Jesus’ conversation with the disciples at Caesarea Philippi in Matthew 16:13-28 includes eight statements, alternating between Jesus and the disciples:
1. Jesus asks who people think he is
2. Disciples: various answers
3. Jesus: Who do you think I am?
4. Peter’s confession
5. Jesus: build church
6. Peter: God forbid
7. Jesus: Get behind Satan
8. Jesus: life by losing life
This seems to have some connections with the creation week.
Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Anointed One, the Son of the Living God, the New David, is in the “Day 4” slot of the conversation. Jesus is the one who rules from heaven, the Sun and Morning Star. Jesus responds by promising to build the church on the Rock of Peter, and this fits with the gathering of teeming, swarming things on Day 5. Peter’s rebuke to Jesus is an Adamic sin, and Jesus’ return trebuke to Peter as Satan is a Sabbatical judgment, the rebuke that Adam should have issued against Satan in the garden. Finally, Jesus moves beyond the seven-day sequence into an eighth day, a day of new life, where His disciples will find life by losing it.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Rome and the Church in the United States
Archbishop Michael J. Curley of Baltimore, who confirmed my father, was a pugnacious Irishman with a taste…
Marriage Annulment and False Mercy
Pope Leo XIV recently told participants in a juridical-pastoral formation course of the Roman Rota that the…
Undercover in Canada’s Lawless Abortion Industry
On November 27, 2023, thirty-six-year-old Alissa Golob walked through the doors of the Cabbagetown Women’s Clinic in…
