"You are the Christ, the Son of the living God."
My dear brothers and sisters in Our Lord Jesus Christ; this Sunday we have the privilege to hear with our own ears, what is known as the confession of Peter. In the face of multiple opinions about Our Lord, Simon, son of Jonah, confesses what we know to be the truth of the identity of Our Lord, He is the anointed one – what Christ means – and he is the Son of the Living God.
This confession has various implications for our faith. In the words of Epiphanius the Latin, “If Christ is the Son of God, by all means he is also God. If he is not God, he is not the Son of God.” The confession of Peter, therefore, is the admission of the divinity of Our Lord, and a testament to the relationship between Our Lord and God the Father. You can see here, already the dawning on the apostle that God is one but composed of multiple persons.
If Our Lord is God, then he is not, unlike what the people then, and some today, say, merely a prophet, or a good man, or a great teacher. This is to say, Our Lord cannot be compared with other figures to whom divinity is attributed, or for whom it is claimed. This is because there is one God, and He has but one Son (1 Cor 8:6). It follows, therefore, that divinity is attributed to these other figures mistakenly.
Our Lord’s response to Peter is also critical in understanding what Peter says,
Blessed are you, Simon son of
Jonah.
For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father.
In other words, Peter’s confession was not the result of any human wisdom, or insight. This knowledge of Our Lord’s identity was revealed to Peter. Catholic theology recognizes that while it is possible, through natural means, to recognize the existence of God, it is only through revelation that we are able to know His identity – One God in Three Persons. As the Catechism (§237) teaches us:
his inmost Being as Holy Trinity is a mystery that is inaccessible to reason alone or even to Israel's faith before the Incarnation of God's Son and the sending of the Holy Spirit.
Our Lord then goes on to say:
… you are Peter,
and upon this rock I will build my church
We often believe that Our Lord was referring to Peter as the rock on which He will build His church, and this would not be an error in understanding. However, it would also be appropriate to recognize that “this rock” that Our Lord refers to is not Peter per se, but the confession of Peter. It is on this confession of the identity of Our Lord that the Church is built. The Church is Our Lord’s and it is the union of those who confess His divinity.
It is this confession that is the key to heaven. In other words, those who do not recognize Our Lord as the Christ, the Son of God the Father, who came down from heaven, died for our sins, was resurrected, then ascended into heaven, is seated at the right of the Father and will come, at the end of time, to judge the living and the dead, do not have the capacity to enter heaven.
One final word; the word confession is also the name given to the tomb of the apostle – we have the confessio of St. Peter, in the famous basilica in Rome which holds his remains, the confessio of St. Paul also in the same city. This name of the structure offers us a powerful lesson, that it was not just with his tongue that St. Peter confessed the divinity of Our Lord. He confessed this truth with his body, even unto a painful death. He confessed that Our Lord is the “Christ, the Son of the living God” with his entire body and through the rest of his life. In other words, he embodied his confession. It was not just cheap words, but he incarnated those words, that confession, in his own flesh.
It was because St. Peter, and all the other apostles, believed in this confession that they were able to give up their lives for Our Lord. They knew that the life we look forward to is not life in our material bodies on this compromised earth, but life in our immortal and glorified bodies in the heavenly Jerusalem. There is no other way that these men would have been able to suffer deprivation, and torture, in addition to painful martyrdom, if they did not participate in this confession of Peter.
And so, my dear brothers let us build our own faith, on the rock-like faith of Peter and repeat his words (Jn 6: 68-69):
Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life,
and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end; Amen.
(A version of this homily was first preached at the Children’s Mass at the parish church of Our Lady of the Rosary, Caranzalem, on 23 Aug 2026.)
(Image reference: Christ Giving the Keys to St Peter (detail), Bernardo Castello, 1598, The Louvre.)
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