Entrusted with keys

“I will give you the keys of the kingdom …” – Matthew 16:19

I clearly remember when I held in my hand, for the first time, a most precious set of keys! What an incredible feeling of power, elevated status and sweet freedom came over me when my grandpa placed in my hand the keys to my first car! It was as if I had been given wings to fly!

It was a beautiful car, a mint condition brown 1972 Chrysler Cordoba with rich Corinthian leather, which my grandparents had driven for 14 years. It didn’t matter to me how old it was; it had a big powerful engine, power windows and power steering! It was awesome! But it wasn’t just the car, it was the “keys,” and all that those keys represented.

You probably have a set of keys with you now. Each one of those keys represents something; a relationship to somebody or something, or some level of responsibility! To a great extent keys represent trust. I was entrusted with keys from Gramps and it was amazing!

In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus entrusted Peter with the “keys” of the kingdom of heaven. The word for keys in Greek literally means the keys that lock or unlock. But similar to my experience with the keys to my first car, in the New Testament “keys” are a metaphor for power, authority and responsibility.

Do you remember when you entrusted the keys to your car for the first time to a friend or one of your kids? How did you feel? Did you have a wave of anxiety come over you – as you thought of your insurance premiums doubling if they got in an accident? Did you have a few concerns, “Can they handle it without misusing the power, authority and the responsibility that comes with the keys?”

I think Christians through the centuries have not always handled the “keys” of the kingdom very well. We who call ourselves Christians can be very good at making Jesus look a lot more like us than looking like the Jesus of the gospels. We often mistake our conjured up images of Jesus for reality. How many times has Jesus been recreated and reshaped by forces of human insecurity and the thirst for power and control? Oh, what a great temptation to recreate Jesus in our image.

Looking at the history of Christianity we see a shocking and dreadful landscape littered with the victims of those who have named Jesus as Lord – but what kind of Lord did they recreate and reshape him to be? J. Holub says, “Christians have used Jesus to distort people with guilt, bigotry, intolerance and anger.

“In Jesus’ name, Christians practiced slavery, defended segregation and approved lynching. In Jesus’ name, children have been abused, women diminished, the LGBT community hated, wars waged, the unrepentant condemned even tortured and executed; Jews and Muslims persecuted, doubters excommunicated and violence used to achieve conversion – all seemingly without care or conscience and often in the name of Jesus.”

Sadly, Christian history has too many distorted images of Jesus. Mahatma Gandhi once said, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

I wonder what the Jesus that lived and walked this earth 2,000 years ago would think if he were to return today and look around at the images of himself by the wide variety of expressions and manifestations of Christianity down through the ages. What would Jesus think?

The main idea behind the “keys” is entrusting authority and power from Jesus to the disciples and ultimately to us. But what kind of power and authority is it to be? That’s the question. What kind of power are we, you and I, entrusted with as disciples and followers of Jesus? What kind of power and authority are we to put to work for the sake of the kingdom of God in the name of Jesus? (In our families, work places, relationships, community and world.)

Let’s look at our Scripture again. These “keys” that Jesus entrusted to Peter only came after a question and a confession. “Who do people say that the Son of man is?” asked Jesus. That was not only Jesus’ question of the disciples, but it was also a heated debate in the early Christian community in the decades immediately after Jesus’ earthly life. One of the primary places that debate and that discussion took place was in the synagogue. One of the popular notions of the expected Jewish “messiah” was that this messiah would defeat and destroy Israel’s enemies, specifically the Romans. So when Peter blurts out, “You are the messiah,” in response to Jesus’ question, it was a technical term loaded with political expectations of the messiah’s expected victory over the Roman occupation.

It’s no wonder that Peter, as well as many others in the synagogue community after Jesus, simply could not accept the idea that Jesus was going to Jerusalem to die at the hands of Israel’s enemies. The messiah was expected to go to Jerusalem all right – but not to die – but to overthrow the Roman oppressors, not forgive them! “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you!” said a very disillusioned Peter speaking out of his expectations; expectations that were blinding him to see anything new; blinding him from seeing and accepting the authentic Jesus that was standing right there in front of him!

We all live with expectations. We all know about the power of expectations. For the most part, expectations are a very good thing because they raise the bar and challenge us to new heights of accomplishment and fulfillment. But they can also blind us to others if we see others only through the lens of our expectations.

Some progressive theologians say Peter, in this story, functions as a metaphor for that kind of blindness. He couldn’t see the real Jesus right in front of him because that Jesus was not living up to his expectations of whom and what the messiah should be and do. What expectations might you have of Jesus that could be obscuring your view of the Jesus of the gospels?

Matthew tells us that from this time forward Jesus began to explain to his disciples he was headed toward a cross, and so were they if they chose to follow him. As followers of Jesus, the “keys” placed in our hands are the way of the cross. The way of the cross does not “conform” to the conventional power of this world. The conventional power of this world is the power of coercion; power exerted from the outside by a stronger entity over a weaker entity and is often experienced as oppressive.

The way of the cross, the power of sacrificial love, is a love that gives itself freely away and gets inside of people and renews them from the inside out; sets them free; gives them wings to fly to be all they can possibly be. This is the love that the disciples experienced in Jesus, and in which Jesus mentored them, and still mentors us. The power of sacrificial love; the way of the cross; the keys of the kingdom!

How many of you have seen the movie Gandhi? I remember seeing it and I’ll never forget the reaction of the crowd at the end of the movie. First of all, there was a silence, a deep silence in the theater. Second, many people just sat in their seats, not saying a word, after the closing scene of Gandhi’s cremation fire filling the big screen. In the life of this slight man with his spinning wheel, bare feet, passion for peace and passionate opposition to every form of violence, we, in that theater, had gotten a glimpse of something, a glimpse of a kind of life that made every other kind of life seem empty and missing something.

I believe the disciples and early Christian community experienced that kind of vibrant God presence in Jesus and it set them on fire! They understood that his life was about unlocking boundaries. He unlocked boundaries of race and ethnicity. He unlocked forbidden religious boundaries that separated the clean from the unclean, the righteous from the sinners. He unlocked any boundary that dehumanized or diminished another human being. J. Holub said, “The ‘keys’ with which we are entrusted are these special keys of sacrificial love that always focus on building others up, and hence, they are ‘keys’ that unlock rigid boundaries that devalue human beings.”

The “keys” of the kingdom, the way of the cross unlocks forgiveness of enemies and seeks to build bridges with our adversaries.

Jesus unlocked people trapped in the prison of fear and set them free to fulfill their humanity. The way of the cross is a journey out of fear to take risks for love’s sake in this world.

For Peter and for us, the way of the cross is dying to old ways of thinking and living and being reborn into new ways of thinking and living that are firmly grounded in our mentor Jesus and the sacrificial love that was embodied in his life.

The way of the cross is to selflessly put to work, for the sake of others, and for the sake of God’s kingdom the unique gifts, talents and skills with which each of us is blessed.

“I will give you the keys to the kingdom …” These are not merely words spoken to a few disciples of long ago. This is not ancient history, but rather it’s a promise that has been passed down through the centuries, and it flows into our hearts where among us it takes new expression again. In this faith community today this story springs to new life and is re-enacted all over again, and you and I are entrusted with the “keys” – the “keys” of the kingdom.

They have been placed in our hands; in yours and in mine. And the yet to be answered question is, “What are we going to do with them?”

Rev. Dan Koeshall is the senior pastor at The Metropolitan Community Church (The Met), 2633 Denver Street, San Diego, California, themetchurch.org. Services every Sunday at 9 and 11 a.m.