Our readings this week are 1 John 4:1-6 and Matthew 16.13–20.

This little snippet from Matthew contains one of my very favourite Greek verbs, ‘luo’.  I love it because it brings together in one word two ideas that seem very different, but between which you can sense a connection.  The first is ‘to untie’ or ‘set free’, the second is ‘to destroy’ or ‘to abolish’.  Context often makes clear which is meant.  In Matthew 21, for instance, when Jesus sends his disciples to find a donkey that is tied up, he obviously asks them to ‘untie it’, not to ‘destroy it’ – that would be a very different story!

Here though, there is some ambiguity.  Does Jesus simply say to Peter, ‘Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven’, or is there also an undertone of, ‘and whatever you destroy on earth will be destroyed in heaven’?  Does the second half just offer a counterpoint to the first, or does it also reinforce it?

The traditional understanding of this verse tends to hear only the former.  It reads this verse to mean that Jesus hands to Peter (and through him to the church) the authority to declare what is forbidden, and what is permissible; what is damnable, and what forgivable.  In short, to decide who gets in, and who gets left out.  It is a grand and far-reaching power, and therefore one it’s understandable any institution would like to have.  

With great power, though, comes great responsibility – and when I look over the history of the church, I’m not sure that its power has always been used responsibly.  Banning books, excommunications, inquisitions, conversion therapies…  do these things hold any hints of liberation, or are they acts of destruction?  Was the authority to do these things, and – worse – to declare them right, really what Jesus was handing over?

When I consider Jesus’ life, I see a liberating approach towards the Law, and a radical inclusion of the unclean and the sinner in preference to the self-righteous and religious.  As a consequence, I find it hard to believe that he ever intended to create an autocratic institution with the authority to arbitrarily and legalistically bind and destroy people’s attitudes, interactions, and lives.  It seems to me he stood against power structures precisely when they were doing just that.

So I think of this as a warning, and I think it’s a warning we still need to heed.  Maybe we can read, ‘I will give to you the keys of the Kingdom of the Heavens, but beware.  What you do with them has real consequences: they come with an extraordinary power to set free, but if abused they also have the power to bind and to destroy.  And whatever you bind upon the earth, and whatever you destroy upon the earth, will be bound and destroyed in heaven too. Things, and people, may be lost.’

It is not, ‘You can choose who is right, and who to send to the stake’; it is, ‘You’d better get this right – lives are at stake’.  It is a calling to service, not judgement.

To hear these words of Christ afresh - both as individuals and as the church - can be to hear a call to repentance.  It is an invitation to examine with serious intention the consequences of the judgements we make, and the attitudes we carry.   It is to ask: where am I bringing destruction? Where, instead, might I join Jesus’ work of setting free?