Contrasting Leadership Styles Series

Friday of the Seventh Week of Easter 2025

I suppose if we were making a list of the ten worst political leaders of the last two thousand years, King Agrippa II would vie with President James Buchanan for a slot. Buchanan, of course, in his one term managed to involve our nation in a horrible internal war. Agrippa, who is always listed with his sister and paramour Bernice, mismanaged Israel badly enough to be the ruler at the time of the disastrous Jewish war against Rome that ended with the sack and burning of Jerusalem. Over a million Jews died.

But today we see the corulers Agrippa and Bernice invited by the new Roman governor, Festus, to sit in an advisory role considering the case of Paul of Tarsus, who had been accused of sedition by the Pharisees of Jerusalem. I’d urge you to read the whole of chapter 26 of Acts so you can understand Paul’s seasoned testimony of his call by Christ on the Damascus highway. It is here that we discover Jesus’s words to Paul when encouraging him to conversion: “it is hard for thee to kick against the goad.” In the end, Festus and both rulers agree: ‘Agrippa said to Festus, “This man could have been set free if he had not appealed to the emperor.”’ You’ll do well to read on in Acts so you can relearn of Paul’s perilous voyage to Rome and his witness there. Everything about Paul can be summed up in two words, “in Christ.” He lived to bring the good news to the whole Roman world. We all should do the same. Christ who forgave Paul’s many sins is willing to forgive all of us by the merits of His passion: “as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.”

In that light, we once more hear Christ’s forgiving words for St. Peter, by the lakeshore up in Galilee. Peter had denied Jesus three times, and pretty much all the accusations against him were made at the first trial as Peter and John listened in the courtyard of Caiaphas’s home in Jerusalem. Who made those accusations? A handful of serving girls, who caught Peter’s Galilean accent. Real threats—not. Peter cowered and saw Jesus looking at him and ran off in shame and repentance. So now Jesus gives him three chances, not to apologize and confess, but to assure Jesus of his love-unto-death. And Jesus not only affirms Peter in his ministry to the Church and to the apostles, but assures him that in the end, he will stretch out his hands on a rude cross of wood, and die in witness to the truth of the Gospel.

Every time we gather to celebrate the Body and Blood of Jesus, who once for all offered Himself as priest and victim on Calvary, we commemorate that sacrifice and offer ourselves for whatever giving God has planned for us. Let’s pray for that grace for ourselves and especially for those in our century and world who are giving everything for the Gospel, all the way to martyrdom in so many places in the world. Jesus is everything, the only hope we have left.