The very first thing to consider about this feast is that it celebrates not one, but two great apostles and saints of our faith. “The Church’s tradition has always considered Peter and Paul to be inseparable, even if each had a slightly different mission to accomplish” (B XVI).
We know that Peter was from Galilee in the Jewish heartland; a married man and a successful small business owner: he was a fisherman. Peter was called by the Lord during Jesus’ earthly life and followed Him throughout His ministry. In today’s Gospel we hear that Peter professed his faith in Christ first and was the leader of the Apostles. After Pentecost, we know that “Peter founded the first community of Christians among those who came from Israel, the Chosen People.”
Paul, on the other hand, was from Tarsus near Turkey, a member of the Jewish diaspora. Though a tent-maker by trade, he was indeed a scholar, having studied Torah under the great Rabbi Gamaliel. A violent persecutor of the early Church, Paul was given the gift of faith through a vision of the Risen Lord. He was called to spread and deepen the faith of the Church through his preaching and was sent to those outside the Hebrew covenant, “becoming the Apostle to the Gentiles.”
St. Peter and St. Paul had different backgrounds and personalities. The way they were called was different; they were each given different gifts, and sent on different missions; there were even some tensions in their relationship. Still, “they worked for one and the same cause: the building up of Christ's Body, the Church. They were equal in their election, alike in their toils, undivided in their deaths."
Like Romulus and Remus, the mythical twins said to have been the founders of the City of Rome, St. Peter and St. Paul are rightly considered the founders of the new Rome – the great Church of Rome. Their undivided partnership in mission bears witness to “a new and authentic way of being brothers, which is made possible only by the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
I think that’s the first lesson to be drawn from this great feast of Peter and Paul. Yes, each of us has an individual and personal relationship with the Lord that varies as much as our personalities vary. And each of us has been given a different and unique set of gifts and been sent on a particular mission.
But our relationship with Christ, our gifts and our mission, can only be discovered and nurtured in the community of the Church. Put simply, our diversity, as wonderful as it is, is less important than the unity that marks us as Christians. In a world where nation states, communities and individuals are so divided, the Church’s greatest witness is the brotherhood and sisterhood we share, the unity that exists in the Body of Christ.
The other lessons I want to draw from today’s feast will focus more specifically on St. Paul. That’s because today’s special observance of the feast of Peter and Paul inaugurates a Pauline Jubilee Year – a year of special celebration marking the 2000th anniversary of the birth of St. Paul.
Our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, has asked that this special year, be marked by pilgrimages to Pauline shrines, and especially by prayer and study of Paul’s life and writings. So what do his life and writings have to teach us about being a faithful disciple today, and how might we celebrate this great Pauline Year?
There are so many things that could be said about St. Paul – after all, next to Jesus, Paul is the central figure of the New Testament. He was the world’s first Christian author, and one of its most important theologians. Including the 17 Chapters of the Acts of the Apostles that cover his missionary work, and the fourteen epistles he wrote, St. Paul makes up for nearly a third of the New Testament. So his missionary work and his pastoral letters can provide an amazing example of what it means to be a Christian disciple.
For example: Paul was a law-abiding Jew, a Greek speaker from Tarsus, and he was also a Roman citizen, which means that Paul was able to relate to at least three of the major cultures of his time. He was able to critique those parts of the culture that were antithetical to the Gospel, and also make connections with things that supported the Gospel.
This would be a most valuable quality for us to develop as well: to be able to relate well to various world cultures and to be able to discern what in them is and is not true to the Christian way of life.
Also, Paul knew that he was not a great orator and yet he still was able to bring thousands of people to faith in Christ and to build up the Church through his letters. Because Paul knew that it was not he who achieved these extraordinary results – it was Christ who was at work in him. We too would do well to rely not on our own abilities but upon God.
But even more than these or any other lesson from the life of St. Paul there is one that stands out as far and away the most important. It is the moment that completely changes Paul and helps us make sense of everything else he did and wrote. And that is the moment of his conversion.
We all know the story: Paul is on his way from Jerusalem to Damascus with warrants authorizing him to continue his persecution of Christians. And suddenly, in a blinding light, Paul is knocked to the ground, and a voice from the heavens asks “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me.”
Even though he was “a violent persecutor of Christians,” when Paul falls to the ground, “dazzled by the divine light, he did not hesitate to change sides to the Crucified One” – he comes to follow Jesus, whom he had hated, without a second thought.
So complete was Paul’s conversion that he travels the known world preaching the Gospel as zealously as he had once attacked the Church – and he himself comes to suffer because of his fidelity to Christ.
How was this possible? How could Paul have so completely changed his life? Well it wasn’t Paul who changed his life – it was Christ who did that. It was the searing experience of Christ’s love that changed Paul – changed him so much that Paul writes of himself: “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20)
Perhaps some of you have had profound experiences of conversion in your own lives. Perhaps you came to faith after being on the wrong path for many years, and suddenly something hit you, and everything changed. For others of us the conversion – the coming over to Christ – is more gradual, little by little.
But every one of us, as disciples of Jesus Christ, as members of the Baptized community, all of us have experienced the searing love of Jesus Christ – a love that burns away all of our past sins, all those things that have previously enslaved us. And whether we normally think this way or not, all of us can say that by Baptism it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives within me!
Do you say that? Do you live your life as if it were not your own, but rather the life of Christ living in and through you? Have you, like Paul, given yourself over entirely to Christ, allowing Him to speak and act and suffer for the world in and through you?
In announcing this Pauline Year, Pope Benedict said: “today too Christ needs apostles ready to sacrifice themselves” and he said that it was for precisely “this reason I am pleased to announce” the Pauline Year.
Perhaps during the special Jubilee Year you’ll take the chance to learn something more about St. Paul. Maybe you can form Scripture sharing groups and read some of his letters – or personally engage in Lectio Divina. Perhaps you’ll have the chance to go on pilgrimage to a shrine or church named in Paul’s honor.
But whatever you do to mark this Pauline Year, let the end result be that you reflect on the ways in which you can help spread Jesus’ Good News the way St. Paul did. Let this year be a time when you allow Christ to speak and act in the world, in your schools, in your homes, in your places of business and work.
Let this be a year that we can say ever more with St Paul, “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” so that one day we may also say with him, “I have competed well, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”
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