Upon This Rock: Stewardship and Power

Twenty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time — Year A Readings: Isaiah 22:19–23 · Psalm 138:1–3, 6, 8 · Romans 11:33–36 · Matthew 16:13–20 Today the Church places before us four readings that, taken together, form one of the most searching examinations of power that Scripture offers us. We hear of a steward removed from office for betraying his trust, a psalmist who sings of a God who looks with favor on the lowly, an apostle who breaks into praise before the unsearchable depths of God’s wisdom, and a fisherman named Simon who is handed the keys of a Kingdom that no gate of hell will ever overcome. These are not four unrelated texts stitched together by accident of the lectionary. They are one message, spoken in four voices, and that message is this: all authority belongs first to God, all who exercise it are stewards and not owners, and God hears the cry of those crushed beneath the misuse of that authority. This is a word the whole Church needs to hear today, in every continent, but I do not think I am wrong, my brothers and sisters, to say that it presses upon our African family with particular weight and particular urgency. Brothers and sisters, the keys that Christ gives His Church are not for building tombs on the heights while His people go hungry in the valley. They are for opening doors — the doors of justice, the doors of truth, the doors of bread rightly shared, the doors of a Kingdom where the lowly are regarded and the proud are known from afar and, in the end, brought low. Let us go from here renewed in our confession, with Peter: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And let us go renewed also in our resolve that wherever we have been entrusted with keys — whether the keys of a nation, a ministry, a business, a classroom, or simply a household — we will hold them as Eliakim held his: as a father and a mother to those who depend on us, a peg in a sure place, and never, God helping us, as Shebna held his — for the glory of a tomb that will not save us.