Fr. Roger J. Landry
Pontifical North American College
Assumption Chapel
Solemnity of SS Peter and Paul
June 29, 2000
Acts 12:1-11; 2 Tm 4:6-8, 17-18; Mt 16:13-19
Today we celebrate the deaths of SS. Peter and Paul, here in this city of Rome. And Peter and Paul both were ultimately chosen by God for their respective missions with these very ends in mind.
Peter’s end happened, as you know, in the Caligula’s circus just a stone’s throw from this chapel. As we learn from the early Christian writings, St. Peter was among several thousand Christian victims of Nero, who were killed either by being torn to death by dogs, lit on fire, or crucified. Peter was one of those alotted to be killed by crucifixion, but as his executioners were getting ready to kill him, he gave them one dying wish: to crucify him upside down. That request delighted his torturers, who knew that such a death would be infinitely more painful than being crucified right side up. If you don’t know, the way people die in crucifixion is not because of the literally excruciating pain, but because of asphyxiation. They can’t breathe. And when you flip someone upside down, the diaphrapm, essential for breathing, really doesn’t work upside down. So for about five-to-six hours of extraordinary agony, Peter would have been struggling for every ounce of air he could take in. Peter made such a request, not because he was a lunatic or a masochist, but because he didn’t consider himself worthy to be crucified right-side-up as Jesus the Lord was 34 years earlier outside the city gates of Jerusalem. Peter’s wish was granted. This 60-something year old man — of retirement age by today’s standards — stretched out his hands, just as the Lord had predicted at the end of John’s Gospel, as they were tied by a belt to his definitive papal cathedra, the upside-down Cross, on which he gave his most glorious Christian witness of all.
Meanwhile, there was a death-march going on in another part of the city. There was a very well-known Christian tent-maker and preacher from the Roman city of Tarsus who was being led by a group of soldiers south of the city. Paul was a Roman citizen and hence could not be killed by crucifixion or by any other torturous style of death. He could be executed, but he had to be executed mercifully and relatively painlessly. Paul’s contemporary in Rome, the great Latin mind Seneca, was given the opportunity by Nero to choose how he’d like to die, and Seneca selected drinking a sweet poison. Paul was not given the choice. He was taken to the outskirts of Rome, which is where he was ultimately poured out as a libation. Rome was where he had written his extraordinarily moving, triumphal words to his spiritual son Timothy which we heard in the second reading, and where those words came to fruition: “I have fought the good fight. I have the finished the race. I have kept the faith.” Rome was Paul’s finish line! And his race went down to the wire; like a sprinter, Paul won that race by a head — his own, gloriously cut off for the faith in a forest just south of the ancient city.
Peter and Paul were chosen with these ends in mind. They were selected because they could finish the race, because they would never give up on the Lord’s call, no matter how many times they would be imprisoned, no matter how many times they would be stoned and left for dead, no matter how many times they fell on the journey through sin or weakness. They were chosen because they were capable of saying a yes to Christ and meaning it, and thereby allowing God to do such wonderful things through them.
And when you really take a look at Peter and Paul, they were extraordinarily unlikely candidates to be asked in the first place. Peter was a simple fisherman with a thick Galilean accent. He had been married — what exactly became of his wife, we don’t know, but we know from the Gospels he had a mother-in-law. We can imagine that he probably had the vocabulary of a sailor. He was far from a theological expert, just someone who would show up like everyone else at the synagogue on Saturdays. Peter begged the Lord to depart from him because he was a sinful man, but the Lord precisely wanted repentant-sinners to proclaim his Gospel, because they would show in their own lives the reality of God’s plan to reconcile sinners to Himself. Later, Peter tried the opposite approach, the macho-proud approach, that he would never let the Lord be crucified and that he would never abandon the Lord, to which in response Jesus called this Rock Satan and a crowing rooster condemned him. Peter continued to sin, he kept falling on the journey, but with God’s help, he kept getting up. Peter had the apostolic boldness to walk on water, but also the habit of occasionally taking his eyes off of the Lord and taking too much account of the winds, and when he did, he sank. But he had the grace and the good sense to call on the Lord to save him, which the Lord invariably did. God ultimately built his Church on this sinful, occasionally weak, relatively ordinary, blue-collar man. This is an amazing fact! Out of all the people in Palestine, all of the great theological minds, great orators and leaders, extraordinarily holy men and women, God chose Peter. Why? Because Peter is an example to every one of us. He wasn’t the smartest, bravest, most talented man for the job. He was just an ordinary man who was capable of doing the same thing each and every one of us is capable of doing: giving a yes to God and meaning it, and thereby allowing God to do such wonderful things with us.
Paul’s calling in some ways is even more extraordinary. Unlike Peter, Paul was a genius, the greatest student of the greatest Rabbi, the towering figure of Gamaliel whom we meet in the Acts of the Apostles. No doubt Paul was talented. He was basically good at everything, with his mind, but also with his hands as a tentmaker. But when we come right down to it, there was something else about Paul that we cannot sugarcoat, because he never did. Paul was killing Christians. Executing them. Probably torturing them as well. He was directly responsible for the stoning of St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, outside the gates of Jerusalem. He had received special orders to go to Damascus with the Temple guards to carry out a reign of terror among the Christians of Damascus as well. Paul was basically doing in the 30s AD what Nero, Domitian, Decius, Valerian, Diocletian, and eight other emperors did to Christians in succeeding centuries. When Christ appeared to Ananias in Damascus and asked him to go baptize Paul, after he had been struck on the horse, Ananias thought the Lord was crazy. Such a request to him would be asking a Kosovar Albanian to go take care of Slobodan Milosevic, or worse, a Jew to take care of Adolf Hitler. But in the space of time of a lightening bolt, God chose Paul. “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” Jesus converted arguably his greatest persecutor at the time and turned him into his greatest and most tireless evangelist. God’s ways are truly not our ways. If someone wrongs us, we want justice. If someone kills, so many in our culture, including Christians, say they must be killed in return. Jesus, rather, in his eternal plan decided to take his greatest persecutor and turn him into the chosen vessel by which his Gospel could be preached to the Gentiles.
In light of the extraordinary nature of each of their calls, calls that basically defy all human logic, how can any one of us here today rest easy? One might say, I’m a sinner, and therefore, I could not possibly be worthy or credible at proclaiming the Gospel. Take a look at Peter, a sinful man, or Paul, who killed Christians for a living. I’m a simple person, not all that smart, and wouldn’t really know what to say? Take another look at Peter, a simple tradesman, with very little formal education at all. Perhaps I’m very well-educated, and think that therefore I should spend my intellectual energies more profitably in other pursuits? Look at Paul, who eventually poured his energies into the bottomless treasure-trove of the faith, finding his ultimate wisdom, the ultimate satisfaction of his extraordinary mind, in the Cross, castigating the pseudo-wisdom of the Greeks and the scandal-mongering of the Jews. P
That bottom line is: God calls all kinds of people for all kinds of service in building up his family of faith here on earth. He calls relatively few men and women to consecrated religious life, and relatively few men to become priests. He calls everyone, though, every single Christian, to first strive for holiness, to strive to grow in the love of the Lord every single day; and second, to try to spread the faith, to try to spread the love of the Lord to others, no matter what one’s state of life. And there are no excuses: Peter’s and Paul’s lives show us that. We can’t be any worse candidates than they were. Each of us, with God’s help, is capable of doing what they did, giving a yes and meaning it, following through on this assent by following Jesus all the way, in every moment, come what may. He wants to inspire a new Acts of the Apostles, with each of us, whether silently or publicly, playing a starring role.