Saints don’t generally come in twos. That’s partly because their feast day marks their death. It is also the day of their birth into eternal life. The Eastern Churches, however, remember Cyril and Methodius who brought the Gospel into the Slavonic world. Monasteries join together Benedict and Scholastica who were siblings, and Francis of Assisi and Clare who were close friends. The most notable pair of saints, however, are Sts Peter and Paul. They represent two faces of the early Church and aspects of today’s Church. And they are united in the tradition that they died as martyrs in Rome.
St Peter represents the birth of the Church through Jesus’ work with his disciples. He was one of the disciples whom Jesus called into a community that could expand his message, a group marked by episodes of generosity and selfishness, understanding and missing the point, courage and cowardice. Jesus gave Peter a position of responsibility in his lifetime and confirmed it when he appeared to his disciples after he had risen.
St Paul represents the birth of the world-wide Church when it moved beyond the Jewish community into the Roman world. He was called by Jesus in a vision. He was the intellectual force of the early Church, learned in the Scriptures and bold in his interpretation of what Jesus’ life death and rising meant for the Christian community. He was also responsible for finding words for the mission of the Church. Paul brought the Gospel to Rome, the centre of the Roman Empire, with its power and all its different linguistic groups and religious movements.
Peter brought to Rome the assurance of Christ’s presence in teaching in the Church, the memory of living contact with Jesus, and a reminder of the daily and often messy business of organisational Church life.
The most significant gift of both Paul and Peter in Rome, however, lay in their reputed death there. Paul was sent to Rome as prisoner awaiting trial and death as a follower of Jesus. Peter was also believed to have been killed in Rome. Both were witnesses to Christ and to the gospel in their lives as well as in their deaths. If the Roman Empire was founded on the triumphs through armies of the emperors, the Church was founded on the victory through the humiliating death of its major figures.
The Feast of St Peter and Paul was significant at a time when the Church was growing and divisions rose about belief and church life and the relative importance of different Churches. The tradition of the leadership of the Bishop of Rome as a mission of strengthening the Church as Peter did was developed in Rome and helped resolve many divisions. This responsibility could be described in terms of power. But the of Peter with Paul who is described in Scripture as once rebuking Peter strongly for betraying the world-wide mission of the Church through cowardice, reminds us of the fragile container in which God’s calling is held and our shared responsibility for Christ’s church.
Fr Andrew Hamilton SJ writes for Jesuit Communications and Jesuit Social Services.
