SS Peter and Paul 2020
Acts 12:1-11; 2Tim 4:6-8, 17-18; Matt 16:13-19
If you were founding the Church, whom would you choose to lead it? Would you choose a rather bombastic character, who tended to speak and to act without thinking, who was quick to promise and slow to deliver, and who, when push came to shove, would let you down completely?
Or would you choose a man who was something of a fanatic, who would persecute his enemies before he met you, and who would then have a massive change of heart? This would be a man who was sensitive to the point of paranoia, who would fall out with everyone, who would sneer at the authority of others, who would brag about disobeying your instructions, and who would display a Uriah Heep-like tendency to boast of his humility?
Did you say that you wouldn’t choose either? Nor would I, which shows how much we know, for these are Peter and Paul respectively, whom the Lord chose as the foundation stones of His Church.
Obviously, I have exaggerated their faults and declined to mention their good qualities, but I don’t think that I have actually told any untruths. Peter did have a tendency to leap before he looked, to fall short of what he had undertaken. Thus he invited Jesus to call him across the water, until his nerve failed him and he began to sink.
On being named the rock on which the Church was to be built, he was quick to take responsibility, but in completely the wrong way, as he tried to use his new authority to turn Our Lord away from his appointed path of suffering. He showed his impetuosity by first refusing to let Jesus wash his feet, and then demanding a full cleansing, and later by cutting off the ear of the High Priest’s servant. Most seriously, his promise to die for the Lord was followed by a three-fold denial, after which he became upset when the risen Christ demanded a three-fold declaration of love, failing to see that this must wipe out that triple negation.
Paul, on the other hand, was the prickliest of characters, a converted persecutor who could have picked a fight in an empty room. He had no patience with Mark, or with others who left his company, even falling out with his mentor Barnabas. He needed love and affirmation from the churches which he founded, and to which he wrote letters, but he spent much of his time scolding them. He was dismissive of the other apostles, claiming that a person’s rank meant nothing to him, yet he was desperate to claim the title of apostle for himself whilst, with the faux humility of the insecure, asserting that he “hardly” deserved it. Finally, his bragging to the Galatians of his humiliation of Peter flew in the face of Jesus’ clear instruction that such matters must be dealt with in private.
Why then did Our Lord, both before and after His resurrection, choose such an unlikely pair? Firstly, along with their faults, both men had immense virtues. The very zeal which made Paul both a successful persecutor of the Church, and a difficult person to live with, made him also the greatest preacher and spreader of the Gospel in history. He had deep insights into, and could write sublimely about, love, about the Body of Christ both as the Eucharist and as the Church, about the relationship of the Church to Christ, about faith and grace, about our ability to rely totally on Christ, and about the value of weakness.
Peter was the first to articulate the Church’s faith in the true identity of Jesus, he was straightforward in both his faults and his virtues, and he was a living example of that repentance which was Our Lord’s first demand, responding to the Master’s gaze by going out and weeping bitterly. Finally, he, like Paul, showed the deepest expression of love by accepting a martyr’s death.
Perhaps though, Our Lord’s principal reason for His choice of these two was less a recognition of their good qualities than a demonstration of the power of grace. “My power is at its best in weakness”, He told Paul. The Church, built on flawed people, will always consist of flawed people—people like you and me. Thank God for that, because it means that the Church, and you and I as members of it, will always be driven back to our reliance on the power and the grace of God, poured out upon us by Christ Jesus Our Lord through the Holy Spirit.
