Dear Sisters, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, today we keep festival in honour of the two greatest Apostles, Peter and Paul. Both of them do in fact have other feast days of their own apart from this one, but they are quite different from the feast days of any of the other Apostles. On February 22nd, for instance, we celebrate the Feast of St Peter’s Chair, that is, the seat representing his teaching authority in the Church. On January 25th we celebrate St Paul’s conversion.
It is hard to find two men of the foundational period of the Church, the Apostolic era, who are more different than these two. Peter, or to call him by his given name, Simon, was a fisherman; not an educated man, impetuous and flawed. After all, it was he who denied Christ three times and ran away before the crucifixion. Paul, or to call him by his given name, Saul, was a highly educated Pharisee, a doctor of the Jewish religious law, who trained under one of the best known Rabbis of the entire ancient world, Gamaliel, and who became the most fanatical and zealous persecutor of the new religion of Christ the Redeemer being preached by Peter and the other apostles, before his extraordinary dramatic conversion to Christ on meeting him supernaturally at the gates of Damascus.
Yet the vast differences between the two men are not so great as those things which unite them. They were brought together by a burning love for Christ, an awareness of their frailty and weakness as men, their total reliance on the grace and power of Christ, and their final witness to Christ in the shedding of their blood as martyrs in Rome.
Rome is the key to this great feast. It is the bond that binds them together on the same day. It is in Rome that both men are buried, awaiting the resurrection on the Last Day. There, too, both are venerated in the magnificent churches built over their mortal remains by the first Christian Emperor of Rome, Constantine; St Peter’s basilica on the Vatican Hill, which was also the site of his crucifixion; and St Paul’s outside the Roman city walls on the way towards the Roman seaport of Ostia, close to where he was beheaded.
As the early Christian historian Eusebius of Caesaria tells us, St Peter came to Rome from Antioch, where he had lived after leaving Jerusalem. He lived in Rome as leader of the Church there for around twenty five years, teaching the faith assisted by St Mark who wrote his Gospel on the basis of all that he heard Peter preach. It is that Gospel which we are hearing read to us Sunday by Sunday during the course of this year. Finally, it was in the great persecution by the Emperor Nero beginning in 64 A.D. that, along with many of this flock, Peter was put to death for his faith in Christ.
This had been foretold to him by our Lord who, according to St John, had said to Peter after the resurrection, ‘”Truly, truly, I say to you, … when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go.” (This he said to show by what kind of death he was to glorify God).’ That was after the dreadful night in which Peter had utterly failed to stay faithful to Jesus at His arrest and trial, swearing three times, ‘I do not know Him’. Just as little as an hour or two before Jesus had said these words to Peter: “I have prayed for you, Simon, that your own faith may not fail; and you, when once you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.”
Paul, three years after his conversion, had met Peter in Jerusalem and, as he tells us in the Letter to the Galatians, they would not meet again for another fourteen years until they met with several of the other Apostles, notably James and John, and there recognised that God had given each of them a distinct mission in the Church: Peter was to continue preaching to the Jews, just as he had done since the day of Pentecost, while Paul would continue his mission throughout the Mediterranean world preaching principally to the gentiles. As the Preface of today’s feast says: Peter was ‘foremost in confessing the faith… who established the Church from the remnant of Israel’ and Paul the ‘outstanding teacher’ of the faith… and ‘master and teacher of the gentiles’. That is why to this day it is predominantly the wonderful letters of St Paul that we hear read at Mass on Sundays throughout the year.
After Peter had been in Rome for many years, Paul also arrived there. He had been in dispute with some of the most powerful Jews in Jerusalem and, arrested by the Romans on a charge of breach of the peace, he appealed to have his case tried by the Emperor in Rome. This he could do on the strength of his rare privilege of being a Roman citizen. It is this status of Roman citizen that meant that when the time came for his execution, whereas Peter the Galilean fisherman was crucified like a slave, Paul was to be given a quicker death by beheading.
As we will hear in the final blessing at Mass, this feast celebrates the steadfastness of our faith in Christ set firm on the solid rock of Peter’s faith. We celebrate, too, the clear instruction in the faith brought to us by ‘Paul’s tireless preaching’. Peter is the Apostle to whom our Lord committed the keys of authority, to bind and loose, that is to govern the Church and to celebrate the sacraments of forgiveness and healing. Paul is the Apostle whom our Lord chose to be His principal teacher, to make clear the mystery of Christ, God made man, and the dignity of our membership of Christ in His Body which is the Church. And so we pray for their intercession on this day, when by their martyrdom Peter and Paul began the long transformation of Rome from the capital of the greatest human empire on earth to the capital of God’s kingdom on earth, the Catholic Church. May we all be brought by their intercession to the heavenly city where God and the saints forever dwell in glorious light.
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