Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, Apostles (2020)

In many respects Peter and Paul were very different people. Peter was a fisherman from Galilee. His world was the Sea of Galilee and the hilly countryside that surrounded it. According to John’s gospel, he was from Bethsaida, a small town on the Northern shore of the Sea of Galilee. He would have had a basic education and his first language was Aramaic. Paul was from the university city of Tarsus, the capital city of the Roman province of Cilicia, on the south-east coast of what is today Turkey. He seems to have been educated to a high level. He wrote fluently in Greek. His family appear to have been well-to-do as his father was a Roman citizen. He was a zealous Pharisee, who declared himself blameless with regard to the keeping of the Jewish Law. If the two of them had met before they came to faith in Jesus, one senses that they would have had little in common. Yet, today, the church throughout the world celebrates their joint feast day. It is Jesus who brought them together. Yet, he touched their lives in very different ways. Peter heard the call of Jesus by the shore of the Sea of Galilee as he engaged in his daily work of fishing; Paul heard the call of the risen Lord somewhere in the vicinity of Damascus where he was heading on his mission of persecuting people like Peter who were proclaiming Jesus to be the Jewish Messiah. Jesus called Peter to be the rock on which his church would be built; he called Paul to be the apostle to the non-Jewish world, the pagans. Each of them gave their lives in responding to the Lord’s call; Peter was crucified; Paul was beheaded. They were both executed in Rome, a long way from Galilee and from Tarsus. Their tombs have been places of pilgrimage to this day and two of Rome’s four great Basilicas are built over their tombs, Saint Peter’s in the Vatican and Saint Paul’s outside the walls. We celebrate their joint feast today, giving thanks to God for their generous and courageous witness to their faith in the Lord. From its beginnings, the church has worked to be true to the faith of the first apostles, especially the two great apostles Peter and Paul. That is why we speak of the faith as apostolic. Today, we too try to be true to the faith as lived and articulated by those two great pillars of the church. This apostolic faith finds expression in a special way in the New Testament. We keep returning to the gospels and letters and other books that are to be found there so as to remain connected to the faith of those early preachers of the gospel. The Lord continues to speak to us through their lives and through the sacred literature that they inspired. The Lord calls out to each of us today, as he called Peter and Paul. He wants to work through us in our distinctiveness, as he worked through the very different people that were Peter and Paul. We each have a unique contribution to make to the coming of the Lord’s kingdom. In our efforts to respond to this call, Peter and Paul can continue to be our inspiration • AE