gates will not prove strong enough.¹²

He could say it because of where he was going. From that conversation he turns toward Jerusalem, toward the builders who will measure him, find him unsuitable, and throw him out.

That is what it has always cost to be God’s anointed. Run the list from Genesis to Malachi. Joseph, Moses, David, Jeremiah. Every one of them was handed authority, and every one of them paid for it. There was advancement in it, and there was a cost, and the cost was usually everything. It is not the life you would choose.

The cornerstone had to be rejected before it could be laid. And the promise about the gates is not wishful thinking, because three days after they buried him he came out (Matt. 16:21; 28:1–6). He said the gates would not hold his church, and then he walked through them first and left them standing open behind him.

The question comes around

Not what you were taught. Not what you would say in the parking lot on the way to the car. Who do you say that he is when you are alone and afraid?

And underneath that one, a second question. What have you been building on that you would never call a foundation out loud, but would panic if you lost? Money, reputation, a marriage, being the person who has it together. Those are stones. None of them were tested.

The church was never built on the strength of your grip. It is built on the Son of the living God, and death has already tried those gates and lost.

~PW 🌮🛶

You can find the full sermon transcript, video, and audio here: Matthew 16.13-20, Christ the Cornerstone

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• Blomberg, Craig L. Matthew. New American Commentary 22. Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1992.
• Chrysostom, John. Homilies on the Gospel of Saint Matthew. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 10. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1888.
• Danker, Frederick W., Walter Bauer, William F. Arndt, and F. Wilbur Gingrich. A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
• France, R. T. The Gospel of Matthew. New International Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007.
• Morris, Leon. The Gospel According to Matthew. Pillar New Testament Commentary. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992.
• Nolland, John. The Gospel of Matthew. New International Greek Testament Commentary. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005.
• Quarles, Charles L. Matthew: Exegetical Guide to the Greek New Testament. Nashville: B&H Academic, 2017.

1. On the site and its history, see Craig L. Blomberg, Matthew, New American Commentary 22 (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1992), 251, and Leon Morris, The Gospel According to Matthew, Pillar New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 418. Philip the tetrarch rebuilt the older Paneas and renamed it. The name also distinguishes it from Caesarea Maritima on the coast. ↩︎
2. Herod’s fear that Jesus was John raised again appears at Matthew 14.2. On Elijah as the promised forerunner, see Malachi 4.5 with Matthew 11.14. On Jeremiah as the representative rejected prophet, see Blomberg, Matthew, 251, and Morris, Matthew, 419. ↩︎
3. Charles L. Quarles, Matthew: Exegetical Guide to the Greek New Testament (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2017), on 16.15. The pronoun is emphatic and the connective is adversative. It sets the disciples’ answer against the crowd’s. Morris, Matthew, 419, notes that Jesus addresses the Twelve as a group and Peter answers as their spokesman. ↩︎
4. Quarles, on 16.16. The article with Christos is monadic. Jesus is the one and only Messiah. Blomberg, Matthew, 251-52, observes that this is the first time in Matthew that anyone unambiguously acknowledges Jesus as the Christ. ↩︎
5. Blomberg, Matthew, 252. Calling God “living” is a characteristically Jewish way of distinguishing him from lifeless idols. The full phrase appears only here in Matthew. ↩︎
6. “Flesh and blood” is a Semitic idiom for mortal humanity over against God. See Frederick W. Danker, Walter Bauer, William F. Arndt, and F. Wilbur Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 914-16, and Morris, Matthew, 422. The verb rendered “revealed” is the same one Jesus uses at Matthew 11.25-27. See R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 620. ↩︎
7. On the three readings and the state of the debate, see France, Matthew, 621-24; John Nolland, The Gospel of Matthew, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 667-70; and Blomberg, Matthew, 252-53. The objection drawn from the gender difference between Petros and petra is weak, since petra is feminine and could not serve as a man’s name, and the underlying Aramaic would likely have used kepha in both places. ↩︎
8. John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of Saint Matthew, Homily 54, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 10 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1888). Chrysostom glosses “upon this rock” as “on the faith of his confession.” ↩︎
9. Blomberg, Matthew, 254, notes that Ephesians 2.20 and Revelation 21.14 make all the apostles foundational, so that Peter’s primacy is chronological rather than hierarchical. On the word for cornerstone, see Danker, BDAG, 39. ↩︎
10. On the Old Testament stone texts behind this passage, chiefly Isaiah 28.16 and Psalm 118.22, and on their use in Second Temple literature, see Nolland, Matthew, 668-69. Jesus applies Psalm 118.22 to himself at Matthew 21.42. ↩︎
11. The phrase echoes Jewish biblical idiom—especially Isaiah 38.10 and Job 38:17—where ‘the gates of Hades’ denotes the realm or power of death. See Blomberg, Matthew, 253, and Nolland, Matthew, 673-76. ↩︎
12. Danker, BDAG, 534, on the verb translated “prevail.” Quarles, on 16.18, follows Hagner in reading the promise as the resurrection of Jesus’ disciples, so that their death will not be permanent. ↩︎