We Are the Keys

I could not listen to today’s first reading without recalling what is happening in our country at this time. We are watching families torn apart by mass deportations that don’t target the “worst of the worst,” but sweep up law-abiding, tax-paying neighbors who have been here for years. We are watching a war of choice grind on with no end in sight. And into that moment comes this reading, in which God removes a corrupt steward, Shebna, and replaces him with Eliakim — a leader described as “a father to the people,” someone who will carry the “key of the House of David” on his shoulder and open doors that no one can shut.

God cared then and cares now about who holds the keys. We have a responsibility — not a suggestion, a responsibility — to elect and support leaders who are principled, honest, and compassionate: leaders who will craft immigration policy with some measure of reason and mercy, who will work to close the widening gap between those who have and those who don’t, who will serve the common good rather than their own profit. God works for his people, today, through the choices we make and the leaders we call to account.

That’s the first key in today’s readings. Here comes the second.

In the Gospel, Peter doesn’t recite an answer he memorized in Catechism class. Jesus asks, “Who do you say that I am?” and Peter answers from someplace deeper than memory: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” That’s not a report of what he’s been told. That’s a confession of what he believes — and that belief is what allows God to work through Peter, the same way God worked through Jesus.

Notice how Jesus responds. He doesn’t say, “Correct — here’s your prize.” He says something much bigger: that Peter’s faith is the rock on which Jesus will build a community of believers — a community that feeds the hungry, shelters the homeless, welcomes the stranger, gives drink to the thirsty, comforts the sorrowing. A community that carries on the mission Jesus entrusted to his disciples in every age. Peter’s faith becomes our faith. And our faith, lived out, is how we join God in building a more just world.

But let’s be honest about who Peter was. This same Peter denied Jesus three times. Jesus himself, elsewhere, calls him a “stumbling block” and a man of “little faith.” Peter was not the strongest candidate in the room. And that is exactly the point. We are Peter. Our faith is rarely great and never perfect — and God calls us anyway. Our little faith was enough for God to build a Church on. It will have to be enough for us to build the little corner of the world that’s ours to build.

We are Peter. Our faith is rarely great and never perfect — and God calls us anyway.

And then Jesus hands Peter the keys. If you’re anything like me, you don’t think much about your keys until you’ve lost them — which, I’ll admit, happens to me more than it should. We can treat God the same way: background noise, until a crisis breaks through — a death we didn’t see coming, a relationship that falls apart, a serious diagnosis, a lost job, an eviction notice. In those moments, faith is what tells us that our security doesn’t ultimately rest in our own hands. It rests in God’s. And God speaks the final word only on the other side of death — a word of love greater than anything we’ve known, and a joy that will never run out.

I want to leave you with this: we are God’s keys. We can unlock our hearts and let love out into the world, or we can lock down our hearts with hatred, greed, and self-interest — and every time we lock down our hearts, we open the door for sin to come into our world. So let us resolve, this week, to be the keys God is calling us to be. Like Peter — flawed and afraid, but faithful anyway — may we unlock our hearts and let God keep doing, through us, the work of healing, forgiveness, and hope that our wounded world still needs.

At this table, we become what we receive: the Body of Christ. So that Christ’s work of unlocking hearts doesn’t end with us — it continues, table by table, door by door, until the whole world is unlocked.