Paying (Honor to) Peter and Paul: 29 June

On the twenty-ninth of June the Church celebrates the Apostles, Peter and Paul. Theirs is one of the few solemn feasts that actually overtake the current Sunday in Ordinary Time when it so falls, and with good reason. Peter and Paul are the greatest of the Apostles. Their lives and deaths provide the foundation for the early Church, of which you and I are the inheritors. Today’s feast allows us to see them in all their humanity—which is precisely how Jesus called them. Through them we see what humanity can accomplish when it is united to the divinity of Christ, who humbled Himself to share in our humanity.

First we encounter Jesus in conversation with Peter. At this point, Peter is feeling the wounds of his own humanity: he, who once professed Jesus as the Messiah, who had the momentary faith to walk on water with Him, who in his bravado said that he would die for his Master, has since denied his acquaintance with Jesus three times. Peter and his fishing buddies-turned-disciples have just spent a day on the lake, catching nothing but grief. The risen Jesus appears to them offshore and furnishes a huge yield of fish. If I were Peter, I might not be filled with gratitude for Jesus’ action as much as shame and embarrassment because I couldn’t do it. “After all,” Peter might have said, “I was a fisherman for years before Jesus came along. I’ve cast hundreds, thousands of nets in my time. What gives?” Peter apparently has forgotten that he has a new Employer. He has failed to cast off his selfishness and pride, but to his credit, he knows it, and is therefore not afraid to approach Jesus on the shore. His self-will is about all he has to lose.

Three times Jesus asks Peter whether he loves Him. There is a traditional connection between Jesus’ threefold interrogation and Peter’s threefold denial. According to the original Greek, in the first two scrutinies, Jesus asks Peter whether he loves Him with agape, the sort of self-sacrificing love that Jesus shows in His life and death. In Peter’s first two responses, he professes philia, the love of friends for each other—noble enough, but not the sort of love that Jesus was looking for. The third time, Jesus asks whether Peter really does have even that friendship love; Peter answers affirmatively and emphatically. Through that process, Jesus is able to heal Peter of the shame and embarrassment that his denials fostered in him. At the same time, Jesus is directing Peter’s thoughts and actions to the service of others—His hungry lambs, His wandering sheep.

Such is the standard remedy for self-pity: reconciliation with, and service of, other people. It gets us out of our own muddled heads and helps us to make a worthwhile contribution to the lives of our fellows. And God is glorified in such transformation. Now, it seems, Peter and we are ready to receive our mission, which inescapably involves the conformity of our wills: Peter is told that the swashbuckling days of his spiritual adolescence are past. The death of the self-absorbed will is the kind of death by which he and we would glorify God. This is what we see in the reading from Acts: Peter and John are engaged in prayer when they see a crippled man ironically being transported to a place called “the Beautiful Gate.” Infused with the power of the Holy Spirit, Peter is able to extend the healing love of Jesus toward this beautiful man, investing him with physical vigor and divesting him of self-pity and uselessness.

Today’s portrait of Saint Paul is an autobiographical piece, in which he is trying to support his claims to apostleship and make a personal connection with the Galatians to whom he writes. This is Paul’s contention: “Today I am as vigorous a herald of the Gospel as yesterday I was an opponent of it—and this by God’s peculiar call and no bright initiative of my own.” The Christians in Galatia could dismiss the claims of some Judean missionaries that Paul was not associated with them. If those missionaries asserted that Paul had no authority to preach, they were right, at least in the sense that human beings did not commission him. Like Cephas (Gk for Peter), Paul was authorized by Jesus Himself. Paul elaborates upon his former opposition to Christ in order to prove this point: he would never have become an apostle if Jesus Himself hadn’t appeared to him and transformed his attitudes. Since his conversion and mission, Paul underwent numerous persecutions and trials, and remained buoyant throughout. All the while he contended with his own character flaws and weaknesses; sometimes they manifested themselves in his writings to the Christian churches and his dealings with fellow apostles. The displays of Paul’s weakness became so many opportunities for God’s strength to shine forth.

Saints Peter and Paul each suffered a martyr’s death, having lived as courageous witnesses to the Lord’s Gospel. They are venerated together because of their important association with the city of Rome, long known as the center of the Catholic faith. Jesus appointed Peter as the head of the Apostles, which headship continues in the person of the Holy Father, now reigning as Benedict XVI. Even today Peter exercises Jesus’ authority in matters of doctrinal and moral teaching, especially when he teaches in union with the Bishops, the successors of the Apostles throughout the world. Paul’s last stop was in Rome; there he reconfirmed his mission to proclaim the Gospel, beginning from Jerusalem, to the very ends of the earth. Paul reminds us of the peculiar call of God and the action of the Holy Spirit’s gifts in the members of the Church: when we lovingly place our gifts at the service of the truth, we come to know God’s presence and can share it with conviction.

We praise God today for these human beings who united themselves to Christ in His suffering for the salvation of the world. The Church graciously receives their intercession, sorely needed in a world where there is a crisis of love and a crisis of truth. Saints Peter and Paul cannot offer us silver, gold, or oil, but they can offer the surpassing knowledge and love of Jesus Christ.