29 June 2018
Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, Apostles
Earlier this week Jesus emphasized the importance of being people of integrity, of practicing what we preach; today He does the same. Yesterday He spoke of building one’s house on solid rock, and so today He founds His Church on an unlikely, but quite solid, rock named Peter.
You can almost imagine a troop of angels standing by, saying, “What are you doing?!” If the Lord indeed desired to found His Church on a mortal sinner, would not John have been a better pick? Or, if He were striving for perfection, why not His own mother? Yet the Lord was not seeking to found His Church on a gemstone, but a rough-and-ready boulder of solid granite, something that would endure not merely the test of time, but the direct assaults of the Enemy. True, Peter faltered when the Enemy loosed an all-out salvo against Him on Good Friday Eve, but once the Risen Lord had propped him up again, Peter was unassailable. He rolled through the crowd of Jerusalem with his preaching at Pentecost and three-thousand (Acts 2:41) “living stones” (1 Peter 2:5) were added to the walls of the Church. Why Peter?
Peter was not the lucky winner of a secret contest Jesus was holding, in which the Lord was waiting to see who would first guess His hidden identity. Even Jesus tells us that Peter didn’t guess; rather it was that the Father revealed the truth to him. It was Peter’s love of the truth—ultimately of Jesus Himself (John 14:6)—that allowed the eyes of faith to see Jesus in a way the others had not yet. It was that love on which Jesus desired to build His Church: a love of the truth, a boldness to profess it, and a willingness to be transformed by it, such that from that moment on the man named Simon ceases to be.
Today is not only the Solemnity of Saint Peter, but of Saint Paul as well. The two of them celebrated together represent the universality of the Church, with Peter having found the most success in converting fellow Jews, while Paul found incredible success bringing Gentiles into the fold of Christ’s flock. Paul, too, had a life-altering encounter with the Lord, such that the man once called Saul effectively died, and a blind man who saw clearer than ever limped his way to Damascus and into salvation history (Acts 9:1-9). These two would butt heads and test one another, not in a divisive way, but in the same way the stones on opposite sides of a keystone in an arch press toward each other, with the keystone between, such that the keystone remains steady and strong, upholding the whole of the arch. Jesus is that keystone of the whole arch of the Church, with Peter and Paul, we could say, bracing either side of Him, with all the other apostles building up the arch of that great door which the Church opens to all people, leading them to eternal life.
St. Peter and St. Paul, pray for us!