The gates of Hades will not prevail - a sermon for the Solemnity of Peter and Paul, Apostles

Just over a year ago, I joined the Bishop of Southwark and a number of other curates on a visit to the Holy Land. On one of the afternoons, we went to the very spot where today’s Gospel is set – Caesarea Philippi. This site, at the foot of Mount Hermon and about thirty miles from the Sea of Galilee, is now little more than few old caves and a sparklingly clear river, the main inhabited area destroyed in the Six Day War of 1967. It is tempting to see this now picturesque, bucolic, and rather deserted location as the backdrop for Peter’s unusually perceptive declaration that Jesus truly was ‘the Messiah, the Son of the living God’, but whilst that would make a good Disney version of the Gospels, nothing could be further from the truth. For at the time Our Lord walked on the Earth, Caesarea Philippi was an awful lot more than a beauty spot.

 

Caesarea Philippi was very much the administrative capital of the local area, and – as its name suggests – Caesarea – it was very much a place of Roman imperial domination and powerful control. The spot where Peter made his declaration is thought to have been just outside the city, in an area densely populated with temples to pagan gods and idols. Amongst those areas was a cave dedicated to the pagan god Pan, and this cave was thought to be the very Gate of Hades itself. This was a place of fear – a place where the gods’ perniciousness and power was keenly felt. Herod the Great even constructed a temple to Caesar Augustus here. So it was here, betwixt earthly and so-called heavenly power and authority, that Peter’s declaration of faith in the One whose sonship was truly from heaven was made. You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God – and it is on this declaration, on this true rock of faithful flesh and blood, that the church is built. Here, amongst the temples made by man to earthly things, Jesus replies to Peter – the gates of Hades will not prevail against my church – and gives to him and to all the successors of the apostles the keys of the kingdom of heaven, with the true responsibility to bind and loose.

 

Yet we cannot think now of the Holy Land without thinking of the violence and division that mars that holy place, where neither Palestinian nor Israeli can live in peace. It is easy, too, of course, to see division and violence only in faraway places, yet in our own land and in our wider church, too, we cannot ignore the reality of divisiveness, anger and hatred arbitrarily whipped up in order to divide and conquer. In the world of politics, people identified as different – as ‘other’ – are made to carry the can of societal dis-ease, with political platforms being built on the backs of dead asylum seekers in the English channel and the return of openly crass racist language into public life. In the Church, Epistles of Doom are sent by those who have always held the power, with threats made to destroy the fabric of the Church of England if any of us dare to bless two people who happen to love one another. Love and faith are elbowed out of the way by division and anger – scapegoats are found, fear and anxiety are promoted as social norms, and our world and our church cries out in pain disguised as victory. Our world, our church, both are fearful, both are anxious. Both are deeply in need of God’s grace.

 

In his message to the diocese during Holy Week this year, Bishop Christopher called us away from our church’s institutional anxiety. This institutional anxiety, he said, reduces our capacity to be joyful, and our commitment to justice. It eats away at our hope and coarsens our love. It undermines community. If we allow it to prevail, then we run the risk of saying that God himself is somehow insufficient – and allow ourselves to worry that it is we who need to make up the difference. If we are institutionally anxious when we should be outward-focused, we become suspicious, rendering ourselves unable to receive the world as the good gift from God that it is. Both tendencies, said our Father in God, are destructive – both stop us from flourishing the way that God intends.

 

So my brothers and sisters, whilst we may live in a world that is all-too-often tempted by the destructive and the divisive, it does not need to be this way. There is a Balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole – there’s power enough in heaven to cure a sin-sick soul. That balm is freely offered to you and to me, to the church, to the world. Yet we must commit ourselves, day after day after day, to choose the path of peace, the way of love – commit ourselves to being grafted into the olive tree of God and to working for peace through justice in our church and in our world. We must commit ourselves to solidarity with the oppressed, to celebrating the extraordinary beauty found in the diversity of God’s holy world. We must commit ourselves to serving God’s world and worshipping not the power and authority of this world with its gods of fear and division, but instead join with Peter, declaring before the God of the universe ‘you are the Messiah, the Son of the living God’.

 

For we know that God is enough – God’s grace is enough – Our Lord’s death on the cross is enough – God’s life is enough. We know that this is more true than the lies of hate and wrong that are sold to us in the clothing of worldly salvation. In the final reckoning, however much we human beings seem intent on hatred and division and violence and greed and all the sins that continue to invade our hearts and minds, the gates of Hades cannot – may not – will not prevail. For the Lord has built His church on a rock and not on sand – he has built you and me and the entire Kingdom of the Father on a rock – and He will not allow that holy Kingdom to fail.

 

He will not allow our hope to be imprisoned – like St Peter, our hope will be rescued from the hands of all those who try to bind it in chains. He will not allow our justice to be locked away – for like the stream that gently flows from the spring at Caesarea Philippi, and becomes the mighty River Jordan, God’s justice, too, must roll down like waters, and the righteousness of God like an ever-flowing stream. You and I – we together, as God’s people – are called to play our part in the fulfilment of God’s purposes here on earth, loosing those things God calls loose and binding up those things that God binds.

 

The gates of Hades will not prevail. My friends, believe it. Live like you believe it. Let us together let go of the fear and the worry about the future of the church and the world and live into the future that God has declared in the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven, built on the foundation of hope.

 

As Pope St John XXIII, successor to the Prince of the Apostles himself, wrote in his extraordinary Encyclical, Pacem in Terris, (peace on earth):

 

May Christ inflame the desires of us all to break through the barriers which divide us, to strengthen the bonds of mutual love, to learn to understand one another, and to pardon and forgive those who have done us wrong. Through His power and inspiration may all peoples welcome each other to their hearts as brothers and sisters, and may the peace we long for ever flower and ever reign among us.

 

For the Christ that we serve is the Messiah, the Son of the living God, and he has anointed us to preach the Gospel to the whole world – and to live it right here, right now, day after day after day, until He calls the whole world to himself and ushers in the hope to which you – and I – we, together, are called. And when the roll is called up yonder, we’ll be there.