Saints Peter and Paul, Apostles (29.06.14)
It’s well known that headlines sell Newspapers. Headlines are designed to capture our attention and, in national daily papers, are disproportionately large to catch our eye. A successful headline writer is a treasure for the paper’s owners! So what words might successfully capture your attention for today, the Feast Day of Saints Peter and Paul? How about –
UN-ALIKES SHARE MARTYRDOM
Peter and Paul shared little as to their backgrounds. Peter, an experienced fisherman on the Sea of Galilee eked out a living if the fish were catchable. Paul, better known as Saul in the time before his conversion, was by contrast a sophisticated and educated Jewish Pharisee from Jerusalem who held Roman Citizenship, was skilled at Law and probably had money. Their paths were unlikely to have crossed in their early life
Their missionary paths did not often cross either as far as can be determined. Peter preached to the Jews. Paul believed himself called to a missionary among the Gentiles. Yet here they are, despite their contrasting backgrounds, sharing a single Feast Day!
The word that spans their distinctive missionary lives is ‘witness’. Both were exemplary witnesses for Jesus of Nazareth even to the point of laying down their lives for him, as he had done for them and for us. Red vestments are worn by clergy celebrating today because both men are not only Saints, but also Martyrs for the Faith.
The Pope said recently at one of his early morning Masses:
“Martyrdom is the translation of a Greek word that also means witness. And so we can say that for a Christian, the path follows in the footsteps of our first witness, Christ. His are the footsteps in which we walk, bearing witness to Him.
You cannot understand a Christian without being aware of her or his giving witness to Christ. We are not a ‘ religion’ of ideas, of pure theology, beautiful things, of commandments. No, we are a people who follow Jesus Christ by wanting to bear personal witness, and sometimes this witness leads to laying down our lives.
Witness, be it in everyday life, in difficulties, and even in persecution and death, always bears fruit. The Church is fruitful and a mother when she witnesses to Jesus Christ. Instead, when the church closes in on herself, when she thinks of herself as a, so to speak, ‘school of religion’, with so many great ideas, with many beautiful temples, with many fine museums, with many beautiful things, but does not give witness, the Church becomes sterile. The Christian is the same. The Christian who does not bear witness, is sterile, without giving the life he or she has received from Jesus Christ”. Pope Francis.
Perhaps, in the west, Catholics grew up in a Church that, having suffered through one hundred and fifty years of, quite often, bloody persecution believed that conformity with the State, a sort of blending-in, and even uniformity within its own ranks was necessary. The process of ‘blending in’ can be the antithesis of witness as can rigid uniformity of discipline.
Proper names often have special associations. Some folk, hearing mention of St Peter, think instinctively of popes and bishops, the Vatican Basilica and Rome. When St. Matthew composed the Gospel passage we read today (16: 13-19) he wouldn’t have been thinking of popes or bishops or the Vatican! Such associations were unknown to him and had no place in his theology. So when we hear these words from Matthew’s Gospel we need to adjust our understanding if we are to hear them in context.
Matthew was writing for Jewish/Christians who were the early Christians. These Jews faithfully went to the synagogue each Sabbath, observed Kosher laws and still felt obligated to keep all the 613 precepts of the Mosaic Law. With their emerging belief in Jesus of Nazareth, they straddled both the old and new Covenants and that could be compared to simultaneously facing in different directions, the unchanging past and the unchartered future. They also appeared to be one of the last biblical communities who were expecting Jesus’ Second Coming to take place in the relative near future. They would never have believed that in AD 2014 we are still a people in waiting!
It’s Peter’s recorded words that give us an idea of the status of his belief in Jesus. When Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” His disciples list famous Jewish people of the past – “Elijah, Jeremiah or one of the prophets”. Peter, on the other hand, identifies Jesus with the present and the future – “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” In contemporary language this transcribes as, roughly, “You are someone whom nobody has ever experienced before.”
When the opportunity presents itself do we ‘explain’ our Catholicism as something of history – “Well, I was Baptised as a baby …”? Do we leave others with the impression that our faith in Jesus is more in our past than in our present and future? It’s worth stopping to reflect on what witness we give. A truthful answer may be uncomfortable!
Peter’s declaration of faith in Jesus (in today’s Gospel) triggers Jesus’ next statement: “Jesus said to Peter in reply, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah. For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father.
And so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.
I will give you the keys to the Kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
Peter’s declaration of faith in Jesus enables Jesus both to identify Peter as God the Father’s anointed ‘foundation rock’ of the nascent Church and to confirm that appointment. All this before Peter will deny knowing Jesus, under the pressure of questioning, in the High Priest’s garden! Like Peter, we pray the Creed with our brothers and sisters at Mass. Like Peter, we do not always live up to the faith in Jesus we profess in the Creed. Please God, like Peter, we find the grace of reconciliation and thereby recover our pilgrim path.
For Saul, become Paul the Apostle of Jesus Christ, there was both change and continuity. The change is summed up by saying that this onetime, dedicated and fearless persecutor of Christians became, in a quite remarkable about-face, one of the foremost promoters of Christianity. The continuity showed itself in the total dedication Saul-become-Paul gave to what he believed to be the right thing to do.
Compromise appears as something entirely foreign to Paul’s conscience; black was black and white was white. Consequently his witness to Jesus was without compromise and, for some Jewish Christians, this starkness was worrying. It was clearly no cause of concern for Jesus who chose Paul, on that Damascus Road, in a singularly unique manner for ministry and martyrdom.
Likewise, today, Jesus can call the most unlikely persons to ministry. Unlikely, that is, to their kith and kin, their workmates and contemporaries. But then, do we really know the depths of another? Heaven help us, we don’t even know our own depths!
St. John XXlll, he who called the Council of the Church we know as Vatican 2, whose genuine smile was so welcome after the taciturn features of Pope Pius Xll, is reported to have said. “Well, look at me large and well rounded with a passion for polenta! God must have known I would be elected Pope. You’d have thought he would have done something about my overweightness!”
Some fifteen years before the composition of the first Gospel, St. Paul, in his first letter to his Corinthian converts recalls what had been revealed to him by Jesus whom he had met with such drama on the Damascus Road: “…that Jesus was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures; that he appeared to Kephas (Peter), then to the Twelve.”
That early meeting between the Risen Lord and Peter must have been an early celebration of Reconciliation. It is possible that through the centuries people have attached too much of their faith to the Church’s hierarchical structure and an airbrushed presentation of biblical ancestors who, with the sole exception of Mary, were recovering sinners just like us.
Giving witness to Jesus is not reserved for spiritual Olympians. It is for the rank and file Baptised. Each has a role, unique and essential, as a living stone or maybe just a chip of stone in the living edifice that is the visible Body of Christ, The Church on Earth. The crucial thing is that we should not rule ourselves out when Jesus is just biding his time to greet us on our Damascus Road!