By Maximos Pafilis, Bishop of Melitene
In the furthest bounds of Galilee, there where the stone prayers resound in the recesses of the ruins, in Caesarea Philippi; a place imbued with the seal of a worldly power that aspired to become eternal, Christ utters a question that penetrates the fabric of time with the acuity of an inner prophecy.
Among the marbles dedicated to Caesar and the ancient springs of the Jordan that welled up as a reminder of an unexpressed beginning, the word was heard: “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” (Matthew 16:13).
It was not a question of categorical classification nor for theological investigation; it was a redemptive incision within the transfixed gaze of the disciples, a demand for the myth of easy interpretations to be dissolved and for the mind to turn to the vertical silence of the true.
Their first answers echoed the recycling of scriptural archetypes – Elijah, Jeremiah, John – like desperate attempts to confine the unheard-of within the pre-existent. Human thought, timid before the enigma of the Incarnation, sought refuge in recognisable models, in order to hold back the revelation. Thus we act perpetually; we disguise the absolute as a philanthropic sermon, the holy as a moral paradigm, God as a contribution to the progress of society. A continuous retreat of the will from the challenge of divinity.
But from within the hesitant echo of the others, rises the voice of Simon, a voice that emerged from the effulgence of a heart that found itself naked before the divine. “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16). This confession was not a rhetorical figure; it was a rupture with every representational mechanism, it was an entry into the timeless time of Revelation. Jesus confirms that this “flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my Father in heaven”; testifying that truth is not taught; it is revealed.
Upon this very stone, the confession itself, the Church is founded. “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church” (Matthew 16:18). How paradoxical; this stone is not indivisible marble, but a man with instabilities, fractures, and frailty: a fisherman from Bethsaida, who promised faith unto death and then denied the Teacher before the flame of a courtyard. A stone that sinks, doubts, yet continues to be called thanks to its willingness to collapse and to be resurrected.
Patristic wisdom, with the rigour of theological precision, correctly interpreted that the foundation is the faith of the person. Photius the Great notes: “The rock of ‘the church’ is the confession of the divinity of Jesus, made indeed by Peter, but being common to the apostles” (Gr. Πέτρα δὲ “τῆς ἐκκλησίας” ἐστὶν ἡ ὁμολογία τῆς θεότητος τοῦ Ἰησοῦ, ἡ γενομένη μὲν ὑπὸ τοῦ Πέτρου, κοινὴ δὲ οὖσα τῶν ἀποστόλων).[1] We do not have here an imperial succession; we have a eucharistic community.
The Church is founded on the grace that penetrates the fissures. The keys of the Kingdom are medical instruments, not sceptres. The authority that is transmitted is not an exercise of imposition, but an offering of therapy. Whoever attempts to convert the confession into an establishment of a person, transforms faith into factionalism. Constantius of Sinai recalls the apostle Paul: “‘I follow Paul’; another, ‘I follow Apollos’; another, ‘I follow Cephas’”[2] – and with these words reveals the delusion of divisions. A Church that relies on persons is a body already dismembered.
And alongside this unstable stone, emerges the parallel root; Paul. A scion of the tribe of Benjamin, a student of the Law under Gamaliel, Saul was the incarnation of nomocanonical piety, forged in the furnace of pharisaical austerity. He did not begin as one indifferent; he began as a persecutor, inflamed by the conviction that he was defending the purity of God. At the stoning of Stephen he was not a passer-by; he was present, and his presence had the acuteness of a theological war.
His conversion was not a smooth curve; it was a rupture. A light that dissolves the vision, a voice that casts to the ground the breastplate of self-sufficiency. He did not “find” Christ; Christ crushed him, so as to reshape him. And calls him “my chosen instrument to proclaim my name to the Gentiles and their kings” (Acts 9:15). An earthen vessel -perishable and fragile- that contains the ineffable.
Paul does not construct a theology from the distance of abstract conception; he writes with the blood of his wounds, with the etched silence of repentance. His letters are not a system; they are the echo of a cataclysmic experience of grace. His testimony, word and wound, ends up overwhelming Rome, starting from the subterranean depths of bonds to reach the heights of transformation.
Peter and Paul. The one crucified upside down and the one beheaded; two modes of martyrdom that meet in the dissolution of the self. The one a body that is overturned, the other a voice that falls silent, yet both transcend history. They are not stained-glass saints; they are broken men, and as such, transformed. The one a foundation, the other a tendency; the one a communal calling, the other an apostolic rupture.
And this dual schema –fisherman and teacher of the law– is not exhausted in complementarity; it is the expression of the same Breath through different qualities of matter. The Gospel is not propagated through completeness, but through the wound. It is not built upon perfection, but on the condescension of Grace. The history of salvation is written with fractured voices.
And Christ’s question has not ceased. It echoes in the corridors of everyday life, in the shiver of loneliness, in the impasses of the mind. “But what about you? Who do you say I am?”. It is not answered with a synopsis of catechisms nor with the repetition of an ecclesiastical terminology. The answer wells up from the personal abyss, from the place where we recognise ourselves as a cracked vessel.
The Church does not survive because it is infallible; it persists because through the cracks of its foundations -the denials of Peters, the persecutions of Pauls- breathes the light of another world. A Kingdom that is not founded by treaties, but is born within the sacrificial confession of those who dare to say: “You are the Messiah”.
[1] Photios I of Constantinople. Eighty-Three Speeches and Homilies. Edited by S. Aristarchos. Volume One. Constantinople: The Annuaire Oriental & Printing Co, 1900, 465.
[2] Konstantios I of Sinai. Biography and Minor Ecclesiastical and Philological Works, and Some Letters of the Same. Edited by Theodoros M. Aristokleous. Constantinople: From the printing house of “Proodou” [Progress], 1866, 212.
