This morning’s Gospel is crucial to understanding our faith as Catholics. In it, we see Jesus using the same language from the old testament that God used when He spoke of giving the fullness kingdom’s authority over to Eli’kim in the book of Isaiah. (Isaiah 22 – around vs 22) What he opens, none shall shut. What he closes non shall open. He says that with this authority comes all of the responsibility of being a father to the people, and their burdens go on his shoulders.
Eliakim was essentially the prime minister of the kingdom of Israel, and here Jesus has made Peter the prime minister of the Church, the prime minister of the kingdom of heaven! So the prime minister acts in the stead of His king, with all the authority and responsibility that comes with that. So these verses and traditions are where we get the office of the Pope, the leader of our faith. This delegation also gives the Church the authority to bind and loosen, establish moral laws and help guide us, as a father does his children.
That’s kind of what I want to focus on this morning—Binding and freeing, opening and closing. Too often, the world and many Catholics see the Church as an angry father figure stamping around, closing doors, and putting up gates just out of spite. The truth is that all of this authority has been established by God as a sheer act of mercy, a grace to guide us towards heaven, and a life of joy and peace.
Here in the Sacraments, our addictions, our inordinate desires, our fallen concupiscence can be healed. Those parts of us that don’t live up to the person God created us to be, the Saint we are supposed to be striving to become, God, can and will bind if we let Him. He’ll open the floodgates of love in our hearts, giving us eyes to see the world with His vision and not our own. It’s not about binding the things we enjoy; rather, it’s about freeing the grace of God in our hearts until it overwhelms us and transforms us into a more perfect image of Him in the world.
It’s up to each one of us to place those things we want to be freed from at the feet of Jesus. So we are bringing our struggles and successes, our good and our bad, to Him who can bind and loosen in the Sacraments of the Church. And if we believe that, with all our hearts, shouldn’t we tell others about it? Love doesn’t hide such a gift of grace but speaks to others about the healing power of confession and the beauty and splendor of receiving Jesus’ body, blood, soul, and divinity in the Eucharist! And it all begins right here, by bringing whatever we need to be healed from to Him at this altar and trusting that the promise He made to Peter still stands today and will stand forever because the Catholic Church is Jesus’ Church, established by, for and through Him, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.
A reflection on the readings for Thursday of the Eighteenth Week in Ordinary Time: August 5th, 2021