Ss Peter and Paul 2014
If you were founding a Church, would you choose to found it on the basis of Saints Peter and Paul? If you were calling disciples, would Peter and Paul be among the front runners? Somehow, I doubt it.
Let’s look at the evidence. Peter was impetuous, a bit of a loudmouth, better at promising than at delivering, with more than a hint of cowardice about him. Paul was difficult, prickly, not the sort of person you would choose to go on holiday with: and if you did go on holiday with him, it’s odds on you would have been returning home sooner than you had planned.
Think of some of Peter’s failures. He sees Jesus walking on the lake. “Lord, if it is you,” he cries, “bid me come to you across the water”. Yet when he begins to walk, his nerve fails him, and he has to be rescued by the Lord, who chides him for his lack of faith.
Then, immediately after the incident in today’s Gospel, when Our Lord has named him as the rock on which the Church is to be built, he opens his mouth and puts his foot in it. Jesus begins to speak about His impending Passion, so Peter sets out to prove what a good leader of the Church he will be, by taking control of the situation. “No, no,” he interrupts, “that isn’t going to happen,” the implication being that the Lord can rely on him to prevent it, just about as unfortunate a misreading of his role as you can imagine.
How many times does he promise to stand by Jesus, to die for Him if the occasion demands it? And then how drastically does he let Him down? Falling asleep in Gethsemane, when the Lord has need of his support, cutting off the ear of the High Priest’s servant—the wrong reaction again; finally suffering complete failure by his three fold denial, as the crowing cock mocks the total collapse of the man of straw.
Even after that, and after his tears of repentance, there were slips and stumbles to come. Peter was too slow on the uptake to understand why the Lord questioned him three times about his love, failing to grasp that a threefold assertion was needed to offset the threefold denial. Finally, there was his moral cowardice when he abandoned his principles and stopped eating with the Gentile Christians, earning a holier-than-thou rebuke from Paul.
What about Paul? Leaving aside his pre-conversion zeal in persecuting the Church, there are enough charges against him in his days as a disciple to cause eyebrows to rise and lips to purse. Take his criticism of Peter for starters. Certainly Peter was in the wrong in failing to stick to his guns in the face of criticism from Jewish Christians, but what about Paul’s reaction? Our Lord left very clear instructions that correction was to be carried out privately and quietly, a principle totally abandoned by Paul as he brags in the Letter to the Galatians of his moral superiority in giving Peter a dressing down. I have always felt that Peter would have done us all a favour if he had taken Paul round the back and given him a good smack in the mouth, thus taking him down a peg or three.
Yet Paul himself was extremely touchy if he was criticised, displaying what could almost be described as temper tantrums in some of his letters, and giving hints that he wasn’t immune to the very fault which he condemns in Peter, as he struggles to rebut the charge that he was strong in his letters, but weak when he encountered people face to face.
And isn’t there something questionable in the character of someone who falls out with one companion after another: Demas, Mark, even Barnabas, who had worked so hard to ensure Paul’s acceptance by the Church at large? Over all, I think it is fair to say that Paul was not someone you would have wanted your daughter to marry.
Yet these two deeply flawed characters formed the foundation stones of the Church, Peter recognised as the first Pope, and Paul spreading the Gospel throughout the Mediterranean world. The Church built on these bases has endured through two millennia, not without stumbles, failures, and grave sins: and the Gospel has been preached the length and breadth of this planet. Our presence in this church today is testimony to the work of Saints Peter and Paul—and to God’s ability to write straight with crooked lines.
Maybe that last point is of particular importance to us. Do you and I have flaws in our characters? Without a doubt. Would Christ have chosen any of us as foundation stones for His Church? Would He heck! But has He chosen us, with all our faults, to be members of that Church, to play our part in building the Kingdom and spreading the Gospel? Indeed He has! Can we wriggle out of our responsibilities on the basis of our weaknesses, our inadequacies, our sins? ‘Fraid not. If God could build a whole Church on such flawed characters as Peter and Paul, then He can certainly achieve His purposes with and through us, and we have no excuses which will allow us to evade our responsibilities, to ignore our own individual call.
