NOTES for Mat 16:13-19
Peter's confession is one of the key Gospel episodes. Not only because here Peter recognizes Jesus as the Messiah for the first time, but also because at the very moment of this recognition he becomes the head of the apostolic community. Everything is logical: the one who first recognized the Messiah as the Messiah becomes the head. And yet there is something more here, something that cannot be reduced to a confession as a verbal formula.
There is precisely recognition, encounter, realization. It is no accident that the conversation begins with the Savior's question about who people consider Him to be. The answer gives the whole set of traditional cliches of that time: John the Baptist risen from the dead, Elijah come down from heaven, one of the ancient prophets whom God had raised to bear witness to the truth. Only not the Messiah: in this respect, the Savior's whole earthly path refuted the common ideas of traditional popular religiosity.
Remaining within those ideas, it was impossible to take Him for the Messiah. To recognize Him precisely as the Messiah, one had simply to look at Him, face to face, without any preassigned "points of view," without looking back at all the traditional views, models, and concepts. What was needed was the purity of direct perception, when the one who, or the thing that, stands before you is perceived directly, in a single whole act of will, without reflection, without looking back at all the "baggage" accumulated over a long life.
This was revelation, a moment of truth familiar to everyone who has seriously sought the truth. To see the person standing before you in this way, one had to find oneself in another reality. Or rather, in the fullness of reality, for the Kingdom is nothing other than the fullness of the reality of God's great world, opened to a person as much as he can contain it.
In such fullness, and only in it, can one see the Messiah as the Messiah. This is not a confession of Christ's divine-human nature, as is sometimes thought; there is no assertion here of any theological concepts at all. There is simply the Encounter. It was an encounter with Christ in the fullness of His person, and therefore in divine-human fullness, but there was none of the theological reflection that gives rise to doctrinal formulas.
Such an experience makes a person a follower of the Messiah, bringing him into the life of the Kingdom, and therefore Peter becomes the head of the apostolic community. Of course, not by inheritance: such an experience cannot be passed on to anyone; one can only bear witness to it, while each person must live through it for himself if he wants to become the successor of the apostle Peter not by status, but by spirit. In the same way, every Christian must live through it, if he wants to become a Christian not only in words but in deed, to become a follower of the Messiah and a citizen of the Kingdom.