Year A / Ordinary Time / Solemnity of Sts Peter and Paul
Readings: Acts 12.1-11 / Psalm 33 (R/v 8) / 2 Tim 4.6-8, 17-18 / Matthew 16.13-19
Don’t we all need a hero or two in our lives?
Someone whose life encourages us to overcome our limitations whatever they are. Someone whose life-story gives us hope to succeed, especially when the odds are against us. May be, even someone whose history challenges us to rise above the discrimination and injustices we face because others judge us lesser for being different, for saying and doing the unusual, or for having made mistakes in our past.
Perhaps, our need for a hero or two is much simpler: to show us how to better live and love as a good parent, a gracious friend, a caring employer, an exemplary worker, or a diligent student.
I believe we each have a hero whose life-story we return to repeatedly. His life or her example is a wellspring from which you and I draw inspiration, wisdom and example to live our lives well.
The Church offers us heroes too. We call them saints. Today, we remember and celebrate two of them, Peter and Paul.
Peter, first among the Apostles, served the early Jewish converts by gathering them as the Church to worship Jesus as Lord and Savior. Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, converted many by preaching that Jesus is the Christ who saves, and for them established the first Christian communities in Corinth, Ephesus and Galatia.
Why does the Church invite us to commemorate the lives of Peter and Paul? Because they proclaimed and taught the Good News, and so established the beginnings of what we profess to be the Catholic Christian faith. Our Church is founded on this faith. And through the Church’s teachings and tradition, we live and move and have our Catholic way of living and loving in this Church. In this celebration, we are especially thankful that they founded the Church through their martyrdom.
I don’t know about you but I have often found it difficult to identity with Peter and Paul as I go about trying to live my Christian life. When I read the Bible, David’s contrition before God inspires me, Mary’s openness to God humbles me, and John’s friendship with Jesus enlivens me.
For me, however, Peter and Paul are but the really great apostles and martyrs. Their apostolic lives and their zealous deeds are larger than life, at the least the ordinary life I live. Perhaps, you feel the same way about them. At best, we probably admire them, and from a distance. On a feast like today’s, I have often thought, “There’s no way I can be like them.”
But I want to challenge us to put aside this mindset; it is not helpful in approaching today’s solemnity. It blinds us to the real gift Peter and Paul’s life-stories can give us for Christian living. We need another lens to look at them: it should not focus only on what they achieved or how they died for the faith. Rather, this lens should help us focus more attentively on what is so often overlooked in a celebration like today’s. What we need to look for that almost invisible detail of what they first received from God: mercy.
If Peter and Paul are here, they would be the first to tell us that they have nothing to be proud about. They would tell us this because they know who they were. Cowardly Peter who denied his best friend three times and self-righteous Paul who persecuted and imprisoned Jesus’ first followers. They know they are flawed individuals.
But Peter and Paul would ask us to remember that Jesus called and gifted them in God’s mercy with transformed lives. God chose Peter in Jesus to be the Church’s foundation: “You are Peter and on this rock I will build my Church.” And God chose Paul in Jesus to be his chosen instrument to proclaim his name to the Gentiles (Acts 9.15). Though they were hardly wise, all knowing, all good, God chose them. God chose them precisely because they were ordinary men who had made mistakes.
What Peter and Paul discovered in being chosen is that God’s mercy Jesus taught about truly saves the sinner. Jesus, who identifies himself to Peter as the betrayed friend and to Paul as the persecuted Lord, compassionately reaches out to save them from guilt, despair and self-doubt. And saving them meant transforming them into his collaborators to make God’s saving love real for Jews and Gentiles.
The Christian truth we celebrate today is that God’s mercy does indeed save, and it always saves when we encounter Jesus. This is why Peter and Paul’s lives must really matter to you and me. Through their humanly flawed but divinely graced lives, we—who are flawed too—are also being graced with God’s mercy, and its promised transformation as our salvation. This is why Pope Francis always says, “God never tires of forgiving. Never!” We will poorer if we see today’s celebration as just another Sunday obligation to fulfill because we will miss this gift of God’s mercy completely.
We probably identify easily with the impetuous Peter who desires to come to Jesus on the water but panics and sinks when the seas get rough, or the zealous Paul whose forthrightness about the faith sometimes upset others. But I suspect it is harder for us experience God’s mercy because we judge our human foibles, weaknesses and sinfulness more harshly than God. And, yet, don’t we always yearn for God’s saving mercy?
Where can we experience God’s mercy? The Trappist monks at Spencer Abbey in Massachusetts offer us an answer. They tell us that it is the very place wherein we experience things falling apart in our lives. This space of fragmentation is where we truly become more open, more available to God’s mercy. Consider Peter in his betrayal and Paul in his time of conversion. The moment when things fall apart in our lives is the graced time when we are most opened to God’s mercy in Jesus and to the good news that it will transform us.
I’d like to suggest that this is the real heroism Peter and Paul model for us. It is their willingness to embrace their vulnerability when things fall apart in life. Their vulnerability is the graced space for God’s mercy to act in their lives.
Mercy that gave Peter courage to bear witness when it counted and wisdom to set up and lead the infant church. And mercy that taught Paul to trust Jesus’s forgiveness and to go forth to preach about Jesus in the face of inevitable persecution and death. And what about you and me: where will we let God’s mercy take us?
This is why it is so important in our everyday lives to pay attention to Jesus’ question to Peter, ”Who do you say I am?” It is a question couched in God’s mercy. It is God's hope-filled question that will open us up to God’s desire to save us in Jesus.
“Who do you say that I am? Who am I for you? What is your experience of me in your life, in your history? How do you experience me now?” Jesus whispers these questions to each of us in the depths of our hearts, at every moment each day. What will you and I answer?
Perhaps when we dare to admit how Jesus’ question really opens us up to God because all our categories of who our Lord is will begin to fall part in the face of his love, then we can be like Peter and Paul. Like them, we will recognize ourselves as sinners desperately—yes, desperately—beloved by God in Jesus.
Then with Peter we can say, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God,” and with Paul, “All I want is to know you, Christ Jesus, and to experience the power flowing from your resurrection” (Philippians 3.10). And with these, nothing else really matters.
Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
photo: god's mercy by willy sukumoto
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