When Jesus said, “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church,” we learned last month that he was claiming the intentional communities he was founding were to be the new Temple, built, not on the famous “rock” at the foundation of the Temple in Jerusalem, but on the new “Rock,” Peter. And this, as you might imagine, was a pretty controversial thing to say.
The Temple was the central socio-political symbol and institution of Israel in Jesus’ day. It’s where the whole covenant that God had made with his people was acted out in its daily, weekly and yearly round of sacrifices, festivals, worship and prayers. It was the “source and summit” of the observance of the law, the place of official teaching and ritual worship. It was the seat of the political and social leadership of Israel, in the same way that the White House in Washington, D.C., stands, not for a house, but for the present socio-political-economic regime. Throughout Jesus’ period, those jockeying for political authority in Israel, like the revolutionaries we’ve mentioned before, whenever they could, took possession of the Temple, and spoke from there. And the Temple was, finally and most importantly, the place where God had promised he would dwell. It was the meeting place of heaven and Earth, the house of Yahweh. The topic of the Temple is central to the socio-political relevance of Jesus and the Gospels.
For when Jesus, speaking of Peter, says “on this rock I will build my ecclesia,” he is really saying something quite radical. Peter had just confessed that Jesus was the Messiah, the God-anointed king. Now Jesus says that, as many expected, just like the king David had, the new king would build the new Temple. By claiming that the communities he was founding were this Temple, Jesus is reorienting the social and political world of Israel and claiming that it really centers around him. However much it might look like the real power locus is in Jerusalem, in fact God is working somewhere different. The kingdom was here, the new age was dawning, a new covenant was being made, and part of that newness was that this central locus of God’s people was being re-focused.
The Temple had been good, founded by God and at one time filled with divine power and presence. But now everything that it stood for was coming to its fulfilment, precisely in the communities of Jesus the Messiah. Everything that had been important about the Temple — the sacrifices, God’s presence, the locus and leadership of God’s people in the world, the center from where true Law was kept and went forth — all these things of which the Temple had been a symbol were now finding their reality in the Jesus movement.
Because the Temple was the political center of the current regime, this counter-Temple message would get Jesus in a lot of trouble with the powers that be. It’s no coincidence that two of the legal charges leveled against him when he was on trial for his life before Pilate were that he spoke against the Temple and that he was stirring up the people to revolt. Both of these charges were only half-truths, but we can now see where the true half comes from. Jesus had started a grassroots movement of peasants who thought of themselves in some way as an alternative to the present Temple. But this meant that they were also a kind of rival to the present political regime. Jesus was preaching a kingdom, and that indeed was what he had founded. However small, (and as we’ll see) nonviolent, and nonmilitarized it was, this could be — and was — seen as treason. These were capital charges, relevant to a capital case like his.
All this history helps us see the way that the Church doesn’t just have, but is, a social teaching, from its very beginning. Church is a particular way of being in the world, a way that, for us as much as for Jesus, means that we are socially and politically engaged whether we want to be or not, simply by being the Church. If you are in the world, you are always taking a position on fundamental issues, by the way you live your life. Jesus offers his followers a real alternative, in a living community, and this will always be controversial.
Miller is the director of the Center for Catholic Social Thought at Assumption in St. Paul. He is the author of “We Are Only Saved Together: Living the Revolutionary Vision of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement.”
