Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, Apostles
I am already being poured out like a libation
There is a common theme in the Readings for this Sunday, for the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul:
“The Lord sent his angel and rescued me.”
“I sought the LORD, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears.”
“When the poor one called out, the LORD heard, and from all his distress he saved him.”
“The Lord will rescue me from every evil threat and will bring me safe to his heavenly Kingdom.”
The Gospel reiterates this guarantee of victory over evil: “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.”
How strange then, that today we celebrate the death of the two greatest apostles. After years of ministry in places both east and west, throughout the known world, Peter and Paul finally make it to the capital of the Roman Empire, the center of civilization. What possibilities for a long career of ministry await them there! But instead they are untimely captured, imprisoned and, this time, not rescued but executed.
Even the details of their deaths seem inglorious: they were swept up in the imperial dragnet, when the wicked and mad emperor Nero blamed the novel Christians for the great fire that devastated Rome in 64AD. It is unlikely that the emperor, nor his officers, even knew who Peter and Paul are, the two greatest apostles of the Church. They knew they were Christians, and perhaps that they were leaders of the Christians. That was enough.
They crucified Peter outside the city, across the Tiber River at the base of the Vatican Hill, where many Christians were cruelly tortured and killed in the circus. Perhaps impressed by his bravery, the soldiers conceded to Peter’s request to be crucified upside down: he did not feel worthy to be crucified upright, as his Lord was.
Not long after, whether that same year or a year or two later, Paul was captured and eventually executed. Being a Roman citizen, and not guilty of any heinous crimes, he could not be crucified, but was entitled by law to the honorable death of beheading.
Today’s solemnity remembers the deaths of Peter and Paul. Why then do the Readings offer for our meditation those episodes from their lives where Peter and Paul are saved from danger, if they would eventually be captured and executed and, so it seems, not saved?
So much for the promised Divine protection! Promises of rescue and deliverance—what good were they? Surely, that is what the cynic would say.
But maybe we should ask: what exactly are we celebrating today? God’s promise that no danger would ever afflict the Church? That it would be free from all suffering? Or rather, that despite all danger and affliction—even, by means of such danger and affliction—the Church will certainly triumph?
What is most remarkable about these Readings is that neither Paul nor Peter has given up. It’s not like, after having been miraculously saved several times, they learn their lesson and go home. Rather, having been delivered from danger, they press on all the more into danger. For surely, that is what coming to Rome meant.
St. Paul says elsewhere, about his experience of being an apostle:
Five times at the hands of the Jews I received forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, I passed a night and a day on the deep; on frequent journeys, in dangers from rivers, dangers from robbers, dangers from my own race, dangers from Gentiles, dangers in the city, dangers in the wilderness, dangers at sea, dangers among false brothers; in toil and hardship, through many sleepless nights, through hunger and thirst, through frequent fastings, through cold and exposure. And apart from these things, there is the daily pressure upon me of my anxiety for all the churches.
Quite the description of a life of ministry! Maybe we should put that on next year’s vocation poster: Thinking of becoming a priest? Beatings, stonings, shipwrecks, danger of life and limb, toil, hardship, sleepless nights, hunger, thirst, cold, exposure, anxiety—all these could be yours!
But again, perhaps it’s good that, on this Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, we ask: what exactly are we celebrating today?
Again, I think St. Paul describes it best, after recounting those trials he went through:
The Lord said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.’ I will rather boast most gladly of my weaknesses, in order that the power of Christ may dwell with me. Therefore, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints, for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong.
That is the lesson of today’s solemnity. It is not the lesson of strength and power and triumphalism, but how the Church herself, the Temple of God and Body of Christ, the very instrument God uses to bring his salvation to all the world, is, like her Master, weak and persecuted—and precisely for that reason, will be victorious.
The Church finds her glory not in her natural victories, but in her supernatural poverty, in her sharing in the weakness of her Head: for Christ our Lord was victorious, not by domination, but by emptying himself. Christ won the victory not by avoiding suffering but by trusting in the Father’s love, even upon the cross.
That is how Peter is the rock upon which the Church is built; that is how Paul is the apostle par excellence: because they fully embraced that call to follow the Lord in their martyrdom, by giving up everything, even their own lives, in poverty and weakness, just as he did.
Do we want the Church to be renewed, to grow and be strengthened, to go forth in a new spirit of evangelization and holiness like in those first few centuries? Do we want to find salvation and victory in our own lives?
Today’s solemnity instructs us how this must be done, by reminding us how Peter and Paul shared in the Passion of Christ, the same cross by which we are made conquerors.
This is a great lesson to learn today: there are many blessings that we would not receive—would not be willing to receive—if we did not first go through the poverty and weakness of the cross.
For it is when the Church is weak and poor, when she has lost everything that this world can give and has to treasure the promises that the Lord alone gives—the faithfulness of his friendship when everyone else has left her—it is only then that she, that we, are poor enough for God alone to be our everything, and so undo the ancient curse: for having shared fully in Christ’s Passion and Death, we will share fully, as Peter and Paul have, in his glorious and triumphant Resurrection, the victory of the New Creation.