They Spread The Gospel Of Christ

Solemnity of Peter and Paul 2024

So today we celebrate as a Church the two founders of the Church of Rome, Peter and Paul. The Scriptures, then, concern these two men, whose work to spread a local phenomenon called “The Way” all the way around the Mediterranean world. In the end, both of these men gave witness to Jesus, Messiah and Lord, during the bloody persecution of Nero, and both are commemorated on this day.

Now the Gospel contains a famous “proof text” used by Catholics to defend the papacy from attacks by other Christians, but I don’t want to stir up that old controversy. Matthew’s Gospel passage is clearly rooted in some OT passages used centuries before by the Kings of Judah, the ancestors of Jesus. The king’s right-hand man, Shebna, was being deposed, and Eliakim was to be his successor. Here, Jesus gives the keys to Simon Peter because of his confession of Jesus as Messiah, a title that Jesus was not yet ready to broadcast to the world, because it would be understood as a revolution against Rome.

It is generally acknowledged that Peter did have that kind of authority in the early Church. The passage in Acts about Peter’s arrest and God-initiated escape is only one Scripture passage that shows his critical mission. His encounter with Cornelius, the Roman centurion, was the event that led to the general acceptance of Gentiles into baptism and the Christian community, an acceptance exploited for decades by St. Paul and others to spread the Church across the Roman territories. All of this leads to images even in secular culture of St. Peter standing on a cloud before a gate, letting people in or denying them entrance to heaven. Whatever Matthew meant, it is certain that such a caricature is not what he intended.

But for me, the excerpt from St. Paul’s letter to his friend and protégé, Timothy, bishop in Ephesus, is the one that points us toward the goal, the real end of our Christian life. Paul is in prison after a long life of preaching and sacrament and mystical prayer and suffering. He knows his case will soon be decided, and he will join the thousands of others who have witnessed all the way to death. Because he witnessed to Christ, he is confident that despite a bad beginning when he persecuted Christians, and the Lord Jesus by extension, he would after death receive a crown of righteousness. He, and all those other witnesses, would see Jesus Christ in glory, and share an eternity of joy with Him. He would be rescued one way or another from “the lion’s mouth,” an image used in the early Church for torture and martyrdom. And he ends with a prayer that we should all say “Amen” to: “o him be the glory for ever and ever. Amen.”