“Lord, to whom shall we go? We have come to believe that you have the words of eternal life” John 6: 67-68
“I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God.” Galatians 2: 19-20
June 29th is a Public Holiday in Rome because Saints Peter and Paul are the Patron Saints of the city. While Peter and Paul are celebrated as the founders of the Christian faith in Rome, it is because they were both martyred there. Other disciples had established Christian communities in the city before Peter and Paul arrived. It seems they had set their sights on visiting Rome because it was regarded at the time as the centre of civilisation in the Northern Hemisphere. Peter was one of the many Christians martyred by the Emperor Nero because he attributed to them the blame for the fire that all but destroyed the city. Peter was crucified because he was not a Roman citizen. Moreover, he was crucified upside down at his own request because he regarded himself as unworthy to be crucified in the same way as which Jesus was. A few years after Peter’s martyrdom, Paul was beheaded, instead of being crucified, because he was a Roman citizen. He was condemned to death after being accused of insulting Emperor Nero. Death by crucifixion was administered to foreigners, while beheading was considered to be cleaner and less painful, so was reserved for offending Roman citizens. When Peter and Paul were executed, the celebration of Rome’s foundation by the legendary Romulus was held on June 29th. The early Christians assigned the same day as the feast of Saints Peter and Paul in silent opposition to the civil celebration. They regarded the civilisation founded by Romulus as the old one and saw the new way of living ushered in by Jesus as new hope for the world. Paul’s remains were buried on what is now the site of the Church of St Paul’s Outside the Walls, while Peter’s remains were placed in a casket and deposited in a neglected burial ground which is now the site of St Peter’s Basilica. A couple of decades ago, archaeologists uncovered the casket with Peter’s relics many metres directly below the main altar of the Basilica. This coming Sunday, we, too, celebrate Peter and Paul as the two very unlikely founders of the Christian Community of which we are committed members. In order to get some feel for who these two disciples were, we might delve into some of the New Testament writings which refer to them.
Human beings down through the ages have given their attention to discovering their identity, asking themselves and those around them about who they really are/were. In today’s gospel-reading from Matthew, we hear Jesus doing just that. In Caesarea Philippi, a location that was distinctly Roman territory, he asked his close disciples how the local people saw him: “What are they saying about me? How are they assessing me? Who do they think I am?” The answers he was given reflected a mixture of confusion, indecision and a belief that former prophets had come back to life. That prompted Jesus to risk asking those closest to him: “But, what about you? Who do you say I am?” And it was Peter alone who dared to speak up and identify Jesus, without qualification, as the Messiah, the Christ of God. And it was the same Peter, who in Jesus’ darkest hour, denied even knowing him.
And then there’s Paul! Here was a skilled orator and writer and a fanatical, religious bigot who persecuted the earliest followers of the way of Jesus. Yet, one who, following a moment of insight and illumination, was humble enough to let go of views and beliefs to which he had clung, and embrace a new way of being.
We look to these two men as the founders of the Christian community we now call Church. They rose above their failures and their human frailty and invested the rest of their lives in laying the foundation of the Christian community. And they followed the Jesus who had died for them, each to a death as violent as his.
There are institutions and movements all across the globe whose members stop on the anniversary of their foundation to recall their memory and to ask how they might recapture and appropriately re-express the founding vision they themselves have now embraced. As we celebrate the lives of Peter and Paul, the two giants of our Christian Faith, we are challenged to ask ourselves what we might be being asked to do to keep their founding vision alive. Like Jesus, they probably found themselves asking just who they were and why were they persevering in pursuing what they had committed themselves to doing. There were probably times when they wondered if what they were doing was worth the effort. Yet they persisted even to dying for it and for him, Jesus!
In the third chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, there is a delightful story about Peter that might give us a pointer to how we might keep his memory alive. There was a gate in the walled city of Jerusalem called the Beautiful Gate. The name “Beautiful” was attributed to it ironically, as it was the very opposite. It was the gathering place for people who suffered from all kinds of disability, illness and discrimination. They gathered there to beg, and to seek support from one another. The place had the smell of putrifaction and the face of malnutrition, disadvantage and physical and mental disability. As Peter and John were going through the Beautiful Gate, heading for the Temple, they caught sight of a cripple being set down to beg. The poor man called out to them for a donation. Peter’s response was simply: “I have neither silver nor gold, but I will give you what I have: in the name of Jesus Christ, the Nazarene, walk!” (Acts 3: 1-10). Do you and I have anything to give to anyone in the name of Jesus Christ? And Paul became so closely aligned to the crucified Christ that he was eventually able to write to the Christian community in Galatia: “It is no longer I that live, but Christ lives in me.” (Galatians 2: 20). Does anyone ever encounter Christ alive in you and me? I conclude with a story about an elderly monk who visited Pope Julius II early in the 16th Century. The Pope, giving his visitor a tour of the rooms in the Vatican that housed a variety of treasures, commented: “You can see, my friend that Peter’s successor no longer has to say: ‘Silver and gold I have none.’” “I understand, Holy Father”, said the monk. “But the Pope can no longer say: ‘In the name of Jesus Christ, the Nazarene, walk.’” Is there a message here for us?