The Gates of the Kingdom Open Outward (Matthew 16)
The words of Jesus in the New Testament repeatedly include two terms that each refer to a divinely ordered realm. The two terms are “heaven” (see Matthew 6:20, Matthew 24:35, and many other verses) and “kingdom” (see Luke 12:31, John 18:36, and many other verses). The latter term is frequently expressed as “kingdom of God” or “kingdom of heaven,” but Jesus uses the phrases interchangeably (see Matthew 19:23-24), so “kingdom” is a shorthand for either or both of these phrases.
Of the two terms, “heaven” is the one that is widely understood, even though we know we cannot visualize the place to which it refers. God’s “kingdom” is the term less well understood, and in need of definition. Yet the very fact that there is ambiguity to both terms (even though it’s a different ambiguity for each) leaves room to conflate them. We hear “kingdom of God” or “kingdom of heaven,” and we might imagine heaven itself. But one thing the words of Jesus do make clear is that these two realms are different. The terms have two distinct meanings, different from one another.
This is perhaps most clear in a single sentence of the Lord’s Prayer, the prayer Jesus taught to his disciples. One line of that prayer says:
Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. —Matthew 6:10
God’s kingdom, earth, and heaven are all present in this one sentence. And the logic of this sentence makes clear that Jesus must have regarded them as three different things.
Different how? We can see an answer in this sentence as well. Earth and heaven each appears in this line as a place. One can locate there. One is “on” earth, or one is “in” heaven, according to the prayer.
Meanwhile, the kingdom of God comes. It advances, apparently. It moves, and the directionality of this movement is an approach or an advance from the perspective of one praying on earth. In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus asks his disciples to ask God to advance his kingdom, the realm he rules, across more and more of the earth.
Many have the Lord’s Prayer committed to memory. Many churchgoers speak aloud a version of the prayer weekly. The fact that the prayer has this information content does not necessarily occur to us. Yet the detail in this one sentence about the nature of the “kingdom” is valuable, because Jesus goes on to reveal how God is answering the appeal from this line of the prayer.
Peter Is Changed
The exchange in which Jesus reveals the prayer’s answer happens much later in the same gospel. In a scene in Matthew chapter 16, Simon Peter, the apostle who must have been one of those to whom Jesus taught his prayer, is suddenly discovered to have been changed. That is, changed in what he sees and understands. Simon so clearly recognizes something about the kingdom—namely, the nature of the one at the center of it—that he shines out as the first in Jesus’ ministry to become a subject or citizen of that kingdom.
The kingdom thus advances by adding him. He transforms into an agent of further advance.
(A giant asterisk before we proceed further: The very first person in the New Testament to recognize the coming kingdom and become an agent of its advance would seem to be Mary. Peter is simply the first in Jesus’ ministry.)
The passage in which Simon Peter has this insight is, like the Lord’s Prayer, also among the better known and often-cited passages of the gospels. I want to quote that passage in full, then examine details. Here is the entire passage:
When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?”
And they said, “Some say John the Baptist; others, Elijah; still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
“But you,” he asked them, “who do you say that I am?”
Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
And Jesus responded, “Simon son of Jonah, you are blessed because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my father in heaven. And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the forces of Hades will not overpower it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth is already bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth is already loosed in heaven.” —Matthew 16:13-19
In short, Simon Peter awakened to the crazy, impossible, meta-logical, once-in-a-universe fact that God was living as a man, and Jesus was that man.
As Jesus made clear, there is no earthly way for Peter to have come to recognize this. There is no way for deductive logic based on perceivable evidence to sum to this conclusion, or bridge the distance to this fact. God gave Peter what Peter knew about God. As Jesus said, “Simon … you are blessed because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my father in heaven.”
You are blessed, Jesus said. Peter’s belief was the identifying mark of one who is in the kingdom. The apostle Paul would echo this means of identification in writing to come later. How does one know he or she is in the kingdom? Paul answered: Through belief, through the discovery of a belief that has become plainly apparent, a belief in something others ignore or discount—that Jesus rules creation, and as a man he rose from the dead (Romans 10:9).
Peter was blessed: He was part of the advancing kingdom, seemingly its first new subject among the disciples traveling with Jesus, and this was enough to kickstart the kingdom and get its movement underway.
Jesus said, “On this rock I will build my church.” (Peter is a nickname translating to stone or rock.) Millions of stones would follow upon this first one, building a stone fortification, the moving and growing stone fortification that is the means of the kingdom’s advance. Jesus would later personally and bodily demonstrate the point that the forces of Hades will not overpower it. “Hades,” distinct from hell, is a specific term referring to the realm of death. (The discussion of Matthew 11:23 in this essay has more.) Death, in other words, will not prevail. Death destroys everything on earth, but it will not win against this advancing kingdom—the kingdom that, again, at this point in the history conveyed by Matthew’s gospel, has but a single new citizen.
The Work of the Keyholder
And significantly, that new citizen is not in heaven. We are back to the differences between these realms. Simon Peter is in the kingdom of God, but he is on earth. He is not done on earth—he has work to do. This work, the work of the kingdom of God, brings heaven and earth together, according to the Lord’s Prayer. Here the Lord is now answering the prayer by working through the pray-er. The man who can see the kingdom now also will see how the work of the kingdom should proceed.
The prayer says, “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Here now is the fulfillment: Jesus says to Simon Peter, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth is already bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth is already loosed in heaven.”
The way things are in heaven, where God absolutely rules and things are ordered the right way—you will begin to see this arrangement, and you will begin to order things in that same way on earth, too.
Peter will get his specific assignment later. It comes in Matthew 28:19 and John 21:17. But ahead of that, he gets this initial picture of how the work will proceed. Peter has been changed: Flesh and blood, his mortal perception and thinking, could not have brought him to the insight he now has. That insight will continue to serve him in the way he now goes, the work he now performs, the work of advancing the kingdom.
And the worker has these keys, says Jesus, the keys of the kingdom of heaven. A metaphorical key ring is at Peter’s belt, jingling as he proceeds.
As we have seen, the kingdom of heaven and heaven itself are separate. So that means these keys given to Peter are specifically not keys to heaven. They are keys to another divinely ordered realm.
And this realm, the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God, is advancing. “Your kingdom come.”
Peter has keys to it. Presumably others after him have similar keys. What do the keys do? Not unlock a stationary place far away, because our prayer to God, taught by Jesus, makes clear that the kingdom is not stationary; it is coming.
The kingdom is coming and the keys unlock it. The church has been given these keys, and they are keys to letting free the kingdom for more of its advance across the world.
These gates that the metaphoric keys to the kingdom open, these keys that release something against which Hades cannot stand: There is something fundamental about the working of these gates that we can piece together from the clues we have been given here, something basic yet profound.
The simple fact is this: It must be that these gates Peter was given the first capacity to unlock do not open in upon a distant, unearthly place. It must instead be the case that the gates of the kingdom of heaven open outward—out upon the world.
Photo: “CAUTION gate opens outwards” by Gordon Joly